If there are two items on the shelf X and Y, such that (< (best-before X) (best-before Y)), then you know X is the older item.
A jar of peanut butter that is best before January 2025 is one month older than one that is February 2025. Therefore, of course, you want to grab the latter one.
Whether it's actually good until February 2025 is just someone's opinion.
Furthermore, if you know that X is a month older than Y, then you know something else: X is at least a month old, today. If you buy the January 2025 jar of peanut butter, you're getting something that was already around for a month when the February 2025 jar was just made, assuming they keep the best before offset the same between runs. And then add the time it took for the jars to arrive to that store shelf.
I would much rather see "date packaged" on every product.
For instance, roasted coffee beans are not very good past only two or three weeks, but not in a way that you would get sick from consuming them. (You can keep them in the freezer to keep the flavor a bit longer.) The exact roast date is important, which they often don't want you to know, substituting a fictitious best before date which includes a generous margin regarding how long it's going to sit in warehouses and on store shelves.
>A jar of peanut butter that is best before January 2025 is one month older than one that is February 2025. Therefore, of course, you want to grab the latter one
I don't follow you. In a few weeks I'll have eaten it all, I don't even look at the BBE on things like peanut butter.
It was an assumption that you will choose the more value for your money, even if it is pretty negligible.
Some people do the opposite, when they buy something they choose the less value for their money (when it is negligible), if it maximizes the total value for the society.
If you know you'll consume it long before that date, then it certainly doesn't matter much. However, for those who buy infrequently and intend to store products for longer, it make sense to get the most recent production.
How much it matters really depends where you shop. Places like Grocery Outlet, or places that don't have super frequent business like small rural grocery stores, can be selling food that _right up to_ the best-by date.
But I sure do for milk, eggs, yogurt, certain cheeses.
It directly affects whether I might have to toss the last third of the milk by the time I get around to drinking it. Or whether the cheese will be growing mold before I finish it.
The point is that just because the best-before date is a year from now doesn't erase the fact that one item on the store shelf is a month older than another identical one.
Small nit - coffee beans are often times better after 10-14 days of roasting and have had some time for degassing when making espresso. Earlier than that and you will get a lot more creme than you really want if you are going for a balanced shot. But in the end it’s all taste so I can also be wrong for your personal situation.
In the supermarket you'll never find coffee that fresh, so you won't really have to worry about that. If you buy directly from a roaster you do have to pay attention to this, though some roasters write that date as well on the package so you know the coffee should still rest a bit.
A best before date is literally a manufacturer recommendation about the time for which the quality of their product is practically as good as new. Absent specific information to the contrary, I typically trust the manufacturer's recommendation; they are certainly able to make a better informed guess than I am. Thus, I consider each of a product which I expect to use by the best by date equivalent to one another, and I don't prefer a newer one just because it's newer.
> Absent specific information to the contrary, I typically trust the manufacturer's recommendation; they are certainly able to make a better informed guess than I am.
This works the other way too: if you have information about the aging of the product because you tried it out one time, then you can pretty much just ignore what the manufacturer says.
Manufacturer's recommendation is based on what they can be sued for not things like bad taste and such which personally matter. Also storage conditions are not always followed when moving or storing the product.
Between two products with different best before dates I would just go and get a product that listed actual manufacturing date :)
Usually, with a lot of products, the expiry date is just an indicator. I ate 12+ year old pastas, 2+ year old sauces I found in our pantry and they were indistinguishable from half year old items. Well, the sauces actually had a much better taste than the ones used before expiry.
I'd rather see an expiry date plus some indicator that after the expiry date how fast would it spoil, or what changes it will go through, if ever.
The problem is that different foods have widely differently ways of spoilage. Date packaged is meaningless unless you exactly know the ingredients of the product, its ratios, and somehow can determine when it will go bad.
For something like coffee with one ingredient, it’s obvious. That’s why a lot of single-ingredient products like coffee or lettuce already have a packaged-on date.
>A jar of peanut butter that is best before January 2025 is one month older than one that is February 2025. Therefore, of course, you want to grab the latter one.
