This can generate a bit of confusion. Many won't eat anything past its best before date, as though it's a use by date. Best before date = no guarantee of quality after. Use by date = potentially poisonous after.
In fact, we have online stores that sell past best before date food at ridiculous prices because retailers can't really sell them.
I think the confusion is due to the fact that some products have both types of date marking, some have only use-by, and some have only best-by. Some consistency would go a long way to fixing the confusion. If you have both on the product it's clear.
I don't think I've seen this before but good point. I'd have thought use by would be equivalent to best before in that case. Usually the use by is a couple of days, up to a week e.g meat, milk, etc.
Interestingly they were slightly soft, you could still snap the crips in half., but the cheese and onion flavour seemed to hold up. I'm guessing the bags are not air tight seals over that length of time.
That's not because of confusion over whether it's means the same as "Use By" so much as because some products, though perfectly safe after their "Best Before" in practice might be a bit yuck, while others are generally ok, and you can't always tell because often it's about "did the humidity get to it?".
That KitKat might have more bend than snap to it... That box of stale cornflakes might be a bit more chewy than crunchy...
And unsurprisingly, consumers aren't keen on the risk of getting home from the shops, only to discover that £1 product that's past its best before really is ickily unpleasant and now they have to walk all the way back to the shops again if they wan't something palatable...
There is that. It rarely happens the day after best before - still perfectly edible if stored right. I've met people who refuse to eat food a few days before the best before so as to completely avoid getting ill. After the best before, it's considered "gone off", just like the use by.
...which is a very important point in this era of 'Brexit'. In a few years food in the UK is going to be as poor as it is in the U.S. since the EU regulations will no longer apply. British people might even end up like Americans where everything is essentially a by-product of corn - corn fed meat, corn based pasta, corn based sugary drinks, corn based batter and corn based thickeners adulterating everything.
I am old enough to remember when food wasn't labelled the proper EU way. Sell by dates were vague and didn't apply to lots of products, there was inflation back then and everything had a price sticker (remember them) and often the low price of a tin (e.g. 7 1/2 New Pence) would give you a clue that it was past it.
The worst bit of food label changes happens next year in the U.S. when the nutrition labels get confusing. You can imagine 'big food' ('big corn') would want. Maybe the US should apply for EU membership to get the benefits of decent regulation on food, this could shift the US diet away from obesity-corn products.
I don't think EU and US food policy could be reconciled. That was a part of the argument against TPIP.
The EU has a glucose-fructose syrup production quota, annual production is limited to 300,000 tonnes. Meanwhile the US subsidises maize.
The EU cares more for the origin of food, and the preparation method: Champagne, Stilton, Scotch whisky, Plarma ham, Greek yoghurt. The US cares more for trademarks.
Legitimate concerns, but the UK now is a much smaller fry in the global market with considerably less local production - Switzerland and Norway are both out of the EU too (EEA regulations aside) and the products they consume are th same quality - I don't see companies going out of their way to exploit any regulatory laxness in the UK - it just wouldn't be worth it.
Unless Ms. May decides the only way to save the UK economy post-Brexit is to change the country to a Laissez Faire model overnight.
The regulations won't apply in a binding way, but in the transition period the UK is expected to, by default, adopt all EU law and then cherry pick parts it doesn't like.
It's unlikely we'll go to corn because we don't have enough land to sustain it, especially given the renewed pressure to grow locally, nor the massive subsidies that the US corn industry benefits from.
Australia's the same - 'best before' aka 'it won't go very bad very quickly but it may be stale and unpleasant', and 'use by' aka 'this is milk and you know milk goes bad rapidly after a set time so use it before then'.
'Sell by' never made sense to me, because it doesn't instruct the end consumer what to do with it once they get home. It's got a relatively variable amount of time after the 'sell by' date until the product goes bad, and consumers simply can't judge that.
The best thing about these dates is fancy high end stuff gets tossed in the discount bin for 50-75% off when that date is imminent.
And based on my experience, yeah, it's not "best" at that time, but it's still edible, not so bad, and maybe even pretty ok compared to fresh cheap stuff filled with artificial flavors.
