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Comment by tech_ken | Hacker News Reader

> Every so often, I go through my refrigerator, check labels on the items, and throw out anything that’s a month, or a week, or maybe a few days past the date on the label

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.

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My parents own a small independent grocery store. My family ate a ton of "expired" food when I was growing-up because it made good economic sense. What you say is absolutely what we did-- throw out the items that really are bad (meat being the primary offender), cut off the bad parts of partially-rotten food, and eat the rest.

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.)

I will eat anything that isn't in obvious danger of killing me but my wife comes from a family that treats dates as gospel, that (in accordance with FDA guidance) at events will get stressed about food being left out for more than an hour, etc. Those people exist, and in fact they are everywhere.

This. Actually I'd ask your parent poster back: there are people that believe most people don't treat BB dates as "will turn bad exactly on this date"?

Well it literally is "best before". In my mind a reasonable consumer would read that as "still pretty good, and hopefully delicious after".

Reasonable consumers are like "common" sense ;)

Honestly, I am way more concerned about food being left out than sell-by/best by dates. The harm that can result from leaving food out is well-established. Sell-by dates? We're basically taking the manufacturer's word for it, as if they're somehow impartial here.

Yeah actually I’m with you on this. Not for everything, but there are definitely food items I won’t try to save after ex. putting them out for a party (like if a dairy based dip has been at room temp for more than 1-2 hours it’s not going back in my fridge).

Rice is one I pay close attention to. When I get takeout from my favorite Taiwanese restaurant, I usually throw away the rice they give me and cook my own (it's a bit of a drive back to my place).

Of course I then keep it warm in my rice maker for 24 hours, but supposedly that's safe in this Zojirushi.

Please ask them not to add rice if you plan to throw it away. Thanks :)

Yeah, I will. I actually had that thought when writing that post. If it helps, they provide rather small portions of rice.

that's unnecessarily wasteful

I agree. I will ask them to leave it off future to go orders.

What's the deal with rice? I come from a culture we eat a lot of rice. You can keep rice in the fridge for nearly a week. The only time I throw away rice is if it has visible fungus on it.

The problem is with cooked rice that hasn't been cooled off properly (or not kept hot enough). The heat-resistant spores of the Bacillus Cereus will then develop and the bacteria will proliferate and produce a heat-resistant toxin, which can hurt you even after reheating the leftover rice.

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.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7913059/

I never ever heard of rice poisoning and it is the most common takeaway dish.

Me neither until very recently, when a student died from it. Then it was all over the news for a week. (I'm pretty sure that is in the level of being struck by lightning.) It has even a name: fried rice syndrome.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/fried-rice-syndrome

Do you not like the texture or something?

Throwing away room temperature rice after an hour or two has nothing to do with safety.

Honestly, it's not the best rice, especially after sitting in a styrofoam box for the drive home.

Why? A Taiwanese restaurant is going to go through a lot of rice, so it seems unlikely they'll serve you anything that's been sitting around for ages, plus it's usually very obvious from the texture if it has been sitting around.

It's not the best rice, the portion is too small, and by the time I get home it's been sitting in a styrofoam box for a while. I should just ask them to leave it off.

I was strongly under the impression that medications with expiration dates do not become dangerous after their expiration, but they may be less effective.

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.

yeah, I haven't really thought twice about taking, say, ibuprofen that's 20 years expired. It's good for a laugh, that's about all the critical thought I put into the label.

In my experience, ibuprofen/advil in an unsealed bottle that's over a year past expiration date simply doesn't work well. You may need 2-3 pills of the expired stuff in a situation where 1 pill of unexpired would be sufficient. This makes it in practice hard to pick a dose which is safe but effective.

After enough such annoyances, I have started consistently throwing out expired Ibuprofen.

That article basically says the same - that they're less effective after a time (and if you're trying to save your life with them, less effective could mean deadly)

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.

> I was strongly under the impression that medications with expiration dates do not become dangerous after their expiration, but they may be less effective.

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.

if my reading of the shelf life extension program paper from 02006 is correct, doxycycline is especially good at surviving past its expiry date. maybe manufacturers are especially conservative about doxycycline expiration dates due to the toxicity risk? the paper didn't mention toxicity risk or safety at all

“Medication” is very big set of very different things.

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)

Meanwhile when I grew up we’d cover cooked leftovers, including meat, leave it out, and eat it the next day. I never got food poisoning.

Do you live in a cool climate, or maybe always had air conditioning? Some things will definitely go off if you leave them unrefrigerated for a day in a hot climate.

A cooked dish was sterilized. It won’t go bad for a day or three, depending on how often it is opened. Before refrigeration this was very common.

Sounds risky to me.

I’ve never needed a seat belt or bike helmet, but I still use both.

Doesn’t that prove the opposite though? One in a million+ meals might make you sick, that’s not risky

If that meal makes you deadly sick, yeah it's risky.

