California bans sell-by dates
foodandwine.com
foodandwine.com
California first state to ban 'sell by' 'best before' label to reduce food waste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775298 - Oct 2024 (61 comments)
I'm pretty sure that was the only time I have ever been right when she and I disagreed about something kitchen-related, by the way.
I think the ban makes sense when you consider that CA still has a provision for a "best by" date. Some more education is still necessary, though. Certain foods can go months or years past their "best by" date and still be perfectly safe - even if they might taste a little funky.
Aren’t safety restrictions the “use by” date?
> Switching to language that either says “Best if Used By” or “Use By” will also help minimize ambiguity. The former will establish consistent wording for advising when an item is less fresh (but still okay to eat), while the latter designates food that should no longer be consumed due to safety concerns.
Exactly - people haven't been taught to actually look at the words before the date. They just look at the date, say "oh that was yesterday" and throw stuff away.
I guess I didn't make that perfectly clear in the parent comment - my wife didn't know that the difference in wording mattered, so she just ignored it.
I was buying eggs recently when I, as my mother taught me, opened the case and checked to see if any had cracked. The person beside me said "I hope you are buying those" as if me touching them somehow made them unsellable. People need to learn more about food.
Sometimes I think we've really failed ourselves regarding basic biology and education requirements.
I can imagine most eggs sold in the United States would be horrifying if not washed.
If a nestbox is the right size, it will only be used for laying eggs (and occasional brooding).
But if I keep the coop clean it’s not really a problem.
AFAIK, those laws are about eggs getting silently contaminated because their shells became porous during the wash.
But that one is a really nice side-effect.
What changed is that the USDA discovered how to wash eggs properly and so mandated the method by which eggs must be washed, while Europe went the complete opposite direction and decided to outlaw washing eggs (prior to sale) but encouraged/mandated that chickens get vaccinated for salmonella (which is not required in the U.S.).
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...
I find it endlessly amusing that Americans are both extremely worried about food safety and apparently completely unable to pass reasonable food safety law.
Once you refrigerate unwashed eggs, though, they need to stay refrigerated thereafter.
So they changed it to "best before <date> but not bad after" and have been regularly running campaigns reminding people.
[1]: https://www.prior.no/artikkel/datomerking-av-egg
[2]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/eggene-varer-_nesten_-evig-1.759...
I think that the show Kim's Convenience said it perfectly, myself. "See this date? It say 'best by'. After date - not best, but still pretty good."
Particularly if the sauce includes unstrained organic bits such as garlic or onions, or includes oils - botulism (odorless, tasteless) can be a non-zero risk.
At some point, that crusty $5 bottle of hot sauce you found in the back of the fridge should just get tossed out instead of taking the risk.
Tabasco in particular isn't just vinegar-based, it's nearly entirely vinegar. Its ingredients list is vinegar, salt and crushed peppers that are then strained before bottling. It is a very inhospitable environment for botulism - or anything else.
Many other types of hot sauces contain oils and/or are not strained of organic matter and/or contain blended organic matter. Such as all of your thicker or chunkier sauces for the most part[1] (which happen to be my favorites). Those should be kept in the fridge and you should discard after some time just to be on the safe side.
I might seem petty about this behavior, but such things are not isolated. This way of thinking colors one's reality.
I said, "oh, you have a Costco membership?"
"No," she said, "my ex used to."
"The guy you broke up with 2 years ago?"
I looked at the date on the mayonnaise. Expired 5 years earlier. She didn't use it very often.
Not wanting to offend her, hesitantly, I ate the tuna melt. And nothing happened. It was fine.
I'm not a mayo fan, so was a condiment for guests. Whoops.
Cooking food typically kills off any bacteria.
Suppose you have a piece of meat out on the counter for 12 hours. Then you put it in the oven and broil the heck out of it (say the whole thing gets to 190°F and zero of the bacteria in it survive). Is it hazardous?
Yes, it can be hazardous, because the compounds made by the bacteria while they were alive all day can themselves give you food poisoning even after you've sent the bacteria to a firy grave.
