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Expired food: how best-before dates create a waste mountain
- ChrisRR 7y agoI've never paid attention to use by or best-before dates. I think generally trusting you nose, eyes and instincts does you fine. The one that most surprises me is the loaves of brown seeded bread I buy. The use by date is normally only a week from purchase, where as the bread is normally fresh for 2 weeks, and edible but starting to harden up to 3 weeks. If I followed the use by date, I'd be throwing away half a loaf of bread every week.
- yub 7y agoIs that a “best by”, “sell by”, or “use by” on the bread? Usually I’ll see one of the first two on bread. Shortly after that, it starts to get stale.
- londons_explore 7y agoJust a single gone-off meal can kill you, so you can't try all that many times and hope to find the limit of survivability. Damp gain and rice based things are particularly hazardous in that regard - sure it's unlikely to be bad, but when it is bad, it can be very bad.
- benj111 7y agoA single crossing of the road can kill you. A single car drive can kill you, hell you could go to sleep one night and never wake up for many many reasons. You can't avoid things just because they could kill you. You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses, and it doesn't really correlate with best before dates, cooked reheated rice is the main risk.
- differentView 7y agoHaving a lot of other risks is not reason to take on more risk, it's reason to reduce risk.
- benj111 7y agoWhen you cross the road you look around, evaluate the risk, then cross. You don't close your eyes and hope, neither do you just never cross the road. The same should apply to food, there have been multiple food poisoning cases in the US stemming from salad, so following best before labels isn't going to avoid all risk. The best option therefore is to evaluate risks for yourself. I don't blindly drink milk based on the date. If it stinks and is lumpy, I don't drink it, regardless of whether it's in date or not.
- DanBC 7y agoThe Use By date is one method people canuse to evaluate the risk. Your salad example doesn't support your point, it counters it. We can't smell food poisoning, so suggesting that people just sniff the food to see if it's safe to eat is, by your own example something that isn't going to work.
- benj111 7y agoMy point is you cant blindly rely on labels to decide whether food is safe, you have to use common sense. In most cases that extends to using my senses, but if I'd left a bottle of milk outside for a week in summer, I wouldn't sniff it to 'check'. Also the original comment mentioned best before, not use by. But use by dates are a useful tool, I'm saying you shouldn't just blindly rely on that.
- DanBC 7y agoYou keep saying "use common sense" and "using my senses", but you cannot use your senses because you cannot smell most food poisoning bacteria. When you sniff food and it smells bad you know that food can't be eaten, so you throw it out. When you sniff food and it doesn't smell bad can that food be eaten? You don't know. That's why they have the dates: the dates take into account the most common food poisoning bacteria, and best practice storage in the home, and make a balancing act. What you do with your own body is obviously up to you, but please don't use "I can smell if it's bad" if you're feeding children or old people because they are at risk of death or permanent harm.
- thereisnospork 7y agoIt's about the statistics, same reason we have seatbelts and helmet laws. If a less aggressive sell-by date means one in a million loaves of bread gets moldy, that might kill a handful of people a year. If nothing else, allowing people to die from preventable sales of expired food is bad politics.
- benj111 7y agoHow many people a year die from moldy bread? Best before and sell by is a guarantee. Its the company saying this product will last until X date. Just like your car doesn't become unusable when the warranty runs out, neither does bread, especially when you make some attempt to store it properly, because best before dates are based on the opposite.
- DanBC 7y agoEach year about 3000 people in the US die from food poisoning. About 100,000 people are hospitalised, and some of them will have been caused permanent harm.
- thereisnospork 7y agoTo add: even if we throw out a few hundred million dollars worth of food, that's more than a fair trade for a few thousand lives and 40x that in hospitalizations.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> Best before and sell by is a guarantee. Its the company saying this product will last until X date. As I mention elsewhere in the thread, these dates do not have any legal meaning at all for the manufacturer. They do have meaning for the vendor (the grocery store), but that's not what people generally imagine is going on. Even the phrasing "best before" explicitly doesn't guarantee anything; a manufacturer would be crazy to make such a guarantee.
- benj111 7y ago
- DanBC 7y ago> You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses, There's not "one" exception. You can't smell the toxin caused by bacillus cerius; you can't smell campylobacter; you can't smell listeria; you can't smell samonella; you can't smell e coli; you can't smell C. perfringens etc etc etc.
- gsich 7y agoAnd a date will help you there?
