
Date labels on food packaging sow consumer confusion and waste - Reedx
https://www.wsj.com/articles/easy-fix-to-cut-food-waste-cleaning-up-date-labels-11567157400?mod=rsswn
======
mjevans
In the old days, long before I was born, about 50% of the population was
conscripted as "free" labor; staying home, cooking, cleaning, etc. That didn't
take up all of the time, but that allocation of resources did leave a lot of
time for doing things within a household.

Since that time nearly everyone works, and we have a literal war for attention
(ads). At least in the school district where I had my education we also lacked
any class about how to cook properly.

If as a society we want to make that choice I believe the logical conclusion
is to have more community kitchens where workers (and automation where
possible) make healthy, and also tasty (maybe not healthy) options for people
to eat. We've outsourced that to fast food, generally, since that's also cheep
"food". However the healthy, diversity, and quality are often lacking.

I live in the suburbs and I have to really, really, think. If I want something
that isn't deep fried, isn't a burger, or a salad with 'BS' leafs (but is
actually a salad with strong content and non-filler material): I struggle to
think of even one place, let alone a selection that I could drive to within
the local zone. Let alone anything I could hope to walk to in a reasonable
duration of time.

Maybe if the automation revolution allows the average worker to have a 2-4
hour a day job (mostly supervising the automation and the paperwork) we can
have an alternate future with time for rotating dinner parties and actual uses
of the food.

~~~
erichocean
I prefer to look at it like this: in the West, we used to have an effective
cradle-to-grave UBI for females. In fact, caring for women and children in our
culture was so important that we dedicated an adult male to basically every
woman in the country, and her offspring. Super important. All of society was
organized around this, and it's one of the greatest achievements of modern
civilization.

Now we make women work for money, but the total amount paid across all workers
is roughly the same. (Wages have been flat for 40 years, mostly because we
have twice the "paid" workers—men AND women—but consumption is basically
flat.)

It's regressive. Women have ALWAYS "worked" [0], but prior to the
financialization of Western culture, that "work" was—as you pointed out—on
activities that we can't put a price on, things like:

* building happy homes and families

* proper nutrition, which is extremely time consuming even today

* birthing and raising children (women had universal "time off" to have kids until we put those same women to work making widgets)

* helping out other families in the local community

* building and maintaining community institutions, schools, churches, etc.

* helping others in humane, non-financial ways where there isn't any money to be made

We've given up a lot of these things just to keep wages down for the
Capitalists. At least the rising inequality over the last 40 years shows
_someone_ benefited. Just not us, or our children, or our communities.

Decline is a choice.

[0] I hate that our culture only values things that can be expressed in terms
of money. Calling what women do "work" (or as the OP calls it, uncompensated
"labor") is demeaning to women. What women do day-to-day is vastly more
important than whatever bullshit men have to (gladly) do to build and maintain
civilization for their families.

~~~
intarga
It's disingenuous to call domestic servitude "caring for" or "UBI", by the
same metric prison is UBI for prisoners.

If you want cooking, cleaning, and childcare so badly, why don't you volunteer
to do it instead of telling women it's our place. I think I'll take my job
over being a man's property.

~~~
ShadowKitten
I personally would love to be the property of most of the women I've dated in
my life.

I help watch my nieces and nephews when needed already anyway, I'm very
stubborn about keeping my living space organized and sanitized(in fact i
cleaned my grandparent's entire house of mold(they are hoarders too so it
involved tons of lifting/reoganizing)), and I've been into fitness/athletics
my whole life, which entails learning to cook healthy meals.

If a women were to ask me to come do any of those things for her I would head
right over enthusiastically and I don't expect anything in return either as
long as she kept me company. This applies regardless of whether I'm
romantically interested in her.

------
userbinator
_In addition, 37% reported that they always or usually discard food when it is
near the date stamped on the package, and 84% said they do so at least
occasionally._

As someone who grew up in a not so wealthy family (but not "poor" by any
standard), this behaviour is... perplexing. Are people regularly buying far
more than they can consume? If that's the case, I don't think changing the
date labels will do much. We almost never discarded food because of, and used
the dates more as an indicator of when to consume it.