Disclaimer/note: I have zero idea about all the various specifics such as whether you're much safer depending if the left-out meat was cooked vs raw, what types of foods are risky or unlikely to harbor harmful bacteria, or how long it is probably safe at what temperature. I have only had food poisoning like 1-2 times, but it was awful so I just try not to do anything too careless.
They want to promote in-state business (dairy farmers).
Montana purposefully has short Sell-by diary dates, because it makes it prohibitive for an out-of-state dairy to transport their milk into Montana.
https://www.nrdc.org/bio/dana-gunders/how-montanas-sell-date...
m-w.com an act of deceiving or misrepresenting
dairy
This sounds perfectly sensible and uncontroversial?
From a company-who-abuses-best-by-dates-to-sell-more-product standpoint it's very controversial.
There will typically only be one date and it will have text specifying whether it is "Best Before End" for things that simply decline in quality such as milk and vegetables and "Use By" for things that go bad in ways that will be harmful such as meat.
The article says there is no mandates on any types of dates. So I imagine these dates serve some purpose, otherwise they wouldn't be there. Laws like this often sound like they're helping but since no one is forcing the hand of retailers, so I would be they end up increasing costs. Maybe not food waste per-se, but some costs that originally tipped the retailers to have these dates in the first place.
If I’m making a food product for sale at retail and I can mark it “sell by” some date, consumers get confused and think it’s no good after that date, the store that buys my food product will not want to keep it on the shelf because consumers won’t buy it.
The retailer has to discard the perfectly fine item and reorder from… me the food product producer and then I make more money.
I imagine the food retailers are happy about this and the food manufacturers are probably unhappy.
I haven't seen dated produce, but maybe it's hidden.
I have always been under the impression that the entire point of pre-packaging produce like avocados, apples, and garlic is to mix items that are bad which no one would buy in with some good items so you can still sell the bad ones.
This seems to have always been the case in California - where you can generally get good produce.
Though it'll get worse. The regime for imported fruit and veg is still in transition, with a lot of stuff that the UK was supposed to bring in in 2021 recently delayed til 2025.
Shelf space is valuable. Food that expires is inventory that’s not selling for some reason, or it wouldn’t be on the shelf long enough to expire. It’s taking up space that could instead be used for other inventory that does sell well. So even inventory that doesn’t expire at all will get put on the discount rack to get rid of it, or finally thrown out if doesn’t sell even at a cheap price.
The best way to avoid waste is to only buy food that actually sells, the quicker the better. Easier said than done, though.
Also, even greedy supermarket execs need to worry about their store’s reputation if they sell people food that doesn’t taste right too often.
So, no, not a lot of competition.
You really should look into grocery M&A's over the past few years. This is all easy to see if you care to _actually_ look.
This is a little misleading, since a lot of their product on their shelve isn't paid for until 60/90/180/365 days after receiving it, and generally suppliers set aside money to help cover shrinkage. And they'll often agree to take back unsold goods.
There's a reason that so many of the largest companies in the USA are/were retailers. Borrowing something worth $100, then selling it for $103 may be low margin, but it scales incredibly well.
It appears that it does not preclude tracking sell-by for internal inventory management purposes (such as with a handheld scanner already used in grocery stores for various purposes, or possibly some kind of opaque but human readable code), just to avoid customer confusion including it explicitly on the package.
Not only frustrating this then wastes my time and my money. Items do need expiry dates, sugar does not, fresh produce and vegetables do.
However, educating that your food isn't instantly bad when it's gone pass would encourage people to waste less food.
I make dinner on a day by day basis. What I mean is that I stop at the supermarket on the way home, buy what I need and then make dinner rather than stocking the ingredients. I find this method for me a good way to get out of the work mantra.
Knowing I can make dinner and then drink to it with a glass of wine. So to get home, find out that X vegetable has expired now means I have to find time to take it to the store or throw it out and waste my money nor have the ability to make what I planned.
If you order online, you can request a refund without much hassle but I don't do that.
this reminded me of the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer tries to return fruit: https://youtu.be/IgZkMRfnomI
I say, if you are buying bad fruit it is time to move on to a new grocer (and not a supermarket).
I am not sure I buy it for fruit/vegetables though, since those are often sold unpackaged and unlabelled already.
It's great! Now the supermarkets can blame us for waste.
