Date labels on food packaging sow consumer confusion and waste

Plenty of nicer resturants have fast lunch menus. The problem is that people take the growing, nutrition and preperation of food for granted.

>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.

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!

> 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.

Start checking out your local grocery stores. In addition to selling, well, groceries, most of them will have a deli section and a salad bar. Salad bars in grocery stores typically get charged by the pound, so you can pick and choose exactly what you're getting. Most grocery stores in the US will also have already-cooked rotisserie chickens, sides available by weight, and other precooked options. Most large grocery stores in the US basically have a fully stocked cafeteria in them.

As long as you consider surviving and having your children supported financially to be worthless, yes, the labor was free.

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.

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.

I just opened a jar of curry sauce with an expiry date of 2018. I get it, the manufacturer doesn't want to deal with any potential liability, but otherwise this sauce is perfectly fine even when expired for over a year. Throwing food away just because the date says so, has always seemed crazy to me.

Some of it is that people want fresh fruits and vegetables to be available. They buy these things fully intending to cook with them, or have their kids eat them, in the next few days/week, but then life happens, other things come up, and they sit out of sight in the fridge until they go bad.

So this happens to me. I think I’ll be cooking s bunch of things, but then I’m in a crunch and don’t have as much time as I thought so I whip up quicker options. That means that okra, eggplant or whatever it was I though I was going to make doesn’t and I’m making something else. When I look after the middle of the week I might have a couple of these items piled up, in addition to the things I already had planned to cook, so I’m left with more things than I can cook and by the time I might get to them, they’re past their useful date.

I feel like car culture and suburbs create some of this.

When I used to spend time in the suburbs I witnessed people filling large cars with groceries to last for weeks. It is hard to estimate in advance what you will actually use working that way.

I prefer to live walking distance from grocers and go every day to buy a small amount of ingredients. I often still end up with leftovers, but I am pretty conscientious about using them before they go bad and before buying more.

You have to really be careful not to buy too much in bulk or too far in advance.

I live alone I can rarely can get perishable items in small enough quantities that I can use them before they spoil. After throwing such items a few times I have almost stopped trying to cook anything as it is cheaper to buy ready made meals plus I don't have to do the dishes after.

> Are people regularly buying far more than they can consume?

I think often, the answer is a resounding "yes". In the UK there was a major push a few years ago to get rid of BOGOF deals on food as it often just led to more food waste.

I've not really seen much tangible change from that, but supermarkets are competing so much on "deals" that it's often better value to buy more than you need than trying to buy "enough".

> Are people regularly buying far more than they can consume?

Yes, and it's not limited to food. It's the same phenomenon as someone buying too many games on Steam or buying more books than they can read.

You are right in that labelling won't solve the fundamental issue, even if it could solve some of it: for instance making it more clear at purchase time how fast a product will degenerate could help lower impulse purchase. But then it will lower sales as well, we'd need regulation otherwise the key players won't buy in.

At some point I wonder if a model close to subscription to food services would work, in the same way Netflix doesn't make you buy thousands of movies you won't watch. If fixing our culture doesn't work.

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

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're buying a prepackaged meal on the way home then you're likely spending one of order of magnitude more than your parents. They could literally be using half their fridge food for target practice and still be spending less than you.

I now fall back on HN's common knowledge about Electron to declare that you are being bad and should immediately seek to maximize the use of the shared storage areas in your refrigerator.

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

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.

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).