Only if they're the same brand. Some brands have different shorter best before dates, within what's permissible, than others.
We produce and sell cheese. The best by date we put on it is required by some regulation or other. The date is mostly arbitrary. If the package is still sealed and the best by date is a year ago, congratulations. Your medium cheddar is now sharp cheddar.
If you opened the package of some fresh Colby, and the best by date is 3 months in the future (so it's been open for 3 months), you're going to have to trim a lot of mold off of it and it probably won't even taste that great anymore.
Really it would be more accurate to say: best before X time after opening or X time after purchasing, whichever is first.
But even then: if someone buys the sharp because they like it, they'll very possibly like it more as it ages to extra sharp, even though it passes the best by date.
>At least in Europe we sometimes have a “do not consume after” which is when the product is expected to go bad, not just off.
Sometimes yes but only on products known to spoil quickly and become dangerous to your health. But still even most dairy has best before and not to be consumed by.
> I would much rather see "date packaged" on every product.
...it's not there already in the US? Over here, there is always a "production date" on the packaging, and then additionally it's either a "best before" date, or a "shelf life" time. But to put just a best-before date without the production date?.. That's insane. Why even omit that?
> Every so often, I go through my refrigerator, check labels on the items, and throw out anything that’s a month, or a week, or maybe a few days past the date on the label
Does anyone actually do this for real? In the overwhelming majority of cases it's extremely straightforward to determine if the food is safe to eat empirically. Only in a couple highly specific cases do you need to be conservative about eating old food (meat products and cooked rice are the two I worry most about, and I don't eat much meat so it's really just the latter). If it smells bad or tastes bad: don't eat it. If you can cut off or pull off the parts that are bad, but the rest is good: you're fine. Humans can (and have) survive and thrive on a shocking variety of food items and qualities, this level of omnivory is one of our biggest evolutionary advantages. I don't even look at the expiration date unless I'm already concerned that the food might be spoiled. Am I just weird? I thought everyone did this.
My parents own a small independent grocery store. My family ate a ton of "expired" food when I was growing-up because it made good economic sense. What you say is absolutely what we did-- throw out the items that really are bad (meat being the primary offender), cut off the bad parts of partially-rotten food, and eat the rest.
Food waste is really, really offensive to me. I probably take it a little too personally and too seriously. (Wasting meat is particularly galling to me, what w/ the likely terrible life the animal had making its way to your table.)
I will eat anything that isn't in obvious danger of killing me but my wife comes from a family that treats dates as gospel, that (in accordance with FDA guidance) at events will get stressed about food being left out for more than an hour, etc. Those people exist, and in fact they are everywhere.
I was strongly under the impression that medications with expiration dates do not become dangerous after their expiration, but they may be less effective.
This. Actually I'd ask your parent poster back: there are people that believe most people don't treat BB dates as "will turn bad exactly on this date"?
Honestly, I am way more concerned about food being left out than sell-by/best by dates. The harm that can result from leaving food out is well-established. Sell-by dates? We're basically taking the manufacturer's word for it, as if they're somehow impartial here.
I don't. For most foods, it's really obvious when they've become unsafe to eat. For those where it's not so obvious, my policy is "if I can't remember how long it's been in there, I'm tossing it."
I can't remember the last time I actually looked at a date printed on the packaging. I've found those dates to be meaningless.
It was not until I was married that I found out mayo even had an expiry date. None of my roommates in the university days used enough to actually work through a jar. It somehow made it fridge to fridge through multiple leases.
Even though I think my sense of smell and taste is fine, I have been accused on multiple occasions of eating food that was not good. In fact, my children have stopped asking me whether an item in the fridge is okay because they don't trust me :D
>If you can cut off or pull off the parts that are bad, but the rest is good
Isn't this untrue for spores and mold? I'm not making the claim, I'm genuinely unsure and remember stern warnings that unseen spores and mold are a threat with moldy bread and fruits.
Yeah sorry should have been clear that I was thinking about a case where like one or two blueberries in the corner of the package have just started to mold, or where it's a non-mold problem (like maybe an apple bruise has made 1/3 of it mushy, I'll probably still eat the other half). Generally stuff that has a nontrivial amount of mold I'm not trying to save.