Fortunately, every supermarket does still have labels that show a coded date - so that their staff can remove products that are too old.
If you search for the particular store online, you should be able to find their system.
I shop in Sainsbury's usually. Their system is pretty simple. A letter shows the month (A = January, B = February etc.) and two digits show the day of the month.
I was thinking a possible solution would be a simple numerical counter (e.g. days since 1 Jan 2000), which can't be easily decoded by eye, but allowed you to rank items easily by age.
If there's a date then frankly I don't want to waste brain cycles thinking if something in the fridge or freezer has gone bad, unless it's so obvious I don't have to think much about it. If it's past, out it goes. I have enough crap to worry about already.
If it means I waste money, that means I'm buying too much and that can be easily resolved.
Not removed. Reworded.
But, yes, I have relatives who will consider use by a hard deadline.
I don’t have time to find a source that supports this, but I understand that these dates also refer to the durability of the “food safe” container/packaging. Ever drink water from an unopened plastic bottle that has been stored for awhile? That taste is not from the water decaying or otherwise breaking down.
Of course you're right in the sense that when it comes to our general environment textiles produce far more environmental microplastics than most other sources. Particularly in our water systems.
Source?
What's "best by?" You need to write "do not eat after." Nobody needs to be explained what that means.
When safety is on the line, the goal can't only be "as few words as possible"
Yes, I'm serious and I say that as a fellow American. We are not literate.
So use as few words as possible and a date. Honestly we could probably do without the words, just the date.
Seriously: We hate reading. The fewer words the better.
Sure, but selecting the oldest groceries on the shelf is not a factor, as it's not your efficiency you're improving.
> filling in gaps where it doesn't matter.
If the store is arranging its stock orders incorrectly then they should fix that. They have a much better opportunity to have impacts here than your gap filling ever will.
Why don't they actually do this then? Because the 2% loss on waste can't be made up by the 5% additional cost of labor to "right size" the order perfectly every time.
Finally it's only waste because we don't manage these outputs correctly and have a single dumpster where all "garbage" goes. Food recycling and city compost programs could close the rest of the loop far more efficiently than any of this.
> Freshness differentials on shelves isn't worth it for me or the business.
No, it's just the entire rest of the supply chain.
Personally, I think everything should be labeled with both a sell by date, a best by date, and an expiration date, all right next to each other.
Why should it? It won't do you any harm. Just don't buy from suppliers who lie to you. But surely if it went sour before the Best before Date then the supplier has supplied goods that were not of merchantable quality and not in accordance with the implied contract and has failed to uphold their side of the contract.
But surely your complaint should be directed against the shop that sold it to you? I would expect the shop to either refund or replace the goods.
The valid until is related to food safety and is regulated by the federal sanitary authority for each product by a federal standard. The "freshest by" is something that consumers have to infer by themselves probably as a midpoint between those two dates.
Infant formula is required federally, so OK. Eggs are an oddly specific one, but I guess I can see it (although I'd wonder why some other products like milk, or meat might not be similarly required). But why beer??? Legit question--I don't drink so maybe it's obvious and I'm just a knucklehead.
I scored once with an imported (Belgian) craft beer at the local supermarket, heavily marked down price because the sell-by date was approaching. Some days later, marked down by half again because the date had passed. Needless to say, I bought all I could carry.
Craft beer *in a can* will not age gracefully. Even in a bottle, while it will probably be fine, how much light exposure are the bottle getting, have they been left out in the sun at any point etc.
Best before dates, hard expiry dates (if required), and ideally including a packaged on date would be a pretty ideal amount of information.
> IPA's always taste off to me.
That sounds contradictory to what I've heard about IPAs: that they were created because the normal beers the British had at the time wouldn't survive the journey to India, so they added a lot more hops and called it India Pale Ale. Based on that, I'd expect them to age better, not worse, than other kinds, but I'm not a beer person and this is just secondhand knowledge that I've never bothered to verify.
The modern IPA is nothing like that anymore. Also its the aroma compounds of hops that breaks down so fast, not the bittering aspects.This is why you can store a Russian imperial stout (high hop bitterness, low hop aroma, very high abv) but not normally a double/triple IPA (high hop bitterness, high hop aroma, high abv) and defiantly not age a normal IPA or session IPA (high hop aroma, low abv).
