Expired food: how best-before dates create a waste mountain
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Best før, men ikke dårlig etter.
Best before, but not bad after.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would expect bread consumed before the best before date not to be stale, if it was I would expect to be able to get my money back, I wouldn't expect the same after the best before.
One problem with food is that there are too many variables about how it's stored after it leaves the store. For example, bread can go stale if it's not stored in an airtight container.
The best before probably takes into account the worst case and is set low accordingly. I go to the effort to store bread appropriately so that lower bound is no longer particularly relevant to me.
Absolutely not, if you think bread going stale is relevant to the expiration date. (Which it isn't.)
If you leave bread exposed to the air, it will go stale almost immediately, long before a one-week expiration period has elapsed. The expiration date is obsolete as soon as you open the product.
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.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_...
This tells you if the food is rotting. It doesn't tell you if the food is safe to eat.
Most of these people probably got sick eating unspoiled food: https://www.fda.gov/food/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm103263...
You can't smell food poisoning!
You may well not come to lasting harm, but you could kill children or older people.
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.
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.
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.
I think they can't legally sell it if it's past the due date though.
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).
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.
They were there from the start, but the USE BY date takes into account common pathogens and how they multiply in correct household storage.
About 3000 people die from food poisoning every year in the US.
Personally I use use by dates (I don't really check best before dates) as a shopping tool, so I buy thing that will last the time required, then rely on my senses.
Canned goods have best before dates on for heavens sake, I'd happily eat a 10 year old can of X, assuming it's none bulging.
Cooked rice is the only thing I'm aware of that can kill you after cooking, whilst still appearing ok.
USE BY is product safety information. The risk increases after the use by date.
BEST BEFORE is product quality information. There's not much risk but the taste and nutrition will degrade over time.
Although it would be nice to have the time to check best befores and use bys of everything I put in my trolley, in practice its basically meat and milk, purely to check that they will last until I want to use them.
Worst case it'll make you sick..
A regular meal can kill you too.
It's one of the reasons why hot countries often have spicy, highly flavored foods. Before refrigeration people could use poor quality meat for longer by covering up the taste, and it didn't kill them because lots of spices have anti-bacterial qualities.
But yeah, it can be masked.
Not having decide if something has gone bad reduces decisions I have to make :)
You will be able to smell if food is rotting. USE BY dates aren't just about rotting though, they take into account commonly found bacteria in different food, and correct storage.
You won't be able to smell most types of food poisoning bacteria, and the risk of poisoning goes up after the use by date.
https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/best-before-and-use-b...
For example, flies circling round meat would make most people instinctively think twice before eating it. In most environments, they will appear within a few hours of the creature dying. In your fridge, the flies won't hatch, taking away a vital signal marking the age of the food.
Many things will keep for months or years after the best before date. One of the most ridiculous ones are eggs which will normally last months - yet have a mandated best before of 28 days.
"Use by" are the ones to take note of. Those are the perishables like milk or meat where the bacteria count matters. These are the ones that have been arrived at by food safety testing.
Even those are designed to be pessimistic enough to cope with the fact that a huge proportion of fridges are running several degrees higher than recommended, and people will leave things on the side for a few hours etc
The parent is probably talking about food that's not more than a few days past expiry, since they worked in a grocery store. The risk from not following a mostly-arbitrary date is not much higher if properly stored than say, eating improperly-stored food.
A student died eating pasta stored at room temperature for five days: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6638715/20-year-old...
Things might have turned out differently if it was stored in the fridge.
It's called a bloom: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/36380/test-if-wh...
But the problem is that many big stores lock their garbage bins in an almost evil decision.
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?