- m_eu 7y agoI wouldn't eat bread that doesn't start to harden within a week. What the hell do they put into it?
- snaky 7y ago> Even Walmart’s “Great Value 100% Whole Wheat Bread” contains seven ingredients that Whole Foods considers “unacceptable”: high fructose corn syrup, sodium stearoyl lactylate, ethoxylated diglycerides, DATEM, azodicarbonamide, ammonium chloride, and calcium propionate. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_foods_and_walmart_how_many_groceries_sold_at_walmart_would_be_banned.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_...
- DanBC 7y ago> I think generally trusting you nose, eyes and instincts does you fine. This tells you if the food is rotting. It doesn't tell you if the food is safe to eat.
- Phenix88be 7y agoIf the food is not rotting, why would it not be safe to eat ?
- cmrx64 7y agoThe organisms that cause the decay and that make you sick aren’t the same. Unspoiled food is _not_ necessarily safe food. https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/multimedia_pub_fsf_24_02.html https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul... Most of these people probably got sick eating unspoiled food: https://www.fda.gov/food/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm103263.htm https://www.fda.gov/food/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm103263...
- DanBC 7y agoBecause it has bacteria. The commonly found bacteria are factored into Use By dates.
- gsich 7y agoA date won't tell you that either.
- DanBC 7y ago> I think generally trusting you nose, You can't smell food poisoning! You may well not come to lasting harm, but you could kill children or older people.
- kyriakos 7y agoSometimes the food itself its perfectly fine but the container is the issue. Plastic and aluminium can leak into the food after time passes. Especially true for sauces and liquids.
- em-bee 7y agohere is how i test if food is edible: method 1: take the food out, stare at it for a few minutes. if it doesn't move, it's still good. method 2: open the fridge and yell "BOOO!!!". anything that doesn't run away in fear is still good. more seriously: keeping food edible requires proper storage conditions. as long as the bread is kept dry, it is good. if it starts to harden that is a good indicator that it was dry enough. even hard bread is still edible if soaked in liquid. but beware of humidity. mold is treacherous and initially invisible. once i see any bit of mold on a bread, then the whole loaf is lost. on the other hand, on jam or cheese i'll just cut the mold away generously and eat the rest. with cheese especially i expect that most of the mold is edible anyways. i still cut it away though, just to be safe. also, to help food keep fresh longer i don't buy sliced bread or cheese for example. the slices have more attack-surface and go bad faster. it's less of a difference for bread because mold can get through anyways, and slices will only dry up faster. with cheese and meat however, the smaller surface really helps to protect the inside.
- slavik81 7y agoThere was nothing wrong with the smell or taste of the cheesecake that left me lying on the bathroom floor and vomitting.
- m-p-3 7y agoI usually keep stuff like bread for a little longer and I usually don't waste most of it. If I'm not sure I'll eat it in time I'll freeze it even though it won't be as soft.
- Proven 7y agoLet's just make this clear: food manufacturers didn't come up with that - governments did. Why don't you expose that truth.
- chewz 7y agoLast night I ate skyr (kind of yogurt) with expiry date at February. So far I am OK.
- benj111 7y agoWell yoghurt is already off milk.
- ValentineC 7y agoYoghurt is also acidic, making it less hospitable to mold, and moreso to lactobacilli and other similar bacteria that are generally safe to consume.
- tomatotomato37 7y agoI use eatbydate for all my perishables, which usually buys me another week or two on the refrigerated food. I also keep a labeler by the fridge, so I can relabel opened containers with the reduced date instead of trying to remember when that jar of alfredo was last used
- kwhitefoot 7y agoHere in Norway yoghurt pots have Tine's new slogan: Best før, men ikke dårlig etter. In English: Best before, but not bad after. Shops are also required to reduce the amount of food that they throw out which results in every supermarket having a chiller with almost out of date food marked down by 40 or 50 percent. I buy a lot of this.
- dominotw 7y agothey would get sued to oblivion in USA.
- jpatokal 7y agoAlmost out of date food, which is commoly sold at a discount in the US as well.