*Some overly malty double and triple IPAs will age into a nice barley wine if given enough time.
A modern beer can, on a newer canning line, is superior to a bottle in every single way. This debate about bottles being better than cans is from years ago. Cans and especially the canning machines have come a very long way in the last 15 years. That is one of the many reasons why almost every brewery is slowly switching to cans.
In regard to aging beers, there are a many important factors. The biggest enemy in aging a beer is oxygen. Oxygen gives beer a cardboard, paper flavor or a very raisin-y flavor, eventually it makes the entire beer taste like soy sauce.
As you mentioned zero light in a can so no skunking, although brown bottles stored in a dark cool place don't experience much of this. But clear, green and other bottles do. Bottle caps slowly leak oxygen in over a very long time and is why you might see a oxygen absorbing material in the under side of some bottle caps.
On the flip side one majorly common way a can will go bad in aging is from a seal alignment issue. This is especially common in smaller breweries as automated seam inspectors are quite expensive. The seal will visually look great. But if you tear it apart and measure the folds its quite common for them to be a little bit off, which can slowly leak out carbonation and in oxygen.
I'm a huge fan of packaged on dates for beer.
I wonder though if local brewery's or more artigianale brewing processes are different and maybe could be a bit riskier ?
Depending on the beer there might be live yeasts in it.
Beers can still go bad. Not always from a "not safe to consume" but often at least a "not going to taste very good anymore" kind of thing. Beers will end up oxidizing, the stuff in the beer will degrade over time, etc. Not all beers age well, some need to be had within a certain period of freshness.
Generally I prefer a "born-on" date for beer.
Brettanomyces will make your beer taste phenolic. Lactic Acid Bacteria will sour it (Lactobacillus and Pediococcus are two common contaminants).
Oxygenation will gradually make the beer taste like cardboard.
Hop aromatics degrade rapidly, heavily hopped beers are best within a month of brewing.
Very few beers get better over time (generally sours and stouts), most are beginning to degrade immediately and fall off a cliff within a year.
Also as you probably already know brett, lacto and pedio are desirable sometimes.
The flavor going off is the main concern with beer.
Had a coworker who made this phenomenon into a yearly gathering. We would bring beers of our choice, bury them in his back yard, then drink and grill/smoke meats. Next year he would dig up the previous years burial and we would try to bring the same beers with us. Then we all gather around and have a tasting comparing the year long aged beer to the fresh beer. You also brought along new beers to bury. He names it Man Beer Meat because it was just guys drinking and grilling.
Here in Sweden (and I assume the rest of the EU) when I buy eggs they are not refrigerated and I keep them in the pantry at room temp for weeks or months without issues. The price I pay is that they sometimes come with a little bird poop on them from the store.
The US washes our eggs, requiring refrigeration but greatly extending shelf life and greatly reducing physical contamination.
Advantages to both (Europe wins hands down if you need to whip egg whites to stiff peaks) but very interesting how the two regions addressed the safety issues around this.
Let's say I have unwashed eggs and washed eggs, and I put both in the refrigerator. Won't the unwashed ones last longer, because they haven't had the natural protective coating removed?
Chickens, especially commercial poultry farms, are disgusting.
If both types are refrigerated, I wonder which effect dominates?
Like I said, there's advantages and trade offs to BOTH, otherwise the move would just be to do one and not the other (similar to how there are advantages to the Imperial measuring system that keeps it in place, but we're not going down that trail).
I think my parents (in the UK) keep eggs in the fridge. They only buy a dozen at a time so it's probably not a big problem :)
When I said "oddly specific," I didn't mean that there might not be reason to label eggs with an expiration, I meant that it was oddly specific to require eggs to be labelled while not requiring some food categories that spoil quickly (mentioning milk and meat as examples). Perhaps it has to do with spoilage in eggs perhaps being harder to detect by examining them?
Very fair question. Anecdotally, when I was just graduating university I drank a few 4+ year past expiration macro-brewed beers that were sitting in the fridge that entire time. The results were not good compared to similar consumption of non-expired beer.
