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.
Hm, I’m guilty of picking up the sliced bread at the back because I know it’ll last longer and involve less waste on my part. I guess they should produce less then?
There are times when there is only one left of my favorite bread, so I take that one. There are enough people who don't care. The store staff can notice that people bought all the May 25 loaves they put out, so that only the May 11 breads are left on the shelf, and refrain from putting out any more May 25s (or newer) until the May 11s are gone. If that doesn't move the May 11s, as a last resort, they can sticker them 25% off rather than throwing them away.
The store has full control over their algorithm for avoiding waste, and full control over what they put onto the shelf. They have all the tools for solving the problem, even in the face of some shoppers going for the newest 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
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.
It frustrates me to no end when people do this with items that expire in a year. You aren't even maximizing your utility, you're just doing the shopping equivalent of "rolling coal".
Right, I'd get that if it were a case of wanting to store it for a long time or fresh food/things with a much shorter shelf life. I don't personally see any difference in value for this example.
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.
What makes it not matter is if you believe the opinion of the best before date to be true: if the stuff is just fine for a year, then it being a month older makes no difference.
I'm of the opinion that fresher is fresher.
What's my incentive for taking the older stuff, if it's not discounted?
Only this one: saving a few seconds by not looking.
if it's in a can or box with a date that far into the future, using the word "fresh" seems incorrect in all aspect to me.
if you want fresh, you shop on the outer walls of the super market. anything on the interior aisles is not fresh. I wish it were a thing that as you continued to the innermost sections the "food" became more processed, and instead of aisles, it was just a spiral to that point.
Regardless, the point remains. Peanut butter is never fresh if it's in a grocery store. If you want fresh peanut butter, you'll need to find a way to buy it unsealed within the day made from the manufacturer or make it yourself.
Really, fresh peanut butter would really just be blended fresh peanuts until it reaches the consistency you want. That's a lot easier to do than making your own salad dressing.
I am not sure how this applies to my comment, but I agree that if peanut butter is so simple to make then it is best to do it yourself (we do not use peanut butter and it is not sold in normal supermarkets here so I am glad to have learnt something :))
I did at one time grind peanuts(not fresh) with Bamix... It is not actually too fast process. I would say that some salad dressings are much less work. At least without proper tooling.
Still, now I wonder what exactly would be "fresh" peanut?
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.
The mom & pop Asian grocery in my hood has a discount section where basically everything is past the best by date. It's all packaged cookies and spice mixes and the kind of thing that won't kill you if it "expired" a week ago though.
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.
what does it say about the store you are at that has food that has dates that far apart? most products are received at the store from the factory from the same batch which means sameish dates. so how do the dates on the products vary that much on the shelf unless some gamesmanship is being done somewhere.
If peanut butter comes in cases of 24 that are in pallets of 144 cases and is delivered every month to the regional distribution center, many stores will have both the month and ++month product on the shelf at the same time. The alternative is to be frequently out of stock.
It just says that they restocked half empty shelf with newer stuff. The factory is not sending new batches every day. Month apart on something that is valid for years is oftentimes how they are spaced.
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.
The label can also be wrong. Just because someone stamped a product with something doesn't make it a fact. It's just the manufacturer's opinion on the matter, and their opinion may be or may not be credible like every other source of information.
Just because they appear authority-like does not make their opinion more valid.
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 :)
Improper storage affects longevity. To estimate longevity at a suspect store you need to know actual manufacturing date not manufacturer's arbitrary best before.
But it doesn't even have to be stored improperly. If you see that this loaf is made two days ago, you will go and find a better place with fresher bread with fewer preservatives or whatever. Manufacturers and sellers obviously don't like it though. So they present you a choice between best before 1 or 2 days from now. Good eh? If you see two loaves with 1 day best-before difference, you'll go for the one with lower date and calmly go home eat your stale bread.
Or you learn to simply ignore the best before and buy bread where you know manufacturing date.
Of course if you are in a third world country likely no one audits factories for compliance and the manufacturing date is also pulled out of someone's ass.
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?
One can argue that it has negative value for the customer.