- zip6 7y agoI think they were referring to saying that a product is "not bad after" it's expiration date.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoA vendor could be sued for that in the US, but not a manufacturer. Expiration dates have no legal meaning for manufacturers. (A manufacturer actually was sued when, after encountering production issues, they recovered by simply relabeling the expiration dates on existing product. But the manufacturer won that suit decisively.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kwhitefoot 7y agoLabelling here, Norway, distinguishes between a 'best before' (best før), and a 'last edible date' (siste forbruksdato). The second typically appears only on fresh produce, such as a sliced ham, that becomes dangerous as it gets older, in contrast to products like milk, yoghurt, vegetables, etc., which typically simply decline in quality but are not dangerous even weeks or even months past the best before date.
- grawprog 7y agoOne of the perks I remember from working in a grocery store many years ago was free pickings of stuff that was going to be thrown out that was past the expiry. Got a lot of free food. Never got sick or had any ill effects once.
- londons_explore 7y agoBut is a small chance of dying from eating toxic bacteria worth it? Best before dates act like a 'hard cutoff', but the reality is the risk of eating food is typically an exponential increasing from the time it was made. It just starts from a very low value. Just a single gone-off meal can kill you, so you can't try all that many times and hope to find the limit of survivability.
- neiman 7y agoWhere is this number, "1 percent" taken from?
- jpatokal 7y agoGenuine question: are there any foods that go bad in such a way that you can't see, taste or smell it, but it can kill you anyway? (Emphasis on "go bad": things like listeria were there from the start.)
- DanBC 7y agoWhy are you excluding things like listeria or campylobacter? They were there from the start, but the USE BY date takes into account common pathogens and how they multiply in correct household storage.
- onion2k 7y agoIf you have a condition that means you'll react very badly to something that would most other people nothing more than an upset stomach, yes. For example, if your immune system is already compromised (from HIV, cancer, etc) something as simple as mild botulism can kill you. About 3000 people die from food poisoning every year in the US.
- neiman 7y agoDumpster diving is a way to both mitigate it and increase social justice. But the problem is that many big stores lock their garbage bins in an almost evil decision.
- derefr 7y agoNo, the problem is that people can sue (and win!) if they eat food from a company’s garbage bins and then get sick. Remove the liability, and you remove the motive to protect against said liability at the expense of the commons.
- neiman 7y agoHmm, I can't find (in one minute searching, busy, sorry) someone winning such a case.. I find it a bit strange. First, because many people do dumpster diving. Second, because it is mostly the big companies locking their bins, so why do the smaller ones don't if it's risky?
- avar 7y agoWhy don't stores offer work the expiration of goods into the price? E.g. a 5% discount on things 25% into their expiry, 10% for 75% etc. It's a common technique to pay staff to stock shelves in such a way that the goods about to expire are at the front, savvy customers will dig at the back to get the new stock. Right now there's no price incentive not to do that.
- pizza234 7y agoThey can, and some (at least one) do - I guess it'a management choice. At a grocery shop where I usually purchase groceries, on the expiry day, some products will have a 15% (or so) discount. I don't remember seeing this in other shops though, or rarely.
- jobigoud 7y agoOrganic stores I go to in France do that for some products. 25% off during the last few days. Big sticker with "Short expiration date" written on it. I think they can't legally sell it if it's past the due date though.
- zip6 7y agoIn the UK, some supermarkets do this. At my nearest supermarket, they can have very large discounts (maybe 75% or more) when an item's expiry date is today, and occasionally they do increase the discount over time like you suggested. Each time they change the price, they put a sticker with the new price and barcode over the old one, on every discounted item. The employee time required to do this is non-trivial. I imagine that in some places, stores would decide that it's not worth the effort, since a discount might not increase sales enough to match the reduced profit per item (especially in affluent areas where customers can easily afford the full-price item, and maybe turn their noses up at items near their expiration date).
- towb 7y agoI just bought some fancy chocolate for almost nothing the other day. Best before was end of january but it tasted very good! If I didn't know old chocolate goes white I might have throw it away.
- ValentineC 7y ago> If I didn't know old chocolate goes white I might have throw it away. It's called a bloom: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/36380/test-if-whitish-chocolate-has-bloom-or-is-spoiled https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/36380/test-if-wh...
- towb 7y agoGood to know! Things that has gone bad usually doesn't taste that great either so that's a good way to find out!
- Merrill 7y agoOn youtube there are plenty of videos of people eating old military rations. The oldest is from the Boer War. But here is "1942 WW2 US Army Field Ration C B Unit MRE Taste Test Vintage Meal Ready to Eat Oldest Food Review" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8f5Kj_CrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8f5Kj_CrY