Originally published at: California restricts sell-by dates on food, as they are misleading - Boing Boing
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Will they let them go with their preferred: “You can’t sue us if consumed after…” ?
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Yeah, that’s probably the silliest example that my kids love to point to. We buy and eat a lot of expired foods.
One exception though is some soft cheeses. I was at a Whole Foods once and saw a whole bunch of visibility moldy (and not the good kind of mold) cheese on the shelf that was just a few days past the sell-by date. And when the packaging is opaque you don’t know until after you buy it.
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So, working as intended?
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I feel like we would be better served by a “manufactured on,” “preserved on,” or “processed on” dates. Then, we need clear guidelines on how long past those dates certain foods are safe to consume.
Raw meats are good for 7 days past processing for example. (I have no idea what the cutoff would be, just using it as an example)
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Definitely don’t want to try eating it after 35,000 years or so.
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At least ground meats have “use or freeze by” dates that act as pretty clear deadlines for both grocer and consumer, but not all foods have such strict cutoffs. Not that this stops my local store. I carried 5 packages of meats to the butcher counter yesterday that were 2 days past their “use by” date and the guy just grunted and shrugged.
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The tricky part is that the useful lifespan of most perishable foods has at least as much to do with the conditions in which they are stored than by a set amount of time. How much time passed between purchase and putting the stuff in your refrigerator? Did you transport the food in a hot car or an air conditioned one? What’s the humidity level in your kitchen? What’s the temperature of your pantry? What’s the temperature setting on your fridge? When did you first open the container? Do you tend to leave stuff out while you’re preparing a meal or put it away immediately? Is your kitchen kept to laboratory levels of cleanliness or is it teeming with bacteria and insects?
Maybe it would be more useful to just teach people how to identify when food looks/smells/tastes suspect rather than do some kind of age-based calculus.
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I arrived at my local supermarket this afternoon to find the staff clearing out chilled and frozen food because because of a “technical issue” with the refrigerators and freezers.
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This is why I ignore the sell by/consume by dates once I’ve bought it, in favor of just keeping a careful eye (and nose) on it to check to see if it’s gone off. Especially since it’s not just about the conditions at home under which it’s been stored, but before it was even packaged. I notice this particularly with nuts (from the same brand, of the same age), where some have clearly been either sitting longer or were stored under poorer conditions, because some start to turn before the sell by date, and others are good, refrigerated, for a year or more after.
I’ve noticed this with Trader Joe’s cheeses that they package on-site, moldless cheeses like Monterey Jack very quickly develop mold - but in that case it is, for the most part, clearly cross-contamination from other cheeses they also cut up on site, resulting in what are effectively hybrid cheeses… Unless it’s a black mold, it’s probably fine.*
*Thanks to cross contamination and forgetfulness, I once turned some feta into something like a Camembert, and it was unexpectedly delicious.
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I agree with you generally but … refrigerating NUTS???
I have never heard of such a thing before. Genuinely weirded out by that.
Mind you, when I buy large packs of shelled nuts, I remove a portion for eating over a period of a few weeks and vacuum pack the rest to remove oxygen to minimise risk of them going rancid.
I opened a shop-bought pack of almonds some 2-3 years old a while back. Edible, but after a few weeks there was a very slight taste of them possibly going in a rancid direction.
Walnuts don’t last as long (one reason, I suspect, you don’t see walnuts in chocolate as much as hazels or almonds, for example) but plenty long enough.
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I tend not to refrigerate almonds (at least, not immediately), but more fragile nuts like walnuts and pistachios, etc., that have previously been on the verge of going rancid/stale even before the sell-by date, yeah. If I’ve harvested the nuts myself (or got them freshly harvested), walnuts can end up sitting around for a few years in the pantry… which makes me wonder about the production process of those slightly rancid store-bought nuts.
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(Here’s a repost from one of my 2017 posts.)
Many years ago my mom sent me a care package from back east: A box of Drake’s Cakes “Funny Bones”, i.e., chocolate covered chocolate cake with a peanutty center. DEEELLLLIISSHHH!!
In a sharing mood, I passed them around at work. They got snagged up pretty quick, just a couple of days… poof. I saved the last one for myself. It was only then that I noticed the expiration date on the box. The cakes had expired four months earlier. I told no one. And I ate my cake, anyway. It was great!
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For some reason the local supermarkets do a lousy job of keeping track of liquid egg products, and every now and then I can show up at the customer service desk with a basketful, saying, “These all have a sell-by date of tomorrow; can I please get them at a discount?”
They’ve gotten quite snippy if I try this anytime the day before the “expiry” date, or even on the same day as the expiry date. It’s quite the little game.
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I buy nuts from the wholesale store and freeze them. They keep for a couple of years just fine. The hard part is when they go on sale at the grocery, and I have to remind myself that 4# is really enough to have on hand.
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I’d say right now on packaged goods it’s 50/50 for “sell by” wording compared to “best by”. Depending on the food and how it is packaged I can see the best buy date being more of a suggestion than anything. But I don’t agree that it’s just put on there without much thought by the producer. Canned goods last a couple years usually, but canned corn past the best buy date is not great (by itself). It’s not going to hurt you, but the flavor and texture change. Acidic foods like tomatoes will take on a metallic taste because they are packaged in cans, not jars.
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Not packaged, but really seeing this with garlic lately. We bought some bulbs on September 10th, and what we have left is in better shape than what’s “new” in the store today. Not by much, but still better. It is WAY better than what was there last week.
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We had a helluva time finding decent-looking onions and garlic when the plague began. It hasn’t much improved.
As others have said I also tend to freeze nuts so they last longer and I have them on hand for baking projects. Nuts for directly eating stay in the pantry and get consumed in a timely fashion.
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