Silly Americans and the chicken confusion

This actually happened a couple weeks ago, but the experience stuck with me. One evening about dinner time, I wandered down to find my fellow dorm-living Texans were in one of the communal kitchens making dinner and experiencing setbacks. They had opened a package of chicken that they were going to cook up for dinner. Once they smelled the meat, they all agreed that the meat smelled bad. They opened up a second package of chicken one of them had bought earlier, only to find that it too smelled funky. So, a couple of them took the meat back to the store to exchange it. The store did, and one of the students asked if they could open the meat there and check it. The store manager said sure. They did. The third pack of meat also smelled. The two students expressed their surprise and unhappiness. The manager caught on to the problem and realized what was going on. She explained that in Norway, they do not use all of these chemical preservatives in their meat the way America does. Rather it is packaged air tight and sealed with a gas that keeps the meat fresh. What they were smelling was the gas. Sure enough, they realized that once they let the gas dissipate for a few seconds, the meat was fine. Needless to say, there was an abundance of chicken that needed to be cooked up for dinner that night. ...silly Americans.