Advantages: a fancy fact, satisfies your curiosity
Disadvantages: you can mistake it for the expiration date, especially if that gets less visible for some reason
You can't. There is either one date, and then it's the production date (because it's required), or there are two dates, right next to each other, in which case the later one is the expiration date, and so the shelf life is written somewhere else on the packaging.
For instance. Packaged juice has 1 year shelf life. Pasta has it in the range from 1 to 2 years. Sausages have 1 to 3 months, depending on the exact kind. Some sweet milk deserts have one week. Is this just a fancy fact, or does it give you a hint that if something can survive for 2 years, it may as well be good for 2 years and 2 months while something that has shelf-life of a week probably won't survive for 2 weeks? I think it's the latter, but YMMV of course.
Actually, the disadvantage might be more about how grossed out people might become if they realize how old some of the food on the shelves might be.
Especially if they needed to also include the origination dates of each ingredient, recursively. E.g. The corn was been stored for 10 years in a silo, and this specific box of corn meal was in a warehouse for a quarter of a year. An extreme example, but there was a time when our country had too much corn in storage, which is why the public school lunch program and corn ethanol became programs to use all this extra corn. Not to mention corn syrups.
> the disadvantage might be more about how grossed out people might become if they realize how old some of the food on the shelves might be.
Only if you've never knew that before? I mean, I guess that's true: I know that e.g. cereals and past can go for years if store properly but if you never knew that, it may shock you. But if for you whole life you've seen labels "Shelf time: 18 months" on various foodstuffs, that's just the piece of general ambient knowledge.
> if they needed to also include the origination dates of each ingredient, recursively
Well, this is ridiculous, so they are not required to do that although, of course, there are (self-)regulations on how old can the ingredients be for the manufactirers to be able to claim the shelf-life they want to claim.
> 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.
> I was strongly under the impression that medications with expiration dates do not become dangerous after their expiration, but they may be less effective.
A few like tetracyclines can become dangerous, apparently that's caused Fanconi syndrome and other kidney problems in a few cases. But that drug is the exception rather than the norm, but since I used to keep doxycycline around for treating Lyme I made sure it was stored in a cool/dry area and never got too far past the expired date.
Aspirin is a pretty easy one to tell if it's past its prime, it'll smell like vinegar as it decays into acetic acid. This falls into the 'loses its potency' category where the thing it decays into isn't harmful.
if my reading of the shelf life extension program paper from 02006 is correct, doxycycline is especially good at surviving past its expiry date. maybe manufacturers are especially conservative about doxycycline expiration dates due to the toxicity risk? the paper didn't mention toxicity risk or safety at all
That article basically says the same - that they're less effective after a time (and if you're trying to save your life with them, less effective could mean deadly)
It does try to suggest that "there could be bacteria growth", but the article hedges and seems like it barely believes that itself. I'm sure some of the syrups could grow bacteria possibly.
“Medication” is very big set of very different things.
When you need to boil down master level chemistry knowledge to one sentence, it is very practical to be conservative and just say “dont use it after exp. It might be dangerous”. (Because, some of them will be dangerous)
yeah, I haven't really thought twice about taking, say, ibuprofen that's 20 years expired. It's good for a laugh, that's about all the critical thought I put into the label.
In my experience, ibuprofen/advil in an unsealed bottle that's over a year past expiration date simply doesn't work well. You may need 2-3 pills of the expired stuff in a situation where 1 pill of unexpired would be sufficient. This makes it in practice hard to pick a dose which is safe but effective.
After enough such annoyances, I have started consistently throwing out expired Ibuprofen.
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.
Yeah actually I’m with you on this. Not for everything, but there are definitely food items I won’t try to save after ex. putting them out for a party (like if a dairy based dip has been at room temp for more than 1-2 hours it’s not going back in my fridge).
Rice is one I pay close attention to. When I get takeout from my favorite Taiwanese restaurant, I usually throw away the rice they give me and cook my own (it's a bit of a drive back to my place).
Of course I then keep it warm in my rice maker for 24 hours, but supposedly that's safe in this Zojirushi.
Why? A Taiwanese restaurant is going to go through a lot of rice, so it seems unlikely they'll serve you anything that's been sitting around for ages, plus it's usually very obvious from the texture if it has been sitting around.