CDC estimates 48 million cases of foodborne illness per year in the US [0]. That works out to something like 1 case in 10,000 meals.

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.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/food-poisoning.html

Idk the risk is not remotely the same between two people.

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.)

Yeah, especially roast lamb / beef. You can easily leave those out probably a couple days and it'll be perfectly fine so long as it's covered away from insects and the cat / dog

Although perhaps in warmer climates it might be an issue.

Works great as long as you aren't in a hot climate. Out of curiosity I checked and I'm currently measuring 14 degrees C in my room. Haven't turned on the refrigerator since October.

In most south east asian household (Malaysia specifically since I lived there), they will leave the cooked leftover on the table below a fly protecting net and eat it up to the next day.

This is in hot humid weather.

> Does anyone actually do this for real?

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.

It was not until I was married that I found out mayo even had an expiry date. None of my roommates in the university days used enough to actually work through a jar. It somehow made it fridge to fridge through multiple leases.

Mayo is one of the foods where I would be antsy about dates. That is an extremely common cause of food poisoning

Source? I mean obviously be careful with homemade mayo made from fresh, uncooked egg, but the store bought stuff is pasteurized and seems pretty stable.

https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Does-mayonnaise-cause-foodbor...

Use by dates are only relevant until the product is opened. They usually then have a "consume within" time which is often relatively short.

not by itself generally. it's too salty and acidic, and the supermarket stuff is often full of edta to boot, so bacteria can't get iron, magnesium, or calcium. mayo diluted with boiled potato is another story

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

Even though I think my sense of smell and taste is fine, I have been accused on multiple occasions of eating food that was not good. In fact, my children have stopped asking me whether an item in the fridge is okay because they don't trust me :D

If I had a nickel for every time I have been asked by family to throw out awesome cheese because "it's moldy"...

(it was just "sweating" the salts and tasted amazing)

Never mind that unless the cheese is exceedingly moldy you can just cut off the mold and keep going. I'd be throwing out a right fortune in cheese if I threw it out at the first signs of mold.

>If you can cut off or pull off the parts that are bad, but the rest is good

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.

Yeah sorry should have been clear that I was thinking about a case where like one or two blueberries in the corner of the package have just started to mold, or where it's a non-mold problem (like maybe an apple bruise has made 1/3 of it mushy, I'll probably still eat the other half). Generally stuff that has a nontrivial amount of mold I'm not trying to save.

Mushy apples are fine. I wouldn't buy them like that. But picking up the half mushy apples that fell from the tree is how we got all our apple sauce made when I was a kid. Dirt cheap. Come to think of it. My mom still does this.

First, what you’re saying is not necessarily true. As you pointed out rice and meat are tough, but so are things like bread. If you spot mold you bet it’s everywhere even in the places you can’t see it. Anything spongy inside needs to be thrown if you spot mold.

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.

For all of my life, if a bit of the bread is mouldy I tear that bit off and eat the rest. I’ve never become ill from this.

I'd Google this if I were you.

Probably best to cut off a bit more than just the obviously bad part; mold tendrils can go deep.

Yeah I was going to say the same. Fungi species can grow real deep, large and invisible to our senses. I understand people ITT getting offended on throwing out food with parts rotten, but honestly if it's not an exception such as banana I will probably throw out the entire piece (like bread) if there is any part rot at all.

Bread is especially spongy, so I for sure throw that out the second it has a whiff of mold. More solid things like cheese though? mold doesn't seem to grow very deep on that.

Good point, yeah I should be clear that if like half my loaf of bread is moldy I'm chucking the whole thing; I'm only saving it if it's like a few slices at one end that are moldy. Probably would have been better to say that I cut off the part which is obviously good, leaving a healthy margin and tossing if in doubt.

White bread is actually super easy to colonize for mold, even a bit of mold is a near guarantee that the rest is moldy - just not with spores.

My tip is to only keep a half dozen or so slices fresh and freeze the rest. Frozen toast tastes just fine.

> 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.

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.

That's what they're saying, it mostly is possible to see, taste or smell if something is bad.

I have a pretty poor sense of smell and I've had terrible food poisoning a couple times in my life. If it's past expired I throw that shit out. I make sure to do a decent job meal planning to control waste.

probably people trusting experts about what to eat is how we got a worldwide pandemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome. the incentives of the experts are not always properly aligned; it was experts who formulated nestle's notorious ad campaigns to replace breast milk with formula, after all, and that sort of thinking wasn't limited to africa. nicols fox's 'spoiled' documents several late-20th-century shenanigans in the usa where expertise was deployed not to prevent foodborne illness but to evade blame for it by rendering it harder to trace

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 check the dates on orange juice containers, but only if there are two or more unopened in the fridge, in which case I want to open the oldest. Otherwise I don't check.

I like my orange juice fizzy, so I only start drinking it when the container starts expanding.