First, what you’re saying is not necessarily true. As you pointed out rice and meat are tough, but so are things like bread. If you spot mold you bet it’s everywhere even in the places you can’t see it. Anything spongy inside needs to be thrown if you spot mold.
But what about fresh fish and meat? What about salad drenched in vinaigrette? What about broth? What about sauces? What about pickles? I’ve had stuff for years in the fridge it still looks good.
Yeah I was going to say the same. Fungi species can grow real deep, large and invisible to our senses. I understand people ITT getting offended on throwing out food with parts rotten, but honestly if it's not an exception such as banana I will probably throw out the entire piece (like bread) if there is any part rot at all.
Good point, yeah I should be clear that if like half my loaf of bread is moldy I'm chucking the whole thing; I'm only saving it if it's like a few slices at one end that are moldy. Probably would have been better to say that I cut off the part which is obviously good, leaving a healthy margin and tossing if in doubt.
> Does anyone actually do this for real? In the overwhelming majority of cases it's extremely straightforward to determine if the food is safe to eat empirically.
I do. How am I supposed to know if the food is still good? Maybe I can't smell the problem. I trust the experts to put appropriate labels on things.
probably people trusting experts about what to eat is how we got a worldwide pandemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome. the incentives of the experts are not always properly aligned; it was experts who formulated nestle's notorious ad campaigns to replace breast milk with formula, after all, and that sort of thinking wasn't limited to africa. nicols fox's 'spoiled' documents several late-20th-century shenanigans in the usa where expertise was deployed not to prevent foodborne illness but to evade blame for it by rendering it harder to trace
people have been detecting unsafe foods by smell for thousands of times longer than they've been people. (and yet foodborne infection remains a leading cause of death.)
I check the dates on orange juice containers, but only if there are two or more unopened in the fridge, in which case I want to open the oldest. Otherwise I don't check.
> In the overwhelming majority of cases it's extremely straightforward to determine if the food is safe
It drives me nuts, but I have a lot of friends who will buy a bunch of bananas, let them go brown (not rot), throw them out, and then buy more bananas. Or throw out all of my store-bought kimchi, which makes no sense.
That's 35 cents a week to pretend you care about eating healthy. You tell yourself you can't eat them today because they're too green. Then in a few days you can't eat them because there are spots. Too bad! I'll try again next week. I can see the reasoning.
I end up in this situation unintentionally, what I started doing is to peel and freeze them as they get overripe. Then you can use them for smoothies or banana bread some day in the future. Like in several months.
Yes, there are lots of people who do this. Type A personality from my personal experience lets the tail wag the dog at times and food has a schedule printed on it so it’s just an easy thing to do just follow the directions and schedule and fuck all context.
Life seems easier if you have the ability to put blinders on and never question why?
IIRC the issue is with cultures that leave rice out on the counter at room temperature, because of historical inertia from per-refrigeration times. In that case, it does support life like anything else moist and pH neutral.
But there is no problem if you follow good food safety practices -- everybody puts the lid back on the pot after they've served themselves, and any leftover goes in the fridge within 4 hours of cooking.
People don't understand that refrigeration stops the growth of toxic bacteria, and throw away perfectly good rice because they lack a basic understanding of biology.
Yes, I do that. But in my case it is mostly products that are months or even years after BBE. I think most waste we produce is from bread. Got a little better when we started baking ourselves.
My mother-in-law cleaned our pantry. I didn't ask her to, but she was here for a week, and just did it.
She threw out salt because it was past the "best by" date. Mind you, that salt has spent millions, possibly billions, of years in the ground. I asked why. She said, if the manufacturer says that, why would they lie?
I don't often find myself reaching out for facepalm memes or "SMDH", but I sure did then. I just said okay, but don't ever throw out salt again.
If you're finding food that is past the expiration date on a regular basis, you're probably wasting money on stuff you rarely or never actually eat. It isn't a problem anybody should be running into.