It's not the best rice, the portion is too small, and by the time I get home it's been sitting in a styrofoam box for a while. I should just ask them to leave it off.
What's the deal with rice? I come from a culture we eat a lot of rice. You can keep rice in the fridge for nearly a week. The only time I throw away rice is if it has visible fungus on it.
The problem is with cooked rice that hasn't been cooled off properly (or not kept hot enough). The heat-resistant spores of the Bacillus Cereus will then develop and the bacteria will proliferate and produce a heat-resistant toxin, which can hurt you even after reheating the leftover rice.
You need to keep your rice cold (<7 °C) or hot (>63 °C) enough for the spores not to develop. Letting your rice cool off naturally in a pot is also leaving it at the wrong temperatures for a longer time than if you rapidly cool it off.
Me neither until very recently, when a student died from it. Then it was all over the news for a week. (I'm pretty sure that is in the level of being struck by lightning.) It has even a name: fried rice syndrome.
CDC estimates 48 million cases of foodborne illness per year in the US [0]. That works out to something like 1 case in 10,000 meals.
Maintaining proper temperature of cooked food is part of basic food safety. Right up there with having people that prepare food wash their hands. Basic food safety.
So no, a random anecdote does not prove the opposite. I don’t want to be snarky, but I can’t believe people are implying that basic food safety guidelines are disproven.
Edit to add: from the same CDC link, 128,000 people in the US are hospitalized from food borne illness and 3,000 die. I’m fine with someone choosing to ignore this for their own food. But please don’t make it sound like there’s no risk.
Idk the risk is not remotely the same between two people.
I’ve drank the tap water in India, eaten fish that’s just been sitting in a pan on my stovetop for a day, cooked and eaten expired slimy chicken (admittedly more than a few times), among many other transgressions, and I’ve never felt sick.
Whatever few organisms and their toxins that may grow if I leave leftovers out an hour too long has so far been easy mode for whatever acid bath flows through my body so I’m not going to throw away food needlessly.
(P.S. If I cook for someone else, I have much more stringent food safety standards. Also despite my transgressions, I do usually cook non-expired high quality food.)
Do you live in a cool climate, or maybe always had air conditioning? Some things will definitely go off if you leave them unrefrigerated for a day in a hot climate.
Works great as long as you aren't in a hot climate. Out of curiosity I checked and I'm currently measuring 14 degrees C in my room. Haven't turned on the refrigerator since October.
In most south east asian household (Malaysia specifically since I lived there), they will leave the cooked leftover on the table below a fly protecting net and eat it up to the next day.
Yeah, especially roast lamb / beef. You can easily leave those out probably a couple days and it'll be perfectly fine so long as it's covered away from insects and the cat / dog
Although perhaps in warmer climates it might be an issue.
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.
not by itself generally. it's too salty and acidic, and the supermarket stuff is often full of edta to boot, so bacteria can't get iron, magnesium, or calcium. mayo diluted with boiled potato is another story
also supermarket mayo is labeled as good for months, but salmonella (the usual culprit) can grow in hours. so the sell-by date wouldn't protect you there
Source? I mean obviously be careful with homemade mayo made from fresh, uncooked egg, but the store bought stuff is pasteurized and seems pretty stable.
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
Never mind that unless the cheese is exceedingly moldy you can just cut off the mold and keep going. I'd be throwing out a right fortune in cheese if I threw it out at the first signs of mold.
>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.
Mushy apples are fine. I wouldn't buy them like that. But picking up the half mushy apples that fell from the tree is how we got all our apple sauce made when I was a kid. Dirt cheap. Come to think of it. My mom still does this.
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.
Bread is especially spongy, so I for sure throw that out the second it has a whiff of mold. More solid things like cheese though? mold doesn't seem to grow very deep on that.
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 have a pretty poor sense of smell and I've had terrible food poisoning a couple times in my life. If it's past expired I throw that shit out. I make sure to do a decent job meal planning to control waste.
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.
Sure it’s true. Uncooked rice often contains the bacteria Bacillus cereus. These bacteria can form protective spores that survive the cooking process and if the rice is cooled slowly these bacteria spores can germinate, grow and produce a toxin that causes vomiting.
