Food labels and the lies they tell us about ‘best before’ expiration dates (2021)
vox.com
vox.com
If there are two items on the shelf X and Y, such that (< (best-before X) (best-before Y)), then you know X is the older item.
A jar of peanut butter that is best before January 2025 is one month older than one that is February 2025. Therefore, of course, you want to grab the latter one.
Whether it's actually good until February 2025 is just someone's opinion.
Furthermore, if you know that X is a month older than Y, then you know something else: X is at least a month old, today. If you buy the January 2025 jar of peanut butter, you're getting something that was already around for a month when the February 2025 jar was just made, assuming they keep the best before offset the same between runs. And then add the time it took for the jars to arrive to that store shelf.
I would much rather see "date packaged" on every product.
For instance, roasted coffee beans are not very good past only two or three weeks, but not in a way that you would get sick from consuming them. (You can keep them in the freezer to keep the flavor a bit longer.) The exact roast date is important, which they often don't want you to know, substituting a fictitious best before date which includes a generous margin regarding how long it's going to sit in warehouses and on store shelves.
Expresso > 14 days from roast
Cheers
I don't follow you. In a few weeks I'll have eaten it all, I don't even look at the BBE on things like peanut butter.
I'm of the opinion that fresher is fresher.
What's my incentive for taking the older stuff, if it's not discounted?
Only this one: saving a few seconds by not looking.
If everyone optimizes for taking the ‘fresher’ product, the older one will sit on the shelf and eventually the store will throw it out.
if you want fresh, you shop on the outer walls of the super market. anything on the interior aisles is not fresh. I wish it were a thing that as you continued to the innermost sections the "food" became more processed, and instead of aisles, it was just a spiral to that point.
The butcher/cheese/fish section can be anywhere, it depends on the shop.
Really, fresh peanut butter would really just be blended fresh peanuts until it reaches the consistency you want. That's a lot easier to do than making your own salad dressing.
Still, now I wonder what exactly would be "fresh" peanut?
Some people do the opposite, when they buy something they choose the less value for their money (when it is negligible), if it maximizes the total value for the society.
That incurs the opportunity cost of caring and checking labels for a "pretty negligible" marginal win. Fuck that.
But I sure do for milk, eggs, yogurt, certain cheeses.
It directly affects whether I might have to toss the last third of the milk by the time I get around to drinking it. Or whether the cheese will be growing mold before I finish it.
Between two products with different best before dates I would just go and get a product that listed actual manufacturing date :)
But it doesn't even have to be stored improperly. If you see that this loaf is made two days ago, you will go and find a better place with fresher bread with fewer preservatives or whatever. Manufacturers and sellers obviously don't like it though. So they present you a choice between best before 1 or 2 days from now. Good eh? If you see two loaves with 1 day best-before difference, you'll go for the one with lower date and calmly go home eat your stale bread.
Or you learn to simply ignore the best before and buy bread where you know manufacturing date.
Of course if you are in a third world country likely no one audits factories for compliance and the manufacturing date is also pulled out of someone's ass.
This works the other way too: if you have information about the aging of the product because you tried it out one time, then you can pretty much just ignore what the manufacturer says.
Just because they appear authority-like does not make their opinion more valid.
Everything else is up to you
...it's not there already in the US? Over here, there is always a "production date" on the packaging, and then additionally it's either a "best before" date, or a "shelf life" time. But to put just a best-before date without the production date?.. That's insane. Why even omit that?
Advantages: a fancy fact, satisfies your curiosity
Disadvantages: you can mistake it for the expiration date, especially if that gets less visible for some reasonEspecially if they needed to also include the origination dates of each ingredient, recursively. E.g. The corn was been stored for 10 years in a silo, and this specific box of corn meal was in a warehouse for a quarter of a year. An extreme example, but there was a time when our country had too much corn in storage, which is why the public school lunch program and corn ethanol became programs to use all this extra corn. Not to mention corn syrups.
Only if you've never knew that before? I mean, I guess that's true: I know that e.g. cereals and past can go for years if store properly but if you never knew that, it may shock you. But if for you whole life you've seen labels "Shelf time: 18 months" on various foodstuffs, that's just the piece of general ambient knowledge.
> if they needed to also include the origination dates of each ingredient, recursively
Well, this is ridiculous, so they are not required to do that although, of course, there are (self-)regulations on how old can the ingredients be for the manufactirers to be able to claim the shelf-life they want to claim.