Maybe a different regulatory regime applies? That's the case at the federal level. For instance: alcohol often doesn't have the typical food labels because it's regulated by the ATF [1] not the FDA, and food labels are an FDA thing:
https://www.ttb.gov/regulated-commodities/beverage-alcohol/w...:
> TTB regulations do not require nutrient content labeling for alcohol beverages.
https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critica...:
> Food labeling is required for most prepared foods, such as breads, cereals, canned and frozen foods, snacks, desserts, drinks, etc. Nutrition labeling for raw produce (fruits and vegetables) and fish is voluntary.
[1] apparently now split into the ATF and TTB
[1] https://www.ttb.gov/regulated-commodities/beverage-alcohol/b...
I've spent way too much time spinning packages scanning for any date, sometimes having to give up, sometimes having to whip out my phone's camera to try to discern tiny black print on dark blue background, in small font, partly malformed, ...
I think this law is like plastic straw bans, or mandated bag fees, or prop 65 cancer warnings: a feel-good law that causes more problems than it solves. Anyone who makes food for sale in California will have to redo their labelling (or at least pay people to audit their product labelling). These costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of increased prices. Some manufacturers will choose to not sell in California, reducing consumer choice, reducing competition, and increasing prices. And for what? To reduce food waste by 0.6% in the best case.
It seems to me that the problem with food wastage isn't the extra food, it's the externalities created by food production, distribution, and disposal. It would be much more effective to tax these externalities than to make ineffective laws about product labelling.
That seems plausible. Figures vary a bit, but generally you're looking at 20-30% of food in supermarkets ultimately being wasted. An average person eats something like 1.5kg a day, so a pound seems about right. (Of course it's not as simple as that, because there's also wastage at home, and that's very hard to measure.)
That said, there's also a lot of wastage by restaurants and other catering operations, and this won't really help there, so the impact may not be as great as people hope.
The law is simply that you cant use various labels like "enjoy by" or "Best by" and instead, all non-safety dates must use the exact words "best if used by". It wont reduce food waste by 20% as claimed.
82001. (a) On and after January 1, 2025, a food manufacturer, processor, or retailer responsible for the labeling of food items for human consumption that chooses, or is otherwise required by law, to display a date label to communicate a quality or safety date on a food item manufactured on or after January 1, 2025, shall use one of the following uniform terms on the date label:
(1) “BEST if Used by” or “BEST if Used or Frozen by” to indicate the quality date of the food item.
(2) “USE by” or “USE by or Freeze by” to indicate the safety date of the food item.
(3) “BB” to indicate the quality date of the food item if the food item is too small to include the uniform term described in paragraph (1).
(4) “UB” to indicate the safety date of the food item if the food item is too small to include the uniform term described in paragraph (2).
But yeah, don't eat food from damaged cans.
And IIRC the EU is also debating the removal of MHD from staple foods that are shelf-stable for years, like dried pasta, uncooked rice etc. Normal sugar already doesn't have an MHD, although jam sugar is marked with the year of manufacture since they have other compounds in them as well beside the sugar itself.
Where i work all all the food that's simply past its MHD gets collected every morning by the Red Cross for food banks ("Die Tafel"). Obviously if a foods container is damaged or it's rotted fruits/veg or it would be unsafe to consume for another reason [2], that stuff gets thrown out (into bins collected for biomass processing).
[1]: pretty sure it's the same as "best (if used) by date" since products from abroad are sometimes marked "BBD <date>" instead of "MHD <date>" (at least on the transport packaging).
[2]: like lazy customers not putting frozen or cooled foods back but leaving them elsewhere in the warm store, something which REALLY aggravates me.
Ah.. so you have not experienced an injury or enough aging to compromise your ability to do this?
If you're like me and slightly paranoid about food expiration dates and sometimes checks things in corner stores, you might notice they like to sell items that can be razor thin on the "sell by" date.
Instead you will be able to decide how close you want to cut it to either date.
Without it, you need to check the date of every perishable product you buy if you want to consume it even the next day. If the store forgot to remove the product for a day (which happens regularly), you would buy a potentially harmful product if you don't always check the date.
On the positive side, the food can be sold regularly just until its expiry date, preventing food waste.
