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Comment by ryukoposting | Hacker News Reader

When my wife and I moved in together, we had a spat about what "sell by" dates actually meant. She had been throwing away loads of perfectly good food because she misunderstood the meaning of the sell-by date. I don't remember who taught me what they actually mean, but I was able to point her to a USDA site that showed the actual meaning.

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.

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My wife does the same thing, and I've been unable to convince her. Not talking perishable stuff, either - she'll throw out something like a bottle of hot sauce because it is a few months past the "best by" date. No matter how much I try to tell her that these things are shelf stable and will be good for even a year or more after the date, she doesn't believe me.

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."

My ex was like this two, but was fairly binary about it. The day before the "sell by date" = totally good, not in any way ruined. The day after = clearly dangerously unsafe food.

Hot Sauce is kind of annoying because it lasts so long after the best by dates. Like it could just be kicking around in then fridge for a couple years and not grow anything on it, but it is probably time to toss it out eventually?

Many hot sauces are so acidic they’re pretty much a preservative!

Vinegar based hot sauces, and/or hot sauces that are very high in sodium, usually yes, but not always.

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.

I don’t even keep things like soy sauce or something like Tabasco in the fridge. Much less vinegars. I suspect a lot of people are inclined to.

Tabasco is fine in the pantry or on the counter.

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.

[1] https://thepepperplant.com/shop.html

I do refrigerate Siracha. But I admit I make my decisions more on gut feel than anything else.

Gut feel is the ultimate judge of food rottenness

I remember seeing a comment thread on here a few weeks ago where people were talking about making their own hot sauces, and botulism was a big concern, which was surprising to me. I figured hot sauce was so extreme that you didn't need to worry too much about the normal food-borne illnesses. Not so, I guess.

I proudly store ketchup in the pantry. No amount of recently added "For best results, refrigerate after opening." on the label will convince me otherwise. Cold ketchup is in no way "best".

When I was in college, at a house party we were all guessing for how long the oldest item in the fridge had been expired. It was a shared flat for four people, so we bet something like half a year or so. The hot sauce expired more than four years before. I am not sure anyone dared to eat some though.

Ha! I like to joke that after the 'best by' date, it's no longer the best, just better :)

Ironically, stuff like hot sauce that never goes bad because it's so incompatible with microbial life as we know it is the stuff that needs "best by" type verbiage the most because while it never becomes hazardous to consume the chemical processes of degradation (oxidation and friends) still happen and the product becomes less good.

I'm not particularly judgemental, but I wouldn't be able to cohabitate with someone with that mentality. "Best by" is a matter of faith, and it shouldn't be treated as fact.

I might seem petty about this behavior, but such things are not isolated. This way of thinking colors one's reality.

There is also much confusion about how food actually goes bad. There are some foods that absolutely should be avoided after a specific amount of time. But most will go bad somewhat randomly, mostly after but often before their sell/best by dates. Sometimes a jug of milk will be bad before it even arrives at a store. Sometimes mold will appear on fresh bread very suddenly. Food is more complicated than fixed dates.

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.

I think as a general rule, biology loathes blunt instruments. That's not to say these things aren't more useful than just guessing, but as this legislation (or rather the underlying issue that led to its passing) shows is that a lot of this stuff is very poorly understood.

Geez, that is aggravating. Do they really think that a completely unsealed cardboard box with holes in it is keeping out all the germs?

Sometimes I think we've really failed ourselves regarding basic biology and education requirements.

in Europe it's forbidden to sell washed eggs, so you're literally buying eggs covered in chicken shit, it's an interesting regulatory divergence.

If you’re buying eggs covered in excrement, that’s on you. That’s what the law is for: for the seller and producer not being able to hide the awful conditions in which the eggs were produced. If you want clean eggs, buy clean eggs, which will then necessarily have been produced in a clean environment, more healthy for the chickens, and also with less risk of contaminated eggs.