You can't. There is either one date, and then it's the production date (because it's required), or there are two dates, right next to each other, in which case the later one is the expiration date, and so the shelf life is written somewhere else on the packaging.
For instance. Packaged juice has 1 year shelf life. Pasta has it in the range from 1 to 2 years. Sausages have 1 to 3 months, depending on the exact kind. Some sweet milk deserts have one week. Is this just a fancy fact, or does it give you a hint that if something can survive for 2 years, it may as well be good for 2 years and 2 months while something that has shelf-life of a week probably won't survive for 2 weeks? I think it's the latter, but YMMV of course.
The store has full control over their algorithm for avoiding waste, and full control over what they put onto the shelf. They have all the tools for solving the problem, even in the face of some shoppers going for the newest date.
For something like coffee with one ingredient, it’s obvious. That’s why a lot of single-ingredient products like coffee or lettuce already have a packaged-on date.
I'd rather see an expiry date plus some indicator that after the expiry date how fast would it spoil, or what changes it will go through, if ever.
Is t that that what best before means? The date until when you can expect the food not to change considerably.
At least in Europe we sometimes have a “do not consume after” which is when the product is expected to go bad, not just off.
Sometimes yes but only on products known to spoil quickly and become dangerous to your health. But still even most dairy has best before and not to be consumed by.
If you opened the package of some fresh Colby, and the best by date is 3 months in the future (so it's been open for 3 months), you're going to have to trim a lot of mold off of it and it probably won't even taste that great anymore.
Really it would be more accurate to say: best before X time after opening or X time after purchasing, whichever is first.
But even then: if someone buys the sharp because they like it, they'll very possibly like it more as it ages to extra sharp, even though it passes the best by date.
Only if they're the same brand. Some brands have different shorter best before dates, within what's permissible, than others.
Does anyone actually do this for real? In the overwhelming majority of cases it's extremely straightforward to determine if the food is safe to eat empirically. Only in a couple highly specific cases do you need to be conservative about eating old food (meat products and cooked rice are the two I worry most about, and I don't eat much meat so it's really just the latter). If it smells bad or tastes bad: don't eat it. If you can cut off or pull off the parts that are bad, but the rest is good: you're fine. Humans can (and have) survive and thrive on a shocking variety of food items and qualities, this level of omnivory is one of our biggest evolutionary advantages. I don't even look at the expiration date unless I'm already concerned that the food might be spoiled. Am I just weird? I thought everyone did this.
Life seems easier if you have the ability to put blinders on and never question why?
(it was just "sweating" the salts and tasted amazing)
Drives me fucking insane. I've never thrown out food that isn't rancid/moldy.
She threw out salt because it was past the "best by" date. Mind you, that salt has spent millions, possibly billions, of years in the ground. I asked why. She said, if the manufacturer says that, why would they lie?
I don't often find myself reaching out for facepalm memes or "SMDH", but I sure did then. I just said okay, but don't ever throw out salt again.
A best by date implies it is stored properly even then there’s a difference in taste/quality before and after the best by date. Which is not true for salt.
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...
So there you go. Also, if you look at context, the poster I replied to asserted that salt clumping was not a change in quality (hence the form of my reply).
Salt can spoil due to humidity if not properly stored within a day, or may never spoil, ever, if stored properly. That kind of spoilage has nothing do to with age and hence my issue with a best by date for salt.
Food waste is really, really offensive to me. I probably take it a little too personally and too seriously. (Wasting meat is particularly galling to me, what w/ the likely terrible life the animal had making its way to your table.)
My tip is to only keep a half dozen or so slices fresh and freeze the rest. Frozen toast tastes just fine.
Of course I then keep it warm in my rice maker for 24 hours, but supposedly that's safe in this Zojirushi.
You need to keep your rice cold (<7 °C) or hot (>63 °C) enough for the spores not to develop. Letting your rice cool off naturally in a pot is also leaving it at the wrong temperatures for a longer time than if you rapidly cool it off.
Throwing away room temperature rice after an hour or two has nothing to do with safety.
That turns out to be wrong according to the FDA website. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/special-features/dont-be-tempted-u...
Either way, the tylenol in my cabinet expired in 2014 and I'm doing fine.
After enough such annoyances, I have started consistently throwing out expired Ibuprofen.
It does try to suggest that "there could be bacteria growth", but the article hedges and seems like it barely believes that itself. I'm sure some of the syrups could grow bacteria possibly.
