The Myth of the Expiration Date
Stop throwing away perfectly good food!
Let’s talk about “expiration dates” on food. Note the quotes. There is no such thing as an expiration date on food!!
A little history. I worked at the Oregon Food Bank for several years, where I was responsible for food safety at over 1000 emergency food distribution sites. As you can imagine, I did a lot of research around the longevity of shelf-stable food.
There was a whole other team making decisions about the perishable stuff! The last thing we wanted to do was give away food that would make people sick.
Here’s the truth about those dates you see stamped on every kind of food: there is NO UNIFIED SYSTEM. There are no federal guidelines. Well, almost none. There are rules about baby food. Because, babies! We don’t want them getting sick.
Some states have rules about the lifespan of various types of food, but those are patchwork at best.
So where do these dates come from? From the manufacturers themselves. They claim to pinpoint the date at which the food is no longer at “peak freshness” or “best flavor” or other made-up quantifiers. They have absolutely nothing to do with food safety.
I’m not sure when Americans stopped trusting their senses and turned instead to corporations to determine how we should manage our hygiene. We’ve become so germ-phobic that we spray bleach at the very idea of bacterium. Never mind that we’re eradicating our own immune systems in the process.
But back to food dating. I HATE the idea that people are throwing away perfectly good food because they think that it suddenly becomes toxic after a randomly assigned date. I’ve got a friend who regularly calls me to give her permission to drink milk that’s “expired”. Ugh.
Here are a couple of great articles on the subject — this one is a deep dive into the subject, this one outlines a series of guidelines with which I more or less agree.
Remember — you have a sense of smell for a reason! Your nose and mouth are generally all you need to determine whether something is safe to eat. That’s what our species relied upon for tens of thousands of years.
Factory farms have already led to the destruction of the ecosystem and the loss of thousands of family farms. Don’t let corporate America tell you what you can and can’t eat.