Guy who's about to invent wine be like

Wait till he finds out about prison hooch.

Don't forget to brush your teeth before drinking it to get all the flavours.

> In the overwhelming majority of cases it's extremely straightforward to determine if the food is safe

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.

That's 35 cents a week to pretend you care about eating healthy. You tell yourself you can't eat them today because they're too green. Then in a few days you can't eat them because there are spots. Too bad! I'll try again next week. I can see the reasoning.

Damn, this describes me too accurately haha. They're so cheap! How could I not at least try!? XD

I end up in this situation unintentionally, what I started doing is to peel and freeze them as they get overripe. Then you can use them for smoothies or banana bread some day in the future. Like in several months.

Yes, there are lots of people who do this. Type A personality from my personal experience lets the tail wag the dog at times and food has a schedule printed on it so it’s just an easy thing to do just follow the directions and schedule and fuck all context.

Life seems easier if you have the ability to put blinders on and never question why?

What is the issue with cooked rice?

Cooked rice goes bad pretty quickly even in the fridge and can make you pretty sick if you eat it.

This is not true.

Sure it’s true. Uncooked rice often contains the bacteria Bacillus cereus. These bacteria can form protective spores that survive the cooking process and if the rice is cooled slowly these bacteria spores can germinate, grow and produce a toxin that causes vomiting.

If you’ve eaten the dish known as fried rice, the rice used there has been cooked and then chilled for 24 hours. So while what you’re saying is true, the topic is complex.

Most web results I found say rice is good for 3-4 days in the fridge, but it’s safest if you cool it quickly after cooking.

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.

IIRC the issue is with cultures that leave rice out on the counter at room temperature, because of historical inertia from per-refrigeration times. In that case, it does support life like anything else moist and pH neutral.

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.

People don't understand that refrigeration stops the growth of toxic bacteria, and throw away perfectly good rice because they lack a basic understanding of biology.

Would you really say “stops”? Not “slows”? Things still do go bad in there, idk about bacteria though— but mold for sure.

> People don't understand that refrigeration stops the growth of toxic bacteria

I’ve never met a single person who doesn’t know this.

The issue is not refrigeration, but how you got to there: how is the hot rice cooled before putting it in the fridge.

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.

In all my experiences, rice cools off pretty fast and dries out pretty fast. It may be starchy and risk B. cereus but it really isn't the greatest medium for it unlike pasta covered in sauce.

Yes, I do that. But in my case it is mostly products that are months or even years after BBE. I think most waste we produce is from bread. Got a little better when we started baking ourselves.

My husband goes into the fridge and throws out random stuff without even reading the label or opening it saying "it's old."

Drives me fucking insane. I've never thrown out food that isn't rancid/moldy.

My mother-in-law cleaned our pantry. I didn't ask her to, but she was here for a week, and just did it.

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.

Salt has a best by date? WTF…

I’ve seen old kg packages of salt turn into a brick. I suppose the salt itself is still good, but you’re gonna have to grind it up

Doesn't that all depend on air humidity? How can the manufacturer account for that in a printed date?

They just slap a number on it. I mean, who throws away salt? My mother-in-law, that’s who. She is actually a lovely person and I enjoy her company (and you can eat off her floors), but that’s one of those tiny little things you just run into from time to time.

That is different issue. Anything can be spoiled by moisture, or other factors.

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.

Not being able to pour it anymore is a change in quality. One that plenty of people would complain about.

It’s not a change in safety, though. Government food regulations are and should be about safety. If it’s bad, well, that’s unfortunate for you, but I don’t want to live under a government that bans bland food.

In the US, best by dates (and other dates) are used by manufacturers to avoid quality disputes about old food. There are regulations that they have to be truthful, but they are not required (except on infant formula).

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).

You missed my point.

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.

It doesn’t spoil, it just has to be broken up again. The entire McIlhenny Tabasco company is based on doing something useful with the land atop their salt mines. I can assure you that southern Louisiana is wet.

I feel obligated to link to the 250 million year old salt expiring next year: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7stejt/this_250_milli...

If you're finding food that is past the expiration date on a regular basis, you're probably wasting money on stuff you rarely or never actually eat. It isn't a problem anybody should be running into.

> it isn't a problem anybody should be running into.

This is an absurd assertion that fails to reflect the reality of food storage in refrigerators.

Idk, I’m definitely guilty of it, a lot, but even I admit that it’s self-inflicted and I “should” just not buy so much food.

Every single person I know wastes food.

Every once in a while, some press or commercial tells me anything for me totally weird thing, like 'people forget to drink water' or 'people throw away all the is expired without checking it', I first think this is total bullshit, and then someone in my inner circle tells me the he does exactly this.

So no, you are not weird, but this people really exist, and I wouldn't wonder if they are the majority.

I do the same, but my wife looks at dates and follows them, and so do my kids.

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.)

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