A few like tetracyclines can become dangerous, apparently that's caused Fanconi syndrome and other kidney problems in a few cases. But that drug is the exception rather than the norm, but since I used to keep doxycycline around for treating Lyme I made sure it was stored in a cool/dry area and never got too far past the expired date.
Aspirin is a pretty easy one to tell if it's past its prime, it'll smell like vinegar as it decays into acetic acid. This falls into the 'loses its potency' category where the thing it decays into isn't harmful.
When you need to boil down master level chemistry knowledge to one sentence, it is very practical to be conservative and just say “dont use it after exp. It might be dangerous”. (Because, some of them will be dangerous)
I’ve never needed a seat belt or bike helmet, but I still use both.
Maintaining proper temperature of cooked food is part of basic food safety. Right up there with having people that prepare food wash their hands. Basic food safety.
So no, a random anecdote does not prove the opposite. I don’t want to be snarky, but I can’t believe people are implying that basic food safety guidelines are disproven.
Edit to add: from the same CDC link, 128,000 people in the US are hospitalized from food borne illness and 3,000 die. I’m fine with someone choosing to ignore this for their own food. But please don’t make it sound like there’s no risk.
I’ve drank the tap water in India, eaten fish that’s just been sitting in a pan on my stovetop for a day, cooked and eaten expired slimy chicken (admittedly more than a few times), among many other transgressions, and I’ve never felt sick.
Whatever few organisms and their toxins that may grow if I leave leftovers out an hour too long has so far been easy mode for whatever acid bath flows through my body so I’m not going to throw away food needlessly.
(P.S. If I cook for someone else, I have much more stringent food safety standards. Also despite my transgressions, I do usually cook non-expired high quality food.)
Although perhaps in warmer climates it might be an issue.
This is in hot humid weather.
I do. How am I supposed to know if the food is still good? Maybe I can't smell the problem. I trust the experts to put appropriate labels on things.
taken to the extreme, trusting the experts to label things properly results in absurdities like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40324991
people have been detecting unsafe foods by smell for thousands of times longer than they've been people. (and yet foodborne infection remains a leading cause of death.)
I don't. For most foods, it's really obvious when they've become unsafe to eat. For those where it's not so obvious, my policy is "if I can't remember how long it's been in there, I'm tossing it."
I can't remember the last time I actually looked at a date printed on the packaging. I've found those dates to be meaningless.
https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Does-mayonnaise-cause-foodbor...
also supermarket mayo is labeled as good for months, but salmonella (the usual culprit) can grow in hours. so the sell-by date wouldn't protect you there
Isn't this untrue for spores and mold? I'm not making the claim, I'm genuinely unsure and remember stern warnings that unseen spores and mold are a threat with moldy bread and fruits.
It drives me nuts, but I have a lot of friends who will buy a bunch of bananas, let them go brown (not rot), throw them out, and then buy more bananas. Or throw out all of my store-bought kimchi, which makes no sense.
This is an absurd assertion that fails to reflect the reality of food storage in refrigerators.
But what about fresh fish and meat? What about salad drenched in vinaigrette? What about broth? What about sauces? What about pickles? I’ve had stuff for years in the fridge it still looks good.
But 24 hours is fine. I just got some food poisoning from eating 5 or 6 day old rice a few times and was surprised it went bad in under a week.
But there is no problem if you follow good food safety practices -- everybody puts the lid back on the pot after they've served themselves, and any leftover goes in the fridge within 4 hours of cooking.
I’ve never met a single person who doesn’t know this.
I imagine not everyone has a blast chiller at home. Does one leave it to cool off naturally, and in what kind of container? Perhaps overnight?
During this process, the rice can take hours to go from 90°C to room temp, and it is during this process that the toxins are created. It might be too late when you put it in the fridge.
Cooling off needs ro be done as quickly as possible by spreading the rice, for instance.
It is not necessarily the lack of basic understanding of biology that causes people to get sick and therefore many to throw away good rice, but the incomplete understanding of the cooking process.
When you get a box of cold rice, there is no way of smelling how it has been cooled and if it is toxic or not.
That said, we eat few of-the-shelf products and cook a lot. Leftovers don't have dates! (But they spoil faster, because they don't have conservatives in them.)
So no, you are not weird, but this people really exist, and I wouldn't wonder if they are the majority.
There's a river of bananas coming from Ecuador to the US, and that river gets broken up into various tributaries which get smaller and smaller until the dribble of bananas ends up at your local store.
And then they sell for .68/lb.
Anything that makes those things last longer is something everyone wants.