~~~
tomatotomato37
Part of it is even the small portions of ingredients are still too much if
you're only cooking the required meal occasionally as a single. It would be
great if grocery stores had the ability to only buy "2 cups of milk" or a
"single egg" in a way that isn't a packaging waste nightmare.

~~~
jessaustin
_...a "single egg"..._

Regardless of the date on the package, eggs at least last a really long time.
Go ahead and buy a dozen. If you eat those dozen this month, you'll probably
be fine.

~~~
brigandish
The float test is helpful here, if the egg floats then it's not a witch but
you should dispose of it (or better yet, check it but be ready for the smell
if it's off).

Delia Smith on how to tell a good egg.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2OWXN80NZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2OWXN80NZQ)

Edit: Ironically (or sadly), I was a bit too quick to call for disposal of old
eggs.

~~~
jessaustin
I wouldn't put a top-floater in an omelet, but if it doesn't smell I'd still
bake with it. It's really a question of taste.

~~~
brigandish
Good point.

------
kazinator
"Best by" labels have no inherent accuracy. However, you know fairly certainly
that for two instances X, Y of exactly the same product, if bestby(X) >
bestby(Y), then X is the fresher one.

Furthermore, you know that the less fresh one is _at least_ |bestby(X) -
bestby(Y)| days old.

If the difference in "best by" between two instances is three months, one of
them is at least three months old already: it's three months plus the age of
the newer one.

That's really the only accurate use of these labels: to leave the old stock on
the shelf for someone who doesn't care. Once you bring it home they have
little value.

~~~
jobigoud
In some stores the items nearing the best by date are slapped with a 20%
discount sticker.

------
egypturnash
I feel like the uses of labels they are discussing might be served by
considering a “dispose of after” or “safe until” date.

~~~
m_eiman
There are (in Sweden at least, I suppose everywhere else too) two types of
dates: "best before" and "last day of use".

The "best before" kind of date is the most common one by far, and it's used on
things that will be obviously bad to eat before they start becoming really bad
for your health. Milk, for example, will smell and taste bad before it's
really unhealthy. If it seems ok to eat, it probably is - regardless of the
date printed on the box.

The other kind, "last day of use", is put on things that can become unhealthy
without you noticing - most common use in Sweden is minced meat and raw
chicken. This is the type of date you should actually follow without thinking
too much about it.

A lot of people don't know there are two types of dates, and treat all dates
like the second type.

~~~
noja
One of the British supermarkets does the same thing (can't remember which).

------
gorpomon
I have pretty good insurance by most standards, but a trip to the ER or
emergency room for a serious case of food poisoning would be pretty hard to
handle. Couple that with often having some important event coming up (project
deadline, travel, social event, etc). So to that end, I throw out when in
doubt. Yes, I feel particularly bad wasting food, but there are significant
financial and social costs I have to pay for getting it wrong. And honestly
knowing that I'm risking those things actually makes eating the food less
enjoyable.

It's important to keep in mind that people are making similar rational
decisions when deciding to sniff or toss.

~~~
phonypc
Food pathogens don't produce smells or visual indicators as a rule. The sniff
test is about food quality, not safety.

------
Etheryte
The title reads that changing the date labels is a way to fix the problem, yet
the third paragraph outlines that "we estimate that 20% of household food
waste is due to confusion over date labels". Cutting down on that 20% would of
course be beneficial, but it's a long way away from fixing the problem as a
whole.

~~~
Ididntdothis
Saying "this fixes a substantial part of the problem but not everything" is a
surefire way to get nothing done.

Same in healthcare. Somebody makes a proposal and immediately people come out
of the weeds claiming "But look at this thing! this is much worse" and in the
end nothing ever changes.

~~~
Ensorceled
Right, if there isn't a simple solution that can be explained in a headline a
large number of people jump to "there is nothing (useful) that can be done".

------
Havoc
Big part of it is routine. I basically buy tonight’s meal on way home. That
leaves very little scope for anything going bad.

Meanwhile my parents have a fridge full of food and are constantly throwing
stuff out

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm guessing your parents are still saving money overall, even accounting for
the stuff thrown away.