Every once in a while, some press or commercial tells me anything for me totally weird thing, like 'people forget to drink water' or 'people throw away all the is expired without checking it', I first think this is total bullshit, and then someone in my inner circle tells me the he does exactly this.
So no, you are not weird, but this people really exist, and I wouldn't wonder if they are the majority.
I do the same, but my wife looks at dates and follows them, and so do my kids.
That said, we eat few of-the-shelf products and cook a lot. Leftovers don't have dates! (But they spoil faster, because they don't have conservatives in them.)
People underestimate the cost of shipping produce. If you look at banana boxes, most of them come from Ecuador (in my area).
There's a river of bananas coming from Ecuador to the US, and that river gets broken up into various tributaries which get smaller and smaller until the dribble of bananas ends up at your local store.
And then they sell for .68/lb.
Anything that makes those things last longer is something everyone wants.
In fact, in the case of bananas that variety (Cavendish) is chosen because it lasts longer. There are plenty of produce that aren't shippable because they spoil - like Hood Strawberries, which only last for a few days and are only available locally.
That's two examples, but really - the idea that producers change the expiration date is patently ridiculous, at least in the US.
Frozen food and canned goods probably never expire.
But things do break down. As a sort of ridiculous example, soda doesn't last forever for sure. And if it's in the sun or not refrigerated it gets weird.
We hit a peak of canned food durability probably 20-40 years ago.
Where we figured out manufacturing well enough, but hadn't gone fully synthetic with liners, overly minimized wall thickness, etc. Probably packaging contamination issues as well.
I've had more (young) cans rupture in the last decade than any time before, even as they're stored next to much older ones.
We're doing the same thing right now with plastic - drink bottles now weak thin and brittle vs the relatively strong/ ductile stuff of 10-15yrs ago.
I'm surprised in retrospect it took me so long to get a vacuum sealer, and why they aren't ubiquitous. I'm trying to really force myself to use it so I don't just chuck meat in a Ziploc bag, throw it in the freezer, and then months later throw it out because it's freezer burned.
Frozen food: slowly. Canned food (if still hermetically sealed): never. The "going bad" concerns quality/taste, not safety.
I've had a few occasions where someone cleared out cabinets in their kitchen, and gave contents away. General findings:
Dry stuff (pasta, cookies, rice, beans, spices, etc): fine for years (if not a decade+) past its best-before date.
Canned food: if hermetic seal is intact, it's edible. Personal record: ~25y old fruit cocktail. Physical structure was poor and taste was bland, but it was edible.
For fresh foods like meat, dairy, vegetables etc: look, feel & sniff. It's almost always obvious when it's gone bad.
As a parent, bananas are by far the cheapest and easiest "healthy"(?) food to transport, prepare and get kids to eat. Maybe that has something to do with it.
A few food-poisonings can make one cautious about food safety...
Even though I'm pretty frugal, one measure I currently practice is to usually not touch food past the best-by/sell-by/expiration date. (Though I'll take this article into consideration, going forward.)
Since I don't like waste, unopened shelf-stable food packages go to the "free stuff" shelves in my large apartment building, where they disappear very quickly.
(Other measures included getting thermometers for fridge and freezer, stopping using sponges and brushes to wash dishes because the occasional microwaving of them might not be enough, tracking dates that some kinds of food were opened/started, and paying attention to packaging dents/puffiness/unsealing.)
> A few food-poisonings can make one cautious about food safety...
Fun fact: most people's claims of food poisoning, particularly from restaurants, are actually Norovirus outbreaks that they get from touching common elements like door handles, and faucets in bathrooms, and so have nothing to do with the food. Actual food poisoning is much rarer than most people think.
I've been actively ignoring these for the last 15 years. For things like fresh meat the smell test is more important - I would even not use something that the label says is good if it smells bad, which happened. Very rarely, but it happened. They have to put those things in most places by law, e.g. honey, even though something with a high level of sugar can last a very long time. Honey can probably last forever. I've eaten candy 10 years past expiry date, some kind of a sugary spread 4 years after expiration etc. I've even had yoghurt a month past expiry. Did not expect, but it was fine after taking a small sip.