If you’ve eaten the dish known as fried rice, the rice used there has been cooked and then chilled for 24 hours. So while what you’re saying is true, the topic is complex.
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.
The issue is not refrigeration, but how you got to there: how is the hot rice cooled before putting it in the fridge.
I imagine not everyone has a blast chiller at home. Does one leave it to cool off naturally, and in what kind of container? Perhaps overnight?
During this process, the rice can take hours to go from 90°C to room temp, and it is during this process that the toxins are created. It might be too late when you put it in the fridge.
Cooling off needs ro be done as quickly as possible by spreading the rice, for instance.
It is not necessarily the lack of basic understanding of biology that causes people to get sick and therefore many to throw away good rice, but the incomplete understanding of the cooking process.
When you get a box of cold rice, there is no way of smelling how it has been cooled and if it is toxic or not.
In all my experiences, rice cools off pretty fast and dries out pretty fast. It may be starchy and risk B. cereus but it really isn't the greatest medium for it unlike pasta covered in sauce.
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.
That is different issue. Anything can be spoiled by moisture, or other factors.
A best by date implies it is stored properly even then there’s a difference in taste/quality before and after the best by date. Which is not true for salt.
It’s not a change in safety, though. Government food regulations are and should be about safety. If it’s bad, well, that’s unfortunate for you, but I don’t want to live under a government that bans bland food.
In the US, best by dates (and other dates) are used by manufacturers to avoid quality disputes about old food. There are regulations that they have to be truthful, but they are not required (except on infant formula).
So there you go. Also, if you look at context, the poster I replied to asserted that salt clumping was not a change in quality (hence the form of my reply).
Salt can spoil due to humidity if not properly stored within a day, or may never spoil, ever, if stored properly. That kind of spoilage has nothing do to with age and hence my issue with a best by date for salt.
It doesn’t spoil, it just has to be broken up again. The entire McIlhenny Tabasco company is based on doing something useful with the land atop their salt mines. I can assure you that southern Louisiana is wet.
They just slap a number on it. I mean, who throws away salt? My mother-in-law, that’s who. She is actually a lovely person and I enjoy her company (and you can eat off her floors), but that’s one of those tiny little things you just run into from time to time.
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.
If the product is ruined, the entire package and contents become waste.
Metal is at least mostly recoverable energy. The footprint of the contents lost is not.
And ironically the lighter plastic packaging makes it more likely to be trashed and not reused, or even attempted to be recycled. (Reuse is 1-2 magnitudes more efficient than recycling.)
on the contrary, if you can reduce the environmental cost per can by 30%, but the result is that 20% of the cans rupture and go to waste, you have still reduced the total environmental cost
Wine bottles are continuing to go down in size too. The glass is still roughly half of the carbon footprint. Weights range wildly (and glass is largely unnecessary).
I think ultimately we'll realize overengineered glass (even if it's single use or crushed/repurposed or landfilled or recycled) is the best all around solution, especially taking into account health and future abundant (fusion-similar) energy.
But also from big picture pollution/environmental and even carbon perspectives.
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.
Butcher paper or freezer-quality Ziplocs make a huge difference. When I used to buy a quarter beef, there would be over 100 lbs. of beef in my deep freeze at any given moment, mostly wrapped in thick butcher paper. Ground beef was in plastic sleeves. It would be in there for over a year at times, and I never noticed even the slightest burn
A lot of freezer burn comes from the auto defrost common on kitchen refrigerators. When the temperature regularly cycles above freezing, the packaging has a nearly impossible job.
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.
> Canned food: if hermetic seal is intact, it's edible.
Definitely not a universal truth. Canned food can develop botulism, you do not want to mess with it. Any cans that are bulged or show signs of swelling should be discarded - don't even risk opening them.
There are guys on YouTube who explore old army rations (which were basically all canned food prior to the 1980s), and when they decide to open a bulged can "for science" they will often literally break out a gas mask. That said, it's also not terribly uncommon for them to find rations dating back to WW2 and older that are still partially edible.
Dried spices vary by volatility and oxidizability.
I tried some 10 year old saffron kept in a corked vial, and it really didn't do much. I basically had to use the whole thing to get any yellow out of it, probably $20 worth.
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.