Having transitioned from the "buy supper and breakfast on my way home" to
"week's worth of food in the fridge" myself, I see two components to this.
One, buying just-in-time is easier when you're single, gets more complicated
when you have a partner, and much more so when you have kids. Two, the
"keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store less
frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a monthly
basis.

~~~
flukus
> I'm guessing your parents are still saving money overall, even accounting
> for the stuff thrown away.

I'm the same as OP, for the most part my parents would be buying the same
stuff at the same store. They'll also be buying at the price on their weekly
shopping day and if that's on a weekend when a lot of people shop then stores
aren't discounting, whereas I can take advantage of daily specials or late
night discounts.

> Two, the "keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store
> less frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a
> monthly basis.

You can do both, most thrown away food is of the more perishable varieties, so
you can buy that on an as needed basis and buy stuff like tinned food in bulk.

~~~
LorenPechtel
Even the perishables can be bought somewhat in bulk. My wife ends up chucking
an appreciable amount of perishables so I have thought about the economics--
and her approach is generally the right one. Much of what gets chucked came
from a store with good produce sales on Wednesday only. If she ends up
chucking 20% of it but paid only 30% of what it would be at the store closer
to home she's still way ahead.

------
sans-serif
I'm not sure what threat model this supposed "Easy Fix" is intended to
address. Struggling families already keep food past supposed expiration date.
If manufacturers want people to throw away food, changing the way the label is
worded won't fix that. And most people are discarding food because they don't
plan and/or buy too many.

~~~
autarch
The goal is to encourage people _not_ to throw away perfectly safe food.

------
stretchwithme
It would be cool if any food about to expire could be given away by your
refrigerator. Maybe robots will one day handle that. Maybe even sniff the food
to make sure it's still good.

Of course, when robots start cooking and restaurant quality meals on demand
for the cost of the fresh ingredients, the need to store food will drop like a
rock and this problem goes away.

------
esotericn
Date labels are a strange concept.

Different countries just like, don't have them. Particularly on stuff like
fruit and vegetables.

I pretty much just eat things if they seem edible. If a piece of fruit is
mouldy, I'll chop off the mould and eat the rest.

Maybe that's why I'm so bonkers. :P

~~~
TeMPOraL
Date labels on food let you _plan ahead_. For half of the stuff in my kitchen,
I couldn't tell you off the top of my head whether it'll go bad in a month or
in a year. Sure, once it goes bad, I might be able to spot it - but labels let
me look at an unopened bag of $foodstuffs and decide whether I have to build a
dinner around it this week, or whether it can wait another month.

~~~
userbinator
I was taught to sort items by date, so you don't have to look through them all
to determine which ones are the closest to expiry.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's a neat trick. However, I've never seen anyone doing it around me. I
wonder how one would make it work with fridge and storage space regularly
filled to capacity?

My wife and I do something else instead. We know we can eat all foodstuffs
before their printed expiry date, but we got tripped regularly by products
with have short expiry time after being opened - in particular, through not
remembering how long such a product has been sitting in the fridge. I
eventually glued some magnets to a permanent marker and put it on the fridge,
and now we write current date whenever opening a fridge-stored product. This
made it much easier to avoid accidental food waste due to uncertainty around
spoilage.

------
pontifier
Why aren't irradiated foods more prevalent?

I NEVER buy strawberries because they are ALWAYS moldy straight from the
store.

------
alexashka
Let's keep the wages stagnant for 40 years, and come up with new ways for the
average American to do more things because they're so naughty, 40% of food
goes to waste you naughty American.

What else should Americans do, use less water when showering, to fix 'water
waste'?

Maybe the problem lies elsewhere...

To take it apart a little more - why is 40% of the food being thrown out a
problem? What do we gain by cutting that down to 20%? Do we have a food
shortage? Agriculture is 0.9% of America's GDP and less than 0.7% of the
population is involved in farming and fishing combined. [0]

It's not at all clear there is any food 'waste' occurring and even if there
is, it's not at all unclear where it sits on the list of priorities. I'd say
somewhere near the bottom.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States)

~~~
fastball
Wages have been stagnating for 40 years because more and more women have been
entering the workforce for 40 years.

Supply of workers has increased massively, while demand for the things being
produced has obviously not increased in the same manner (because the women now
in the workforce were already consumers).