There are very few things that start to rot near or even well after a "best before" date (ie: the point of the article/regulations). Vegetables are the worst "mental" group; there's no health/safety issue involved, just the change to a slimy texture that turns people off. Fruit goes soft, but takes 1-2 weeks past its date to become undesirable - and by then, it's obvious that there is rot or mold. Bread is fine until you can smell or taste mold, no date checking required. Unprocessed meat and dairy products are really the only ones to be concerned about. Nearly every other product is just a matter of freshness - a subjective perceived metric of quality more than anything else.
Really, just try smelling and then tasting it. By and large, our noses and tastebuds are amazing natural filters. If it isn't so revolting that you need to gasp for air or spit it out, you're probably safe. So very few products actually "go bad" to the point of being dangerous to consume.
I'm curious to see just how clear-cut the "use by" label will be. I suspect that even with these changes, such a label will continue to be abused to label things as "unsafe" long before it is really the case. The industry desire to have you throw out perfectly good product (and buy more to replace it) is far too strong for regulation to make a difference. I wouldn't be surprised if they start adding dairy (or some unstable chemical) to products that don't normally contain such things, in order to get away with marking their product as having a shorter shelf life than required.
Ive seen this in the UK Aus and NZ but never in the US. I wonder if it is because US stores stick to a perhaps rational strategy where discounted items cannibalize profits?
It's in the US too however it's in lower cost areas. For example, a small rural town in Wisconsin has a bargain store that often gets these kinds of items from Costco and major markets like NYC and Chicago (it's obvious by the ethnic grocery items). Obviously, one small store isn't enough to sell it all so there must be quite a few of these spread out over the country in lower cost of living areas where rent is cheap for low margin small retail.
In the US we have discount "grocery stores" in lower income neighborhoods that pretty much exclusively sell stuff that is past or very close to it's best by date. I agree it's less common to see a discount bin in a normal grocery store, but if you're in a more working class neighborhood you might find a rack that has stuff that they're not longer stocking, old bread, or dented boxes and cans.
In the US (at least in some states) there are discount grocery stores that buy truckloads of expired products from the major retailers and sell them off cheap. Tend to exist in lower income areas.
Some of the stuff is years out of date. A surprising percentage of people don't even look at the date.
The expiry date put on medicines are sometimes absurd. Certainly antibiotics may break down, but why would aspirin have an expiry date that's only a year or two away? It's a simple stable molecule that would probably last decades. Anyone know what's up with that?
Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. When it's exposed to water vapor, the acetyl group comes off and combines with water to make acetic acid, which is the acid in vinegar [1].
This happens pretty fast. An open bottle of uncoated aspirin tablets can start to smell of vinegar in a day or two, depending on the local relative humidity.
If you smell vinegar when you sniff your bottle of aspirin, toss the bottle. Why? Well, the other hydrolysis reaction product (salicylic acid) removes the outer layer of the skin and is used, for example, to remove warts [2]. Not something you want in your stomach.
I had always wondered why aspirin tended to smell like vinegar and rarely helped with headaches. It's quite satisfying to have an explanation for both.
Not all acids are the same. What's at play isn't only the amount of free protons but also what else is disassociating. For instance, hydrofluoric acid is considered a weak acid but it can severely burn (pretty slowly but it will get you) or even kill you. The fluoride group will consume the calcium ions in your blood and possibly send you into cardiac arrest.
Any compound with a hydrogen ion that can dissociate in solution is technically called an acid, but that doesn't mean it's acidic properties are the most relevant.
This is a huge deal with drugs that can cost $10k per vial.
The manufacturers have no incentive to test for longer periods: it would just mean less revenue and more risk. And as I've mentioned before, physicians are very conservative and don't like stepping outside what other people do even if the basic research is there.
For example, the ability to pool leftover amounts of Yervoy (ipilimumab) among patients could save thousands of dollars each. The research so far shows that cancer drug Yervoy remains sterile, stable and effective for at least a month [1] but the manufacturer's guidelines say to use immediately after opening and throw away the rest. (Ironically the independent researchers couldn't afford to do a larger study because the vials were so expensive in the first place!)