It's not completely useless for all things and it is some indication to at least pay more attention, but for the most part it's not really decisive.
I recently ate joghurt that was 6 months after expiry. It lost a lot of water so was quite dense but otherwise fine.
I also had some pumpernickel bread that was fine several years after expiry, same with baked beans, lentils, breadcrumbs, etc
If the possibility of a psycho in your building makes you nervous, you're probably better off not taking "free candy", and just avoid the stress. (Much like I decided I would rather do half a dozen very cautious measures, than get food poisoning even once.)
For what I put on the free shelves, it's things nearing/at the best-by date, the year and month of that are usually marked prominently in handwritten Sharpie on the front of the package, and I don't put things there if they have any risky signs.
For example, recently, a packet of instant potatoes was nearing best-by date, but the packet seemed puffed up more than usual, like I think I would've noticed when I bought it. So I erred on the side of caution in throwing it away, rather than risk a neighbor, maybe unaware of the suspiciousness, getting sick.
In France (and probably many other places), supermarkets have a shelf with "close to expiry date" produces. They slap a label on each with a new price at a certain discount, from -30 to -50%, and a new barcode over the original barcode.
I _love it_. As it's a rotating subset of what's in the shop, it gives me ideas on what to cook. I basically don't go in the other aisles anymore: I enter the shop, go straight straight to what I jokingly call "the rotten aisle" and make a menu for the next 3 to 5 days from what's available. Which means that yes, I'm often eating stuff a couple days past their official date, whatever.
It's made inflation bearable for me, the flip side being that I'm now unable to buy food anywhere else, the price shock is just too much, I'm like "no way I'm paying that for food" ^^".
Believing expiration dates on raw, unsealed food is silly.
But for packaged food, I have to wonder if the companies are as evil as some would wish.
I’ve definitely noticed chips/crackers start to taste rancid not long after the expiration date.
Preservatives and such do break down. Do we really want to be eating that? The manufacturers know the breakdown behavior and probably want to limit liability and negative experiences. Do safety studies take decomposing preservatives into account? (Questions, but suspect the answers are “No”)
> I’ve definitely noticed chips/crackers start to taste rancid not long after the expiration date.
That's because they're not expiration dates, they're "best by" dates. They're the date at which the food starts to get less tasty in various ways, but that happens much, much sooner than when the food actually becomes unsafe to eat.
Manufacturers (generally) aren't lying about those dates. They really do line up with when the food is no longer as fresh-tasting as it can possibly be. At the same time, manufacturers don't mind even a little when people confuse them with expiration dates.
Best before and use by dates are more useful if you use them as a tool when buying food, not when choosing to throw it out.
If I know that I'm going to be eating something today or tomorrow then it doesn't matter, but otherwise choosing the longest dated food makes sense in order to know that it'll still be edible when I need it.
For a lot of foods it's an exponential process so something that has two days left and something that has ten can look and smell exactly the same.
At least here, there's a lot of margin built into some use-by dates also. Since they are expecting the cold chain to be broken at least somewhat while you transport that food home.
A lot of stores here also do extreme discounts on things that expire that day or soon after. I've had so many dinners that were basically "oh, that thing's 80% off and I have to use it today. Fantastic."
As global policy, there is a very important, optimal amount of food waste: to first order, the xth percentile of uncontrolled variance in harvest size, where x is the percentage of years when we are willing to let some fraction of the population to go hungry. We can start eating 'expired' cheese in an emergency a hell of a lot easier than we can go back in time a year and a half and raise more calfs.
If the harvest is down 25% this year, the result is not that 75% of people eat the same amount of food as they do now and 25% starve to death, it's that the price of food increases and then the average person buys 25% less food.
A significant percentage of the world population is overweight. That implies not only that they're eating in a caloric surplus and could feasibly eat less than they do now forever, but that they could eat in a caloric deficit for a period of time and the result would benefit their health.
If production of food was temporarily low, people would not have to resort to eating foods that are expired, they could simply eat foods that are stored. The date on the can of soup in your pantry is two years from now, and you were going to eat it two years from now, but you can also eat it now.