In fact, in the case of bananas that variety (Cavendish) is chosen because it lasts longer. There are plenty of produce that aren't shippable because they spoil - like Hood Strawberries, which only last for a few days and are only available locally.
That's two examples, but really - the idea that producers change the expiration date is patently ridiculous, at least in the US.
Frozen food and canned goods probably never expire.
But things do break down. As a sort of ridiculous example, soda doesn't last forever for sure. And if it's in the sun or not refrigerated it gets weird.
They do, just much slower.
Where we figured out manufacturing well enough, but hadn't gone fully synthetic with liners, overly minimized wall thickness, etc. Probably packaging contamination issues as well.
I've had more (young) cans rupture in the last decade than any time before, even as they're stored next to much older ones.
We're doing the same thing right now with plastic - drink bottles now weak thin and brittle vs the relatively strong/ ductile stuff of 10-15yrs ago.
Yes, you should recycle, but we all know that not everyone does.
Metal is at least mostly recoverable energy. The footprint of the contents lost is not.
And ironically the lighter plastic packaging makes it more likely to be trashed and not reused, or even attempted to be recycled. (Reuse is 1-2 magnitudes more efficient than recycling.)
It should be, but how much of that is actually recycled vs. how much ends up in a landfill.
Marginal savings is meaningless if the resulting product is worthless.
On top of that- 99% of people who find a ruptured can with black ooze are trashing it.
And the other 1% are spending more energy/resources to clean a contaminated container than the recycling will save.
(Washing things is surprisingly expensive in terms of energy/resources. Often worth it for reuse, but not recycling.)
Now you're essentially comparing mpg on a trip to no where.
you are likely to go bankrupy tho
The manufacture has an interest in delivering it undamaged, but less in storage or handling or longevity.
They used to overshoot to ensure hitting the goal they car about.
It's probably efficient for them. They draw the system boundary after delivery.
Because that doesn't necessarily make the full Life Cycle of the container and contents efficient as its actually used.
It's similar to 'water saving' toilets. The manufacture sells a product with gal/flush, not gal/use.
Real world use differs from nominal, and interests aren't always aligned, especially if regulatory bodies are involved.
But the point is- the number is different depending on if you're the manufacturer, retailer, consumer, or recycling/ waste agency.
Maximizing one parties efficiency doesn't mean an increase in net efficiency as viewed by others.
https://www.joannasimon.com/post/lightly-does-it-reducing-bo...
But also from big picture pollution/environmental and even carbon perspectives.
then use your vacuum sealer.
custom, roll yer own, jacklinks rule, esp. caribou
I've had a few occasions where someone cleared out cabinets in their kitchen, and gave contents away. General findings:
Dry stuff (pasta, cookies, rice, beans, spices, etc): fine for years (if not a decade+) past its best-before date.
Canned food: if hermetic seal is intact, it's edible. Personal record: ~25y old fruit cocktail. Physical structure was poor and taste was bland, but it was edible.
For fresh foods like meat, dairy, vegetables etc: look, feel & sniff. It's almost always obvious when it's gone bad.
I tried some 10 year old saffron kept in a corked vial, and it really didn't do much. I basically had to use the whole thing to get any yellow out of it, probably $20 worth.
Definitely not a universal truth. Canned food can develop botulism, you do not want to mess with it. Any cans that are bulged or show signs of swelling should be discarded - don't even risk opening them.
There are guys on YouTube who explore old army rations (which were basically all canned food prior to the 1980s), and when they decide to open a bulged can "for science" they will often literally break out a gas mask. That said, it's also not terribly uncommon for them to find rations dating back to WW2 and older that are still partially edible.
I don't think that has much to do with age though. Sometimes canning is done wrong.
For some reason, banana pricing is hyper competitive in Canada. We pay CAD$0.56/lb or US$0.41/lb. (Yes, we sell them by lb not kg).
Even though I'm pretty frugal, one measure I currently practice is to usually not touch food past the best-by/sell-by/expiration date. (Though I'll take this article into consideration, going forward.)
Since I don't like waste, unopened shelf-stable food packages go to the "free stuff" shelves in my large apartment building, where they disappear very quickly.
(Other measures included getting thermometers for fridge and freezer, stopping using sponges and brushes to wash dishes because the occasional microwaving of them might not be enough, tracking dates that some kinds of food were opened/started, and paying attention to packaging dents/puffiness/unsealing.)
Three different things.
Best-by -> may not be particularly unsafe, but starts tasting gnarly as time goes on.
