Originally published at: Truths about food expiration dates | Boing Boing
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I agree. The deli meats that I buy will be eaten right up until I don’t like the amount of slime on them.
That said, Mrs. Bashful will not even sniff the milk as little as one day after the date printed on the bottle. Sometimes compromises must be made to keep the peace.
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- True
- White flower get’s chalky and gross if it’s too old (I’m a baker)
- Add baking soda to the cook water of old beans/lentils and they will soften right up and cook quickly. Will hasten cooking for new pulses as well. The opposite, vinegar, will allow lentils to keep their form and not turn to mush.
- Salad dressing is preserved in vinegar and probably won’t grow microorganisms maybe forever if left in the fridge. The oil (particularly olive oil) will go rancid though.
- True
- UHT milk alters the structure of the milk in bad ways. Worse than homogenization. Not recommended for human consumption.
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Very useful, esp the part about beans and lentils. Thanks
Yep. I can smell when milk has gone even a tiny bit off and it makes me feel sick. Day after expiration? Partner may drink as much as he pleases but I’m using the newer one or going without. He is a good man and knows not to give me the expired stuff in my coffee
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Just zap it with gamma rays. (Keep a pair of purple shorts, just in case.)
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What the hell bullshit is this? If this were true cooked milk would be toxic. It kills bacteria which may alter the taste of fermented things like cheese, but it does not do anything more “bad” than cooking milk does! And in some EU countries (like say, France of all places) milk for drinking is nearly 100% UHT treated, because they understand bacteria and the effects of it on Dairy for centuries longer than most others.
Taste different? Likely. Mess up fermentation by killing bacteria? Definitely. “Alter the structure” to make it “unsafe?” 
Please do not spread woo here.
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Yeah, I’m the same as Mrs. Bashful with milk. However, once I started buying lactose-free milk I never had a problem. It last much longer than normal milk. Still, I don’t drink milk like I used to…
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also on the original post, “uht is worse than homogenization”. Homogenization is bad? I’ve had unhomogenized milk. If you like your milk with chunks even before it’s gone bad, great! Eww.
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Got to admit, the UHT part didn’t even register with me.
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I have. Ruined the batch of sweet bread I was making when I grabbed one a staffer had brought in for ‘bread making.’ Didn’t know it had been in the fridge for over a month, and may have been in the staffer’s fridge for some time before that. Ugh. The entire thing went in the toilet, with multiple flushes.
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One Easter we didn’t find all the eggs. Several months later it was “found” by the lawnmower.
The whole neighborhood knew for a week we missed one.
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I have - cracked one into a hot frying pan. The stench was immediate and overwhelming. Luckily the pan was non-stick and the toilet was max 10 ft from the kitchen, .
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Anyone have any guesses on walnut milk, a year past “best used by”? We have five quarts of the stuff, from a time gf was going dairy free for a bit. Is it delicious walnut wine, or is this a preamble to the Snig’s obituary? It proudly states there’s no preservatives or emulsifiers, just water and walnuts.
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100% false.
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It must have been a very long time before that. A month is not much for an egg. I don’t even start to worry about how old they are until a month past the date on the carton. Never seen a bad one.
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No idea and I haven’t tried that yet. But I do enjoy walnut butter, which I store unrefrigerated for months in the pantry. Its contents are 100% walnuts (even occasionally including a fragment of shell).
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There were three in the last dozen I got. I buy direct from the farmer and that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a rotten egg!
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For a few weeks my hens decided that laying eggs in the coop wasn’t good enough for them. Nope. So they spread eggs all over the backyard. We found some, animals found some. And then there were those we didn’t find until they began to rot and broke open. That was about a week of real bad times.
ETA:
We leave ours on the counter for a couple weeks. No problems. If we’re suspicious there’s always the float test.
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I can’t say I ever really pay much attention to expiration dates.
Supermarkets in the UK are experimenting with not having use by/best before dates on fruit and veg produce in an attempt to cut down on food waste and it seems like a good idea to me. I know of people who will automatically throw things out when they reach their use by date, regardless of whether they’re still good or not (and they almost certainly are).
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