Low harvests in one year can generally be addressed by the next year, for example by planting different crops this year that aren't susceptible to this year's problem, or planting crops in a larger amount of land area, possibly in another part of the world not experiencing the same yield issues.
Readit News
If there are two items on the shelf X and Y, such that (< (best-before X) (best-before Y)), then you know X is the older item.
A jar of peanut butter that is best before January 2025 is one month older than one that is February 2025. Therefore, of course, you want to grab the latter one.
Whether it's actually good until February 2025 is just someone's opinion.
Furthermore, if you know that X is a month older than Y, then you know something else: X is at least a month old, today. If you buy the January 2025 jar of peanut butter, you're getting something that was already around for a month when the February 2025 jar was just made, assuming they keep the best before offset the same between runs. And then add the time it took for the jars to arrive to that store shelf.
I would much rather see "date packaged" on every product.
For instance, roasted coffee beans are not very good past only two or three weeks, but not in a way that you would get sick from consuming them. (You can keep them in the freezer to keep the flavor a bit longer.) The exact roast date is important, which they often don't want you to know, substituting a fictitious best before date which includes a generous margin regarding how long it's going to sit in warehouses and on store shelves.
I don't follow you. In a few weeks I'll have eaten it all, I don't even look at the BBE on things like peanut butter.
Some people do the opposite, when they buy something they choose the less value for their money (when it is negligible), if it maximizes the total value for the society.
But I sure do for milk, eggs, yogurt, certain cheeses.
It directly affects whether I might have to toss the last third of the milk by the time I get around to drinking it. Or whether the cheese will be growing mold before I finish it.
Deleted Comment
Expresso > 14 days from roast
Cheers
This works the other way too: if you have information about the aging of the product because you tried it out one time, then you can pretty much just ignore what the manufacturer says.
Between two products with different best before dates I would just go and get a product that listed actual manufacturing date :)
I'd rather see an expiry date plus some indicator that after the expiry date how fast would it spoil, or what changes it will go through, if ever.
For something like coffee with one ingredient, it’s obvious. That’s why a lot of single-ingredient products like coffee or lettuce already have a packaged-on date.
Only if they're the same brand. Some brands have different shorter best before dates, within what's permissible, than others.
Everything else is up to you
Is t that that what best before means? The date until when you can expect the food not to change considerably.
At least in Europe we sometimes have a “do not consume after” which is when the product is expected to go bad, not just off.
If you opened the package of some fresh Colby, and the best by date is 3 months in the future (so it's been open for 3 months), you're going to have to trim a lot of mold off of it and it probably won't even taste that great anymore.
Really it would be more accurate to say: best before X time after opening or X time after purchasing, whichever is first.
But even then: if someone buys the sharp because they like it, they'll very possibly like it more as it ages to extra sharp, even though it passes the best by date.
Sometimes yes but only on products known to spoil quickly and become dangerous to your health. But still even most dairy has best before and not to be consumed by.
...it's not there already in the US? Over here, there is always a "production date" on the packaging, and then additionally it's either a "best before" date, or a "shelf life" time. But to put just a best-before date without the production date?.. That's insane. Why even omit that?
Does anyone actually do this for real? In the overwhelming majority of cases it's extremely straightforward to determine if the food is safe to eat empirically. Only in a couple highly specific cases do you need to be conservative about eating old food (meat products and cooked rice are the two I worry most about, and I don't eat much meat so it's really just the latter). If it smells bad or tastes bad: don't eat it. If you can cut off or pull off the parts that are bad, but the rest is good: you're fine. Humans can (and have) survive and thrive on a shocking variety of food items and qualities, this level of omnivory is one of our biggest evolutionary advantages. I don't even look at the expiration date unless I'm already concerned that the food might be spoiled. Am I just weird? I thought everyone did this.
Food waste is really, really offensive to me. I probably take it a little too personally and too seriously. (Wasting meat is particularly galling to me, what w/ the likely terrible life the animal had making its way to your table.)
That turns out to be wrong according to the FDA website. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/special-features/dont-be-tempted-u...
