12 ms·

Date labels on food packaging sow consumer confusion and waste

99 points by Reedx 7y ago

Etheryte 7y ago
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.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  "cut" =/= "eliminate" If I "cut" someone's pay, they get a "pay cut" or, in other words, their pay goes down. They don't lose their entire wage.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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".
- jessaustin 7y ago
  They also seem to be ignoring the possibility that the current date indicators take the form they take because the firm that packaged that food has decided they make the most money that with this form of date indicator. Sure, there could be regulations governing this, but like all regulations they'll be written by the firms they regulate.
esotericn 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    I guess. I think it depends a lot on what you buy. I pretty much have fresh stuff that would go stale within weeks, and stable stuff that has effectively infinite lifespan. I don't find it hard to track the fresh stuff. It's quite possible that my shelf stable items build up forever and so will eventually get wasted in 10 years or something though :P
Proven 7y ago
You know the world is doomed when even the WSJ thinks solutions lie in more government regulation.
userbinator 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    ...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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
mjevans 7y ago
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.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  Plenty of nicer resturants have fast lunch menus. The problem is that people take the growing, nutrition and preperation of food for granted.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
  >In the old days, long before I was born, about 50% of the population was conscripted as "free" labor That could be anywhere up until 2019 or later.
- curuinor 7y ago
  The problem is density. The hawker stalls in Singapore are exactly this (pojangmachas and cafeteria dealios in Seoul, hawkers in Hong Kong), but they get to have it and your suburb doesn't because they have enough soulless 50 story apartments. Ask for a 50 story soulless concrete apartment in your neighborhood today!
Havoc 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > 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 7y ago
      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.
egypturnash 7y ago
I feel like the uses of labels they are discussing might be served by considering a “dispose of after” or “safe until” date.
- cwyers 7y ago
  Manufacturers don't want to put "safe until" on anything because there are a lot of things that can go wrong with an agricultural product and you don't want to provide a firm safety guarantee. The thing is, most labels that I see have _sell by_ dates. They're intended for grocery stores, not consumers. But people treat them as _use by_ dates. Which is just awful.
- m_eiman 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    One of the British supermarkets does the same thing (can't remember which).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
gorpomon 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Food pathogens don't produce smells or visual indicators as a rule. The sniff test is about food quality, not safety.
alexashka 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
stretchwithme 7y ago
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.
sans-serif 7y ago
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 7y ago
  The goal is to encourage people _not_ to throw away perfectly safe food.
kazinator 7y ago
"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 7y ago
  In some stores the items nearing the best by date are slapped with a 20% discount sticker.
pontifier 7y ago
Why aren't irradiated foods more prevalent? I NEVER buy strawberries because they are ALWAYS moldy straight from the store.
marketingzet 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

99 points by Reedx 7y ago

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.

Ensorceled 7y ago
"cut" =/= "eliminate" If I "cut" someone's pay, they get a "pay cut" or, in other words, their pay goes down. They don't lose their entire wage.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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".
jessaustin 7y ago
They also seem to be ignoring the possibility that the current date indicators take the form they take because the firm that packaged that food has decided they make the most money that with this form of date indicator. Sure, there could be regulations governing this, but like all regulations they'll be written by the firms they regulate.

esotericn 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- esotericn 7y ago
  I guess. I think it depends a lot on what you buy. I pretty much have fresh stuff that would go stale within weeks, and stable stuff that has effectively infinite lifespan. I don't find it hard to track the fresh stuff. It's quite possible that my shelf stable items build up forever and so will eventually get wasted in 10 years or something though :P

Proven 7y ago

You know the world is doomed when even the WSJ thinks solutions lie in more government regulation.

userbinator 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  ...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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.

mjevans 7y ago

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.

whenchamenia 7y ago
Plenty of nicer resturants have fast lunch menus. The problem is that people take the growing, nutrition and preperation of food for granted.
phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
>In the old days, long before I was born, about 50% of the population was conscripted as "free" labor That could be anywhere up until 2019 or later.
curuinor 7y ago
The problem is density. The hawker stalls in Singapore are exactly this (pojangmachas and cafeteria dealios in Seoul, hawkers in Hong Kong), but they get to have it and your suburb doesn't because they have enough soulless 50 story apartments. Ask for a 50 story soulless concrete apartment in your neighborhood today!

Havoc 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    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.

egypturnash 7y ago

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

cwyers 7y ago
Manufacturers don't want to put "safe until" on anything because there are a lot of things that can go wrong with an agricultural product and you don't want to provide a firm safety guarantee. The thing is, most labels that I see have _sell by_ dates. They're intended for grocery stores, not consumers. But people treat them as _use by_ dates. Which is just awful.
m_eiman 7y ago
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 7y ago
  One of the British supermarkets does the same thing (can't remember which).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

gorpomon 7y ago

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 7y ago
Food pathogens don't produce smells or visual indicators as a rule. The sniff test is about food quality, not safety.

alexashka 7y ago

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 7y ago
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).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

stretchwithme 7y ago

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.

sans-serif 7y ago

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 7y ago
The goal is to encourage people _not_ to throw away perfectly safe food.

kazinator 7y ago

"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 7y ago
In some stores the items nearing the best by date are slapped with a 20% discount sticker.

pontifier 7y ago

Why aren't irradiated foods more prevalent? I NEVER buy strawberries because they are ALWAYS moldy straight from the store.

marketingzet 7y ago

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deleted 7y ago

[deleted]