Sell-by -> the store should sell it by this date, but there's still a healthy margin of time left for you to keep it on your shelves and eat it.
Expiration -> They definitely don't want you to eat it after this date.
It's not completely useless for all things and it is some indication to at least pay more attention, but for the most part it's not really decisive.
When I realized that antisocial individuals might place toxic food there, I fell into panic.
For what I put on the free shelves, it's things nearing/at the best-by date, the year and month of that are usually marked prominently in handwritten Sharpie on the front of the package, and I don't put things there if they have any risky signs.
For example, recently, a packet of instant potatoes was nearing best-by date, but the packet seemed puffed up more than usual, like I think I would've noticed when I bought it. So I erred on the side of caution in throwing it away, rather than risk a neighbor, maybe unaware of the suspiciousness, getting sick.
Isn't really related to the expiration date.
Fun fact: most people's claims of food poisoning, particularly from restaurants, are actually Norovirus outbreaks that they get from touching common elements like door handles, and faucets in bathrooms, and so have nothing to do with the food. Actual food poisoning is much rarer than most people think.
I _love it_. As it's a rotating subset of what's in the shop, it gives me ideas on what to cook. I basically don't go in the other aisles anymore: I enter the shop, go straight straight to what I jokingly call "the rotten aisle" and make a menu for the next 3 to 5 days from what's available. Which means that yes, I'm often eating stuff a couple days past their official date, whatever.
It's made inflation bearable for me, the flip side being that I'm now unable to buy food anywhere else, the price shock is just too much, I'm like "no way I'm paying that for food" ^^".
But for packaged food, I have to wonder if the companies are as evil as some would wish.
I’ve definitely noticed chips/crackers start to taste rancid not long after the expiration date.
Preservatives and such do break down. Do we really want to be eating that? The manufacturers know the breakdown behavior and probably want to limit liability and negative experiences. Do safety studies take decomposing preservatives into account? (Questions, but suspect the answers are “No”)
It's the oil/fat used on or in the chips/crackers that goes rancid. That stuff oxidizes when the package is opened.
That's because they're not expiration dates, they're "best by" dates. They're the date at which the food starts to get less tasty in various ways, but that happens much, much sooner than when the food actually becomes unsafe to eat.
Manufacturers (generally) aren't lying about those dates. They really do line up with when the food is no longer as fresh-tasting as it can possibly be. At the same time, manufacturers don't mind even a little when people confuse them with expiration dates.
But it is a thing that isn't really necessary. With the vast majority of foodstuffs, it's really easy to tell whether or not they're safe to eat by observing, smelling, or tasting them.
If I know that I'm going to be eating something today or tomorrow then it doesn't matter, but otherwise choosing the longest dated food makes sense in order to know that it'll still be edible when I need it.
For a lot of foods it's an exponential process so something that has two days left and something that has ten can look and smell exactly the same.
A lot of stores here also do extreme discounts on things that expire that day or soon after. I've had so many dinners that were basically "oh, that thing's 80% off and I have to use it today. Fantastic."
A significant percentage of the world population is overweight. That implies not only that they're eating in a caloric surplus and could feasibly eat less than they do now forever, but that they could eat in a caloric deficit for a period of time and the result would benefit their health.
If production of food was temporarily low, people would not have to resort to eating foods that are expired, they could simply eat foods that are stored. The date on the can of soup in your pantry is two years from now, and you were going to eat it two years from now, but you can also eat it now.
Low harvests in one year can generally be addressed by the next year, for example by planting different crops this year that aren't susceptible to this year's problem, or planting crops in a larger amount of land area, possibly in another part of the world not experiencing the same yield issues.
The optimal amount of food waste is none.
An oven thermometer is another one I’ll recommend, as the temperature the oven claims it’s at is a function of where the sensors are. It’s not uncommon for it to be consistently off by 5-6%, which can really matter if you want the best results. Again, about $7 can solve that one too.
Interestingly even medicines don’t magically go bad the day after the expiration date.
But yeah, depends on how far past expiry you go.
IIRC, there is an inconsistent practice where grocers purposely destroy food they throw out to prevent freeganing.
I do wonder about how many years various condiments last, especially those that don't contain any preservatives. Have had ketchup turn very dark brown before.
At a minimum, barely expired food should be donated to nonprofits.
At worst, food unfit for human consumption should be composted. Disposing of it in landfills is a waste of waste.