Either way, the tylenol in my cabinet expired in 2014 and I'm doing fine.
I don't. For most foods, it's really obvious when they've become unsafe to eat. For those where it's not so obvious, my policy is "if I can't remember how long it's been in there, I'm tossing it."
I can't remember the last time I actually looked at a date printed on the packaging. I've found those dates to be meaningless.
(it was just "sweating" the salts and tasted amazing)
Isn't this untrue for spores and mold? I'm not making the claim, I'm genuinely unsure and remember stern warnings that unseen spores and mold are a threat with moldy bread and fruits.
But what about fresh fish and meat? What about salad drenched in vinaigrette? What about broth? What about sauces? What about pickles? I’ve had stuff for years in the fridge it still looks good.
I do. How am I supposed to know if the food is still good? Maybe I can't smell the problem. I trust the experts to put appropriate labels on things.
taken to the extreme, trusting the experts to label things properly results in absurdities like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40324991
people have been detecting unsafe foods by smell for thousands of times longer than they've been people. (and yet foodborne infection remains a leading cause of death.)
It drives me nuts, but I have a lot of friends who will buy a bunch of bananas, let them go brown (not rot), throw them out, and then buy more bananas. Or throw out all of my store-bought kimchi, which makes no sense.
Life seems easier if you have the ability to put blinders on and never question why?
But there is no problem if you follow good food safety practices -- everybody puts the lid back on the pot after they've served themselves, and any leftover goes in the fridge within 4 hours of cooking.
Drives me fucking insane. I've never thrown out food that isn't rancid/moldy.
She threw out salt because it was past the "best by" date. Mind you, that salt has spent millions, possibly billions, of years in the ground. I asked why. She said, if the manufacturer says that, why would they lie?
I don't often find myself reaching out for facepalm memes or "SMDH", but I sure did then. I just said okay, but don't ever throw out salt again.
This is an absurd assertion that fails to reflect the reality of food storage in refrigerators.
Deleted Comment
So no, you are not weird, but this people really exist, and I wouldn't wonder if they are the majority.
That said, we eat few of-the-shelf products and cook a lot. Leftovers don't have dates! (But they spoil faster, because they don't have conservatives in them.)
There's a river of bananas coming from Ecuador to the US, and that river gets broken up into various tributaries which get smaller and smaller until the dribble of bananas ends up at your local store.
And then they sell for .68/lb.
Anything that makes those things last longer is something everyone wants.
In fact, in the case of bananas that variety (Cavendish) is chosen because it lasts longer. There are plenty of produce that aren't shippable because they spoil - like Hood Strawberries, which only last for a few days and are only available locally.
That's two examples, but really - the idea that producers change the expiration date is patently ridiculous, at least in the US.
Frozen food and canned goods probably never expire.
But things do break down. As a sort of ridiculous example, soda doesn't last forever for sure. And if it's in the sun or not refrigerated it gets weird.
They do, just much slower.
Where we figured out manufacturing well enough, but hadn't gone fully synthetic with liners, overly minimized wall thickness, etc. Probably packaging contamination issues as well.
I've had more (young) cans rupture in the last decade than any time before, even as they're stored next to much older ones.
We're doing the same thing right now with plastic - drink bottles now weak thin and brittle vs the relatively strong/ ductile stuff of 10-15yrs ago.
I've had a few occasions where someone cleared out cabinets in their kitchen, and gave contents away. General findings:
Dry stuff (pasta, cookies, rice, beans, spices, etc): fine for years (if not a decade+) past its best-before date.
Canned food: if hermetic seal is intact, it's edible. Personal record: ~25y old fruit cocktail. Physical structure was poor and taste was bland, but it was edible.
For fresh foods like meat, dairy, vegetables etc: look, feel & sniff. It's almost always obvious when it's gone bad.
For some reason, banana pricing is hyper competitive in Canada. We pay CAD$0.56/lb or US$0.41/lb. (Yes, we sell them by lb not kg).