Exactly this. I have chickens and when I collect the eggs they are usually completely clean. Only if I start to slack on cleaning the coop or one of the chickens gets sick do the eggs get dirty.

I can imagine most eggs sold in the United States would be horrifying if not washed.

The size of the nestbox can be a factor as well. If the nestbox is too large for the breed of chicken you keep, it encourages them to hang out inside it, and they walk on the eggs and get them dirty.

If a nestbox is the right size, it will only be used for laying eggs (and occasional brooding).

Hmm that is definitely possible. They do tend to track poop in from the main part of the coop to the boxes.

But if I keep the coop clean it’s not really a problem.

> That’s what the law is for: for the seller and producer not being able to hide the awful conditions in which the eggs were produced.

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.

As it turns out, the eggs covered in chicken excrement are those that haven't been power washed, so the actual edible part of the egg is safer...

Per NPR, washing eggs was the historical norm until the 1960s or 1970s...(https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...)

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.).

My understanding is that unwashed eggs preserve a protective layer that inhibits bacterial growth, which is why washed eggs in the US must be refrigerated instead. I think they are both valid methods.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...

Yes it’s one of those weird American things. Like being extremely worried about chicken meat because the conditions chicken are raised in are so awful you can’t trust it’s not contaminated.

I find it endlessly amusing that Americans are both extremely worried about food safety and apparently completely unable to pass reasonable food safety law.

It's largely a generational thing. Most baby boomers are afraid to eat eat even slightly pink beef. Arguments that millions of Americans eat hamburgers with the middle of the paddy still oozing blood and virtually nobody is harmed by it fall on deaf ears. Old dogs, new tricks, etc.

Unwashed eggs can also be refrigerated, and they last an absurdly long time that way — much, much longer than either refrigerated washed eggs or unrefrigerated unwashed eggs.

Once you refrigerate unwashed eggs, though, they need to stay refrigerated thereafter.

Here in Norway, farmers have been lamenting the EU rules of requiring a rather short "best before" limit of 28 days while our eggs are safe a lot longer[1], typically 4 months but can last over a year[2].

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've lived in Bulgaria, Ireland, and Poland, and I've never seen dirty eggs in the stores. Are you sure about that?

Educate yourself on chicken anatomy and physiology https://www.getstronganimals.com/post/chicken-anatomy-101

I have never ever seen this in any European country.

I see this regularly in the Netherlands, sometimes even with a feather attached.

I’ve seen feathers but not poo except maybe on the rarest of instances.

To be fair, we’ve recently been through a period when infection by physical contact was at least initially widely viewed as a thing even if elbow pumps and obsessive hand washing turned out to probably not be much of a deal. But there was certainly a year so there when if you touched something in a supermarket and put it back you were inviting lots of stink eye.

When I first started dating my ex, I was at her place and she asked if I was hungry. I said yes, so she made me a tuna melt with mayo. As she had it in the oven I looked in the fridge. The tub of mayo was enormous and mostly empty. It was Kirkland mayonnaise.

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.

To me that just sounds like a good way to end up in a Chubby Emu video.

I had no idea that mayo expired. I had dragged a tub of mayo through several university housing locations and two apartment moves before my new bride noticed the long expired container's date as we combined refrigerators.

I'm not a mayo fan, so was a condiment for guests. Whoops.

Anything with oil in it can get rancid. Including nuts.

> As she had it in the oven ...

Cooking food typically kills off any bacteria.

This isn't an argument that you should turn into a 'throw away food after the best by date' person or anything, but it's important to understand one key point:

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.

This is true. The toxins left behind by bacteria or fungi can be worse than ingesting a live culture. And they don't break down by cooking at normal temperatures. I think the only reason 5-year-old industrial mayo is ok is the preservatives. Fresh mayo can kill you after 24 hours unrefrigerated, whether you cook it later or not. Source: Worked in restaurants.

> 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.

> Aren’t safety restrictions the “use by” date?

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.

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