It also limits how the drugs are delivered. For example, IL-2 (as a cancer immunotherapy) might be safer, more effective and more convenient as a single continuous infusion over a few weeks [2]. But the guidelines say to use immediately and throw away the excess.
It also limits research into what I think is the most promising near-term approach to cancer: intra-tumoral immunotherapy (with frequent low doses of e.g. ipi, nivo, IL-2 into lesions). Unfortunately this is way too expensive if you have to throw away 99% of a vial for each injection.
It says "mindestens haltbar bis", which is the German translation for "best before".
The manufacturer only guarantees the quality before that date. Afterwards, the anti-caking agent (Rieselhilfen) may not work so well, and the salt could be clumpy.
I have read that water bottle contains expiry date, it is not for the water but to the plastic bottle which will start leaching chemicals after the expiry. I guess it is the same case here.
If you let the placebo effect count — and why wouldn't you? — it pretty surely will have some effect.
Even better, when combined with a consultation from a homoeopath, you're getting some informal counselling as well as a placebo. This is a pretty sweet combination, assuming you're not actually dying of something, and might keep you away from real pharmaceuticals with real side effects long enough to get better on your own.
(So my view is that homoeopathic remedies are very likely just sugar pills, but that it's far from clear we should be regulating them away on those grounds).
Haha. That is hilarious. 280 million years old, the preservative of preservatives. In many other countries (developing especially) they don't even pay attention to food expiration dates. We have eyes and a nose and they're really good at telling us when food shouldn't be eaten. I have a friend who is from Nigeria and was selling bags of rice at her shop. Food inspectors told her she had to throw the rice away because it had expired. She was devastated because she wasn't even used to thinking about rice expiring, especially not when it's just a few months old. Welcome to the West.
The "best before" time on the rice in my European cupboard is one year. It's still legal to sell it after that date [1]. The EU is considering[2] removing rice from the requirement to have a "best before" date at all, which is already the case for a few things[3], like salt and sugar.
Could also be related to the fact that they need to account for a massive range of storage conditions across all consumers. Some people live in climates where it hits 90-100+ degrees for many months of the year and may not have AC. Some people might keep their bottles on a counter that receives sunlight. And there are huge ranges in humidity. There's probably a big range in medicine lifespan between the best and worse cases there.
It's simply a guarantee of full potency of the drug. A while ago, a study (currently looking for it...) found ~90% of OTC drugs were perfectly fine 10+ years after the expiry date, IIRC. And most antibiotics should be just as stable as aspirin.
The US military operates the Federal Shelf Life Extension Program which, from what I understand, regularly tests federal stockpiles of medications to avoid waste.
Stability tests are actually pretty expensive, and you need to demonstrate that your shelf life is valid across the shelf life you request - so usually 2-3 years is about the max companies request, but it's good enough, and they need to ship their drugs out as fast as possible. Sometimes you see drug shelf life extensions post-release, but that's not always really worth the effort.
Since one contains the other, seems like this could be open to packaging errors. Much better to use an alternative verb for 'best if used by', i.e. 'display until'.
Germany uses the wording "Mindestens haltbar bis", which roughly means "good until at least". Yet despite using the "at least" wording, a lot of people still throw out their yogurts that are one day over the date.
Germany also uses "zu verbrauchen bis" which is a hard expiry date on goods that are perishable and often dangerous when expired. Minced meat, fish or poultry are examples where that is used. Most people don't grok the difference though.
My brother - who is a chef has - has already told me to hunt for the oldest beef I can find in the shelves.
Oh, and one of the largest grocery chains here has now started agressively pushing anything that is about to expire by cutting the price in half and put it on display in a designated fridge.
Market segmentation I guess but for those who care to check it is often lots of good food at a nice price.
Sonetimes the dates are inaccurate, but I've always been impressed by the ability of milk to go from totally fine to weird-tasting on precisely the use-by date.
Another example is MPAA movie ratings. Since they decide which ages are appropriate for the movies that they license local theaters to play, theaters prohibit kids from sneaking into R-rated movies, even though it isn't against R law.
It's a shame self-regulation doesn't occur more often.