I told my parents I finally ate that butter they gave me to take home with thanksgiving leftovers a few years ago and they looked at me like I was crazy and told me that butter expires.
Now I'm not so sure.
If you want to focus on fallacious expiration dates, the don't drag in the subject of food distributors wasting food out of commercial expedience. If you want to talk about people going hungry in a country of plenty, then don't talk about individually wasting food. If you want to talk about fresh water being squandered, don't do it in a pan-country context where most of that water is a renewable resource continually falling from the sky. If you want to riff on the ridiculousness of landfills, don't focus on one of their most decomposable ingredients.
All of these things are certainly problems to be discussed in their own right, but I don't see how lumping them together in one big ball does anything besides letting readers feel that they might do something about any of the larger problems.
https://i.imgur.com/hJ2OgWp.jpeg
Expires 2008. I'm subitizing about 12 tablets left in there, which is half. So this should easily last past 2040.
How does that work? Buoyancy is determined by the volume and mass (i.e. density) of the egg, and neither of them changes when the egg goes bad.
Even if the liqud->air change doesn't directly cause spoilage (?) the passage of time at least correlates with both.
Baffling argument. I’m sure producers would be much happier with indefinitely fresh products.
> Distributors fear legal threats if someone eats past-dated food and becomes ill (something that has rarely happened, but it’s still a looming threat).
That’s basically it. No scams or conspiracies needed.
As for the proposed solution about labeling standardization, I haven’t read the linked Harvard study in full, but I also haven’t managed to find the methodology by which they estimated the $1.8 billion benefit.
When I saw Spain's tomato fight event, it made feel very uneasy thinking how can they easily waste/play with perfectly good food.
Where does “wasted” food actually go? The article claims it ends up in landfills and plowed into fields, but doesn’t give examples or evidence to back that up.
If more research is done and it’s uncovered that wasted food does have some sort of afterlife, that’s a sign of the market at work. No doubt some unwanted food isn’t used in an optimal way, but if for example, some gets turned into feedlot and others into pet food, it radically changes the narrative.
A well-researched article about broadly what happens to “wasted food” would really help. But right now it’s not clear if there’s anything here to fix.
While I’m certainly a fan of frugality, I’m not going to lose sleep about over-hiring rice farmers in Ecuador.
It's not actually making lives of people in poor countries better when we waste more of what they produce. Food becoming more expansive just means middleman will have higher margin, and the poor people will starve more.
If we waste less, money lose their jobs and can't afford food.
You can bet that it's always the poor who pay the price.
In the limit - if food is abundant to the point of being worthless - nobody starves. If the food is so rare it's more expansive than gold - almost everybody starves.
And that starvation happened mostly in unindustrialized countries (meaning - 90%+ of population worked in agriculture).
It's possibly the subsidised US farmer who is going to loose money, not the poor Ecuadorian or African farmer..
They’re dates after which the manufacturer believes you won’t enjoy the product as much.
Other stores (even from the same company as mine) might instead have a compost heap and throw all old produce there and/or give a discount to those items.
Best-before dates are crucial for us since we need them to figure out how long a product has been sitting on the shelf (especially the items that can sit on the shelf for months) and especially for keeping the warehouse organized as we can days of orders stockpiled with 3+ different best-before dates, and it's important to always put out the oldest product otherwise the whole box can go bad.
Also, as a fun fact, since there are thousands of items, old bad produce can be often be missed. One time I found some prunes that had been past their best-before date for nearly a year.
Also, I've regularly witnessed items that go bad basically right as we get them (maybe 5 or so days before their best-before date) while other items can last a week or two after their best-before date just fine.
So yeah, for regular people, best-before dates are more like a suggestion that roughly tells you how old the item is and maybe the mean average time the item goes bad (depending on how it's regulated). If it's near the item is roughly near its best before, maybe just give it a close look and a sniff. If it looks and smells fine, it's probably fine.
I once bought a glass of jam in a store that was already past its best-before date. It was still perfectly good, especially for baking. If I had seen that before leaving the store, I might have tried to haggle down the price :)
Where I live, if you feed leftovers to your dog, that counts as food waste. As if the dog wouldn't have to eat something else? Peel a carrot, and the peel is food waste. WTF?
Such strict definitions are counterproductive, because we cannot judge the actual extent of the problem.
if the can is undamaged, the "best before" date has little to do with safety.
how the items were stored is likely more important.
ive eaten 7 year old canned seafood from pantry shelf, but i would probably use "sun meat" bulge, or corroded cans for bait.