The bread guy took back the unsold breads and we were only charged for the sold ones and credited the unsold.
This was in Montréal 20 years ago.
Not sure how it is today and I have no idea in California.
But since it passed I'm guessing it was thr same and now this would be an obvious advantage for the sellers since this would assuré they sell everything.
Landfill? Animal feed? Some amount of charity for the salvageable items? A typical grocery store could produce an incredible amount of daily waste.
Definitely a large amount of it went to perfectly fine meals. The cook was very skilled at making good meals with an odd selection of ingredients.
I also used to dumpster dive, and yes, grocery stores throw out a LOT of food. Some places would have bins for pig farmers to collect, most just threw it in the trash. I’ve been held at gunpoint twice for dumpstering. We had an ongoing battle with a manager for a Trader Joe’s, who ended up pouring bleach all over the dumpster every night. It’s wild what people will do in order to keep people from getting something they don’t “deserve,” even when it’s literal trash.
But you haven't "stood in the other man's shoes" and seen it from his/her perspective.
Businesses are strictly regulated. They are required by law to dispose of certain old/damaged/discarded foodstuff and are not allowed to sell it for human consumption. Likely a second company (and possibly a third, since storage and hauling may be done separately) was hired to store the food in a container and to haul the food away as trash. The company signed a contract stating so.
Now you
1. entered his property (trespassed),
2. entered a dumpster (a second trespass possibly of a second business),
3. removed goods (theft), and then
4. passed/sold them to others (violating untold food laws)
and then are surprised someone tries to stop you!
Worst of all, consider if, while dumpster diving, you hurt yourself or even died? The food business would be sued and his insurance company would likely pay. You would have nothing to say about the decision to sue: your insurers and/or medical providers would pursue litigation against the food vendor even were you to oppose their actions.
As you can see, in this interpretation there is no particular question of what one or another person "deserves". Rather it is a question of law, property rights and civic responsibility.
Laws are rules created by people and we have the ability to change them. At the very least, we have the ability and moral responsibility to ignore them when they are unethical.
Also, I have never sold dumpstered food or given it to anyone who didn’t know it was dumpstered. I HAVE gotten injured dumpstering, and didn’t sue anyone for it. I DID get sick once from dumpstered food, and didn’t sue anyone for it (I’ve also gotten sick from eating at restaurants, and didn’t sue them, either).
For me, basic human rights and care for each other will always trump laws and property rights. And yes, I’ve done jail time for it and would do it again. I know that we won’t agree, and don’t need to change your mind. I do hope that you can understand the difference between knowing and understanding the rules, and blindly following the rules.
You could have done either: known and understood the rules or blindly followed the rules. Either was acceptable but you did neither: you instead broke the rules. Your post is a sociopathic justification of criminal action.
Why are there so many people unemployed and unemployable who seem to seek a repeat of the French Revolution in all of it's blood-dripping anarchy? The music of Les Miserables (the musical) was good, but not that good!
The reason they are enforced is because of game theory. There are plenty of things that are not a big deal if only one or two people do it. However, if large numbers of people do it then the system breaks down for everyone.
One hopes for some individual discretion at the margins, and the TJ's manager probably went overboard. However the morality is not so obvious when one has to consider higher order effects. (Though I also realize you would like the entire system to function differently anyway, which is a fair point as well).
"Packed on" only helps if you have some understanding of how long that product will stay good for.
It will probably help to prolong certain products shelf life but it isn’t a perfect system.
The Mindeshaltbarkeitsdatum is exactly what it says: a "best before" (MINDEST, minimum). It does not say anything about it not potentially remaining the same quality or taste after this date, and definitely not that it is dangerous to consume after. It may for example simply lose some of its taste over time, but up until that date it is "guaranteed" to taste the same ("the best").
Products that should not be consumed after a certain date (like meat) use "Zu verbrauchen bis" (use before); that is not a MHD.
As the article says, many people misunderstand "sell by" to mean "only safe if used by".
Meanwhile in Maine, you're questioning the sanity of Californians.
I mean, personally a big fan. I recently started seeing "Packed on <date>" and like wtf does that even mean. Was the corn also picked on that date?
