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I classify certain members of my family as “check the date” people. They’re the most likely to have fridges containing foods long past their expiration dates, so when eating at their homes I try to discreetly find the little printed dates on the mayo jar before sticking a knife into it. I often cringe when I see them gleefully squirting three-year-old Dijon mustard onto their sandwiches and wonder: How are they not constantly getting sick? Have their stomachs adapted to ingesting spoiled condiments? Or were they born resistant?
I’ve learned that there’s very little science and almost no standardization to food dates and labels, and they’re widely misunderstood. So-called “expiration dates” don’t refer to the actual date a product ceases to be edible and were never really meant for consumers, anyway. Their origins date to the 1970s, when manufacturers started printing coded dates on food to inform supermarkets when to rotate their stock. A few consumers hacked the codes in order to decipher the freshness of their food, and the New York Consumer Protection Board published the method in 1977. The plain-English “sell by,” “best by,” and other markings are basically extensions of this system.
 Expiration dates effectively protect the manufacturer, though. Food technologists test food and give it a number grade at different ages and conditions, so manufacturers pick out a grade at which they’re even a little uncomfortable selling their product and set the expiration date accordingly. For example, if a food researcher gives a product a grade of 7 when fresh, a manufacturer may choose to set an expiration date at the time a food reaches a 6 or so. It’s not anywhere near “expired,” but its quality may be slightly less than fresh. The problem is a food past whatever date is printed on it tends to immediately turn an average consumer’s stomach. And there are dozens of confusing ways to express an expiration date, so how are consumers to know the difference between “sell by,” “best before,” and “after opening, use within 5 days”?
This misunderstanding is one of many factors influencing the global problem of food waste, especially in post-industrial countries, where food waste stats often top 40% of production. In 2015 the United States Department of Agriculture and EPA jointly issued the country’s first national food waste reduction goal, calling for a 50% reduction by 2030. And in May the Food Date Labeling Act was introduced; the bill proposes unifying food quality dates and providing on-product guidance about foods at a high risk for spoilage. While the bill is still sitting in Congress as of this month, supporters believe it will help cut confusion and reduce the amount of perfectly safe “expired” food that winds up in landfills. These efforts complement other food waste initiatives around the world, including South Korea’s “pay-as-you-waste” and France’s fines on wasteful supermarkets.
Food technologists stress that a product’s smell is usually much more accurate for predicting spoilage than an expiration date. Concerned consumers can also tap one of many free guides to food shelf life. One of these, the searchable database StillTasty, draws on food safety research conducted by the USDA, FDA, and CDCP.
I still find myself a little queasy when rummaging through my relatives’ fridges, but it’s comforting to know that the expired foods they’re eating daily are (most likely) fine to consume.
Image credit: Ashley Davidson / CC BY 2.0
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