The MPAA rating system might look like a success from the outside but I think a lot of people familiar with it would disagree. It is wildly inconsistent and the rules that it does follow are mostly arbitrary (one "fuck" is ok, but two isn't) . The process of getting a film rated is not very transparent and getting a film re-rated can be prohibitively expensive for low budget films.
On the other hand, government rating systems can get hilarious.
Here in Finland, VHS and DVD distribution of program materials were rated for audiences (does it suit children or not, etc) by a government agency. They wanted to raise money for the government. So, even if a program was rated for VHS, distributors couldn't use the same rating for DVD distribution; they had to pay another fee to get the DVD rating. Without government inspection, movies had to be distributed with K-18 (X-rated) label.
Eventually, one of the distributors got fed up when they were told to pay yet again for the new rating of "Little House on the Prairie", the nostalgic 1970's family series classic. The distributor simply said no, and decided to sell Little House as an X-rated DVD release. Supermarkets had to verify that buyers had photo ID and were over 18 years old. Parents were told it's forbidden to show the series to their children (it had been on air in prime time in 1970's and many remembered it fondly).
Everyone started to laugh at the government rating agency, and they gave up and changed the regulation.
I met someone who worked for the British equivalent, the BBFC.
She said every release had to be submitted for classification, since they often contained different material -- a slightly different edit of the main film, or "extra features" which occasionally needed changing, such as where the director's interview "The Making of Fluffy Bunny Adventures III" had him cursing about something.
Yes, that's true. Here the good thing is that the regulator isn't really counting the swearwords in a film one by one so that a director's interview of Little House would really change the rating. Or at least that was common enough perception among the public.
Also, there's sometimes a long delay in providing a DVD / Bluray version of a film that had previously been released on VHS, and it's possible that the same film now gets a lower age rating.
When it comes to food I go by look, smell, and taste. The dates don't often mean much. I've had bread that grew mold a week before the sell by date and I've had bread that didn't a week after the date.
Ah another reminder I am old, and thankful I got to learn the lost art of using my senses, and appreciating food that although not useful for winning photography awards, it was still yummy. Yes, I'm one of those that gets frustrated when I see someone throw away a banana because it had a softer spot on one end, or "ew, too many freckles". I am from a past that will never return. While I'm here, I'll miss it.
EDIT: I should mention that I prefer buying non-packaged food, so I still trust my senses better than any "sell by" or "best before" labels.
> Ah another reminder I am old, and thankful I got to learn the lost art of using my senses...
I literally have lost my sense of smell, more or less, since I was about 20 years old. These dates are pretty useful to me, I'd never know milk was off until I was pouring lumps of it.
The human olfactory system is the product of millions of years of evolution, it's highly adept at detecting food that's no longer edible. Nature doesn't come with labels, that's why the smell of inedible food is so obvious and fowl.
> We carried out a survey of campylobacter in chicken on retail sale in the UK between May 2007 and September 2008, and it reported that campylobacter was present in 65% of the fresh chicken samples tested. A European Union baseline survey carried out in 2008, and published by European Food Safety Authority in March 2010, showed the UK estimated prevalence for campylobacter in broiler batches (caecal contents) was 75.3% and 86.3% in broiler carcasses (skin samples). These results were above the weighted EU mean prevalences of 71.2% and 77% respectively. There was a wide range of campylobacter prevalence across members states varying from 4.9% to 100% in broiler carcasses and from 2% to 100% in broiler batches.
For example an unpasteurized cheese has a whole ecosystem of bacteria, each keeping the others in check.
The cheese like substances in most American grocery stores however are almost sterile, so a single bacteria like Campylobacter can colonize it and take it over unopposed.
Not all bacterial contamination leaves a detectable smell.
Well I'm in my thirties, and I'll happily use stuff way past the date.
I also go by my nose, though for some products like milk, I don't mind if it has a smell or some separation. I do make sure to boil it before I use it.
Edit: I also don't use pre-packaged food, I prefer cooking from scratch.
1) Use By (if properly stored)
2) Best By (a guess about quality, should be BEFORE above)
Note that both of these are /best case/ outcomes. Food can and frequently does go bad before then. An example that comes to mind is highly pasteurized milk. IF SEALED and STORED PROPERLY it can indeed live to that date. However I've also noticed that it tends to go bad at roughly a fixed time after unsealing, even if it's well before that date.