Like these dates have been on products for as long as I can remember. Might was well have some rules around them finally.
"Use by" is dumb, it's too close to "Best if Used By." If there's a safety issue, the term should be "expires", "expires on", or something like that.
For salt, that seems somewhat silly, but not enough to make me fundamentally distrust the rationale
It does seem to go “flat” after a few months regardless, even when the expiry date is 2 years in the future.
Then they switched to 30 days recommendation to goose sales.
A sell by date makes perfect sense on salt. No packager wants to be responsible for material that sat on someone else's shelf for years and years.
Luckily the packaging had started to biodegrade, too, so it was easy enough to scrape off the fiber fuzz and hammer down the inner salt rocks into something useful. Better than nothing! But I wish I’d been able to buy it by its sell-by.
(Spoken as a skeptic of deadlines of all sorts, and one who routinely ignores food safety. I still think the dates are mostly silly, but that type of instance reminds me why it’s a hard problem: even if you’re not a dastardly wastemonger, choosing the “right” date depends heavily on handling and climate and factors beyond your control—unknowable at production time.)
My broader point, I guess, is that the appropriate date to sell something by depends so heavily on factors unknowable at production time that it’s hard to guess. But also that apparently-shelf-stable goods can in fact degrade.
And I guess that it’s kind of weird and unnatural the way modern industrial packaging/processing have trained us to expect that a given product should be interchangeable with any other until an arbitrary date.
I am a human capable of parsing natural language semantics, and "use by" is terrible. It's one of those completely unexplained commands you often find in instructions. Why should I use it by that date? If you're not a mindless drone who just unquestioningly follows instructions, the total lack of reason creates a lot of space to decide to do something else. For instance: without consulting California food labeling legislation (which, I admit, Californians all carry around the statute book those regulations several times a day), it's reasonable to interpret "use by" as "best if used by," for instance.
They should use clearer language because they can and have no excuse not to.
The compromise here is to keep printing as short as possible. I think the greater issue is that these statements don't point to any trivially available authoritative definition.
They have no excuse.
They're not being banned. The wording must change to "best if used by" if it's not about food safety.
Salt? Flour? Oil? Oats? Rice? Garlic? Black pepper? Most ground spices? Nuts? Beans? Honey? Vinegar? Quinoa? All of these can reasonably sit on a shelf for weeks. I guess none of these are safe to be consumed, all just "toxins".
The reasons why Twinkies are so shelf stable are largely the same reasons why flour or rice or olive oil is shelf stable.
Better be careful of those chemicals like sodium chloride and dihydrogen monoxide.
Sure, if you are assuming Americans are mostly eating these things daily.
Sugar, Water, Enriched Flour, High Fructose Corn Syrup (sugar), Tallow (animal fat/oil), Dextrose (sugar, from the HFCS), Egg
Twinkies are >98% sugar, flower, oil, with a little bit of egg.
You could substitute the tallow with other similar kinds of oils if you wanted, like say coconut oil.
I.e. nobody knows what “processed” means, they just know it’s bad somehow.
(Re-post of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397900>)
I consider them crazies in the same vein as vegetarians who judge whether something is a vegetable based on how cute it looks.
They're probably full of things that are bad for you too.
Your salt is full of microplastics (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro...). Your oats are full of chlormequat. Your spices are full of heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, and lead), and the same is true for vinegar, nuts, beans, and rice. Most honey sold in stores isn't real honey but comes from China and can be filled with chloramphenicol and other illegal animal antibiotics. Almost all of the extra virgin olive oil sold in US stores is fake and can also be contaminated with phthalates. Around half the garlic sold in the US comes from china and according to some this is Communist Sewage-Garlic, and a threat to national security (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67662779) which can also be covered in chemicals (the common claim is methyl bromide is used although I haven't seen anything to back that up)
The quinoa sitting on your shelf seems the least likely to be toxic or bad for you, but you might want to avoid it for other reasons (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/25/quinoa-g...)
I do keep nuts in the freezer for the most part.
Or for years, in a proper cupboard.
“must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety”
From the article:
any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety.
> To adhere with the requisite language outlined, any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety.
The milk will say "Best if Used By <date>".
This information can be found in the fifth sentence in the article.