Even though I'm pretty frugal, one measure I currently practice is to usually not touch food past the best-by/sell-by/expiration date. (Though I'll take this article into consideration, going forward.)
Since I don't like waste, unopened shelf-stable food packages go to the "free stuff" shelves in my large apartment building, where they disappear very quickly.
(Other measures included getting thermometers for fridge and freezer, stopping using sponges and brushes to wash dishes because the occasional microwaving of them might not be enough, tracking dates that some kinds of food were opened/started, and paying attention to packaging dents/puffiness/unsealing.)
Three different things.
Best-by -> may not be particularly unsafe, but starts tasting gnarly as time goes on.
Sell-by -> the store should sell it by this date, but there's still a healthy margin of time left for you to keep it on your shelves and eat it.
Expiration -> They definitely don't want you to eat it after this date.
Fun fact: most people's claims of food poisoning, particularly from restaurants, are actually Norovirus outbreaks that they get from touching common elements like door handles, and faucets in bathrooms, and so have nothing to do with the food. Actual food poisoning is much rarer than most people think.
It's not completely useless for all things and it is some indication to at least pay more attention, but for the most part it's not really decisive.
Isn't really related to the expiration date.
When I realized that antisocial individuals might place toxic food there, I fell into panic.
For what I put on the free shelves, it's things nearing/at the best-by date, the year and month of that are usually marked prominently in handwritten Sharpie on the front of the package, and I don't put things there if they have any risky signs.
For example, recently, a packet of instant potatoes was nearing best-by date, but the packet seemed puffed up more than usual, like I think I would've noticed when I bought it. So I erred on the side of caution in throwing it away, rather than risk a neighbor, maybe unaware of the suspiciousness, getting sick.
I _love it_. As it's a rotating subset of what's in the shop, it gives me ideas on what to cook. I basically don't go in the other aisles anymore: I enter the shop, go straight straight to what I jokingly call "the rotten aisle" and make a menu for the next 3 to 5 days from what's available. Which means that yes, I'm often eating stuff a couple days past their official date, whatever.
It's made inflation bearable for me, the flip side being that I'm now unable to buy food anywhere else, the price shock is just too much, I'm like "no way I'm paying that for food" ^^".
But for packaged food, I have to wonder if the companies are as evil as some would wish.
I’ve definitely noticed chips/crackers start to taste rancid not long after the expiration date.
Preservatives and such do break down. Do we really want to be eating that? The manufacturers know the breakdown behavior and probably want to limit liability and negative experiences. Do safety studies take decomposing preservatives into account? (Questions, but suspect the answers are “No”)
That's because they're not expiration dates, they're "best by" dates. They're the date at which the food starts to get less tasty in various ways, but that happens much, much sooner than when the food actually becomes unsafe to eat.
Manufacturers (generally) aren't lying about those dates. They really do line up with when the food is no longer as fresh-tasting as it can possibly be. At the same time, manufacturers don't mind even a little when people confuse them with expiration dates.
It's the oil/fat used on or in the chips/crackers that goes rancid. That stuff oxidizes when the package is opened.
If I know that I'm going to be eating something today or tomorrow then it doesn't matter, but otherwise choosing the longest dated food makes sense in order to know that it'll still be edible when I need it.
For a lot of foods it's an exponential process so something that has two days left and something that has ten can look and smell exactly the same.
A lot of stores here also do extreme discounts on things that expire that day or soon after. I've had so many dinners that were basically "oh, that thing's 80% off and I have to use it today. Fantastic."
A significant percentage of the world population is overweight. That implies not only that they're eating in a caloric surplus and could feasibly eat less than they do now forever, but that they could eat in a caloric deficit for a period of time and the result would benefit their health.
If production of food was temporarily low, people would not have to resort to eating foods that are expired, they could simply eat foods that are stored. The date on the can of soup in your pantry is two years from now, and you were going to eat it two years from now, but you can also eat it now.
Low harvests in one year can generally be addressed by the next year, for example by planting different crops this year that aren't susceptible to this year's problem, or planting crops in a larger amount of land area, possibly in another part of the world not experiencing the same yield issues.
The optimal amount of food waste is none.