I checked the milk in my apartment's fridge. My room mate's only lists a pull date and has no other handling instructions (not even to refrigerate). The milk I am buying /now/ happens to mention, in otherwise completely ignoble and normal looking text in an out of the way area, to refrigerate and use within 7 days of opening, but not past the printed date.
I would hazard that most consumers have read the directions on milk /maybe/ once, if at all, and have been operating on prior behavior since then.
Section 4, paragraph 3, point 2 says that milk subject to 'aseptic processing' (defined earlier in the same doc, as milk that can be stored without refrigeration in a hermetically sealed container) must be labeled with the words 'keep refrigerated after opening'.
I've used plenty of products past the use by date (including milk). In my experience, the use by date is generally a pretty conservative estimate when it comes to noticeable degradation in quality.
The nose knows people! Just smell and look, I have eaten many past due things and scooped of layers of fungi. I have never been ill from it, 34 years and counting.
Sure, be careful with chicken and turkey but yoghurt for example, come on, it's basically a bottle of bacteria already and the smell is hard to ignore when it actually goes bad.
I generally agree, but be careful with moldy food. Some mold species produce mycotoxins that can be quite dangerous (e.g. aflatoxin can induce liver cancer, some mycotoxins can't be degraded and build up in the liver).
Simply removing the fungi is not enough, since the toxins diffuse into the food matrix (e.g in jam, yoghurt). An exception is mold on fruits and vegetables, there you can cut out the affected areas, the toxins can't diffuse across the cell walls.
> I have eaten many past due things and scooped of layers of fungi. I have never been ill from it, 34 years and counting.
Nobody should follow this advice. Most people will instinctively recoil from what you describe, for very good survival reasons.
The fluffy stuff on top is just the surface part of the fungus, its main body actually lies inside the food. The reason why you've never been ill from it is probably because your body is used to this. However, there can easily be long term (and sudden short term) health consequences from ingesting fungus toxins - including persistent infection, cancers, and neurotoxicity.
Off topic, but what is wrong with this site? The top bar is moving around and as a reader, I cannot use the top of the browser as a line to read. It is extremely frustrating.
I once bought some Camembert in France which, instead of having an expiration date, had a date to determine the ripeness of the cheese e.g. "Eat this cheese 30 days after this date if you like it ripe and runny".
"In fact, it's totally fine to eat a product even well after its so-called expiration date."
Not so, unless lost nutrition and bad flavor are totally fine. Americans eat a lot of moldy nuts, rancid olive oil, and stale coffee. Just Google for the expert opinions on these foods, and compare to what you read on the label of any mainstream, high-volume product on the shelves.
I'd say consuming stale coffee is totally fine. The only certain way (that I'm aware of) to get coffee that won't be stale is to grind the beans just before use, and I certainly do not have patience for that. I buy packaged coffee even if my hipster-y friends disapprove.
For a regular coffee drinker, a far more useful way to improve the taste of coffee is to remember to wash the pot of the coffee machine more regularly.
The clock starts ticking on coffee as soon as it's roasted (green beans last a long time). Grinding accelerates the degradation as more of the coffee is exposed to oxygen (nitrogen flushed containers help here). Coffee off its peak isn't harmful, but is less flavorful.
I get where you're coming from, but do yourself a favor and just get a decent burr grinder and a bag of the whole bean variety of whatever brand you are buying. Trust me, you'll learn to deal with the extra minute in your morning routine.
Cheese is best after the expiration date, if it's 2+ of blue, unpasteurised and soft. I only buy cheese from the reduced shelves, when it's less than half price because its use by date is today - this gets me tasty cheese, and helps limit my consumption (since on the average visit, there's no reduced cheese available).
Not recommended: buying your cheddar this way. That tends to go a bit hard and crispy. Always found that unappealing.
Also not recommended: using this purchasing strategy with raw oysters.
Since I live somewhere now where I can't get sharp provolone, I get the stuff the supermarket sells and leave it out on the counter for a month before I eat it. It tastes much better that way.