Since the amount of time before food goes bad is incredibly variable and depends a ton on how it was treated after it left the manufacturer, I'm not sure that's a thing that is even possible.
But it is a thing that isn't really necessary. With the vast majority of foodstuffs, it's really easy to tell whether or not they're safe to eat by observing, smelling, or tasting them.
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.
Only one person mentioned this in passing so far, but I highly recommend getting a thermometer for your refrigerator to ensure it's keeping food cold enough for safety. I really think a lot of people have no clue what the inside temperature of their fridges are and think it's totally normal to have milk and other food spoil within a week. It's also not uncommon to have warmer and colder spots in it depending on airflow.
Yep, moreover they cost a whopping $7. Not only can you ensure things are in a safe range, but also not too cold to further improve efficiency.
An oven thermometer is another one I’ll recommend, as the temperature the oven claims it’s at is a function of where the sensors are. It’s not uncommon for it to be consistently off by 5-6%, which can really matter if you want the best results. Again, about $7 can solve that one too.
It rubs me the wrong way when most people refer to best by date on food items as the expiration date. Looks, smell and taste go far in deciding if food is good to eat or not.
Interestingly even medicines don’t magically go bad the day after the expiration date.
It's also a logically trivial statement. There is no threshold for "best"--food quality is a matter of degree. So you can cite any date at all and justifiably say the food is "best" before that date.
Some medicinal compounds are hygroscopic and may go bad over time due to the permeability of moisture through the packaging. (Hence the use of metallized foils, which have nearly zero moisture permeability). Same for oxygen/oxidisation.
Some guys I hung out with who lived in one of the most expensive ZIP codes in the US selectively freeganed pretty good grub from behind Whole Foods.
IIRC, there is an inconsistent practice where grocers purposely destroy food they throw out to prevent freeganing.
I do wonder about how many years various condiments last, especially those that don't contain any preservatives. Have had ketchup turn very dark brown before.
At a minimum, barely expired food should be donated to nonprofits.
At worst, food unfit for human consumption should be composted. Disposing of it in landfills is a waste of waste.
I had a neighbor growing up who would get large quantities of vegetables and breads from the local grocery store "for her chickens". I'm sure that she actually did give the bad stuff to them, but she also regularly made rounds about the neighborhood placing perfectly good food that was just past its expiration date.
AFAIK, no nonprofits would touch so-called “expired” food, barely or otherwise. Some poor person falls ill after consuming it, whether or not there was even any real correlation, and they would be sued. And if any store or manufacturer donated the food they’re going to be sued too.
Most people in the US are overweight or obese. Most “food waste” is from people eating more food than they need. This costs society trillions of dollars in environmental costs, and medical costs.
When I was younger I for some reason thought butter doesn't go bad.
I found some butter that was two years old in my fridge. I made cookies from them, and ate them all.
I told my parents I finally ate that butter they gave me to take home with thanksgiving leftovers a few years ago and they looked at me like I was crazy and told me that butter expires.
the big issue with butter is rancidity, which increases oxidative stress on your body. but butter is mostly saturated, so even at room temperature it lasts months. two years in the fridge is probably fine
There has to be a term for this type of article that throws out a bunch of subjects in a purported progression of logical argument, but is really only taking the reader on an emotional journey. Non-interactive Gish gallop?
If you want to focus on fallacious expiration dates, the don't drag in the subject of food distributors wasting food out of commercial expedience. If you want to talk about people going hungry in a country of plenty, then don't talk about individually wasting food. If you want to talk about fresh water being squandered, don't do it in a pan-country context where most of that water is a renewable resource continually falling from the sky. If you want to riff on the ridiculousness of landfills, don't focus on one of their most decomposable ingredients.
All of these things are certainly problems to be discussed in their own right, but I don't see how lumping them together in one big ball does anything besides letting readers feel that they might do something about any of the larger problems.
Food waste in landfills is actually a huge issue because it doesn’t decompose normally. It typically gets buried and undergoes anaerobic decomposition, producing methane, which is much worse in the short term as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
Eggs are a great example of this - they can be good to eat several weeks after their date when refrigerated. Especially if you do stuff like flip them every now and then. All you have to do is put them in a pot of water, and if it doesn't float, you're fine.
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.
reply