In my new position I am partly responsible for monitoring outdates at several stores.  Since my company has been in the news a lot over the years for selling expired products (mainly baby formula and dairy) it is a huge focus in our company and gets audited by several people to make sure the stores are pulling outdates regularly.

The article below from attn.com explains that the dates you see on products are not set in stone dates to throw product away.  A lot of people will toss something even before the date on the package, fearing that they’ll get some exotic bacterial disease from a box of crackers that says “Best by January 2016.”  While it’s true that they may not be as fresh, they are still safe to eat and there’s only a few products that you should strictly obey the date on (dairy products to be sure.)

There’s a graph below that shows how much food Americans throw away and it’s A LOT.  What frustrates me is that my company pulls product as much as 30-60 days before the “sell-by” date in some cases, and there’s a corporate policy that it can’t be donated to a charity so it goes directly into the trash.  That’s right–it’s not even close to being expired and it goes to waste.  Many grocery chains give their pulled products (and day-old bread) to local food banks who screen it carefully before using or distributing it, but apparently we are too worried about liability somehow so just take the easy way out.

So try and be a little more discriminate in what you throw away, and if you want to know how to make your groceries last longer, you can go here.

 

Often, meaningless food expiration dates can actually cause Americans to throw away products that are perfectly edible. This misdirected trend leads to an astonishing $165 billion dollars worth of food that’s wasted every year in the U.S. — roughly 40 million tons of food — an amount that has only grown since the 1980s.

WASHINGTON POST – 

To save yourself a bit in your pocketbook each week, however, as well as some strain on the environment from all of that discarded food, you can learn to be a food label reading ninja in order to better determine how long your food actually lasts. 

HOW TO DECODE THE LABELS

FLICKR / MARK TURNAUCKAS – FLICKR.COM

Looking through your fridge, you might find a variety of labels depending on the product, from “sell-by” dates to “use-by” dates to coded numbers on the bottom of a soup can. Deciding what’s safe to eat can be confusing. Do you need to toss the eggs with the “sell-by” date that’s two weeks old? (Probably not.) What about the milk? (Very likely.)

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) describes four kinds of date labels and gives us the following guidelines to differentiate their meaning:

• “Sell-by” dates: These dates are for grocers and other stores that sell food products. They tell the store how long to display the product for sale. According to the USDA, you “should buy the product before the date expires” but it “is not a safety date.”
• “Use-by” dates: While misleading, these dates are also not safety dates. Instead, the USDA says that they are “determined by the manufacturer of the product” to tell you when the product will be at peak quality.
• “Best if used by (or before)” dates: The meaning of these labels is slightly more obvious. They sound like they tell you when the item will be at its best, and these labels do — giving you a date to consume your soda or chips by, for instance, for best flavor or quality. Importantly, though, the USDA notes that these are not purchase or safety dates.
• “Closed or coded” dates: Perhaps the most confusing of all, these are numbers that can look like dates and may represent dates, but they are solely packing number for use by the manufacturer. The date may refer to the time of manufacture.

Other than for infant formula, the only one of these dates required expressly by law is the “closed or coded” date, which is required to help with tracking for interstate commerce and recalls.

The biggest takeaway is that none of these dates necessarily has anything to do with product safety. Even for eggs, which worry so many of us because of the potential for salmonella poisoning, the USDA specifies that “[t]he ‘sell-by’ date will usually expire [after eggs have been purchased], but the eggs are perfectly safe to use” for 3 to 5 weeks after you bring them home, provided they’re stored properly.

STILL SKEPTICAL?

DOLGACHOV – BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM

Most Americans discard between 209 and 254 pounds of edible food per year. I used to be one of these people, tossing out food way too early based on an erroneous understanding of how “sell-by” and other date labels worked. Then, while volunteering on an environmental campaign in Appalachia, I met a group of freegans.

Freeganism is a lifestyle strategy that centers partially around minimizing your consumption of resources. Although not all freegans dumpster dive for food in order to limit waste, this group of freegans did — dumpstering for groceries by choice in order to help offset the costs of feeding the campaign’s volunteers.

When I first heard about it, I got an image of someone rummaging through a trash can for half eaten sandwiches and bags of potato chips. But in reality, similar to Americans in their homes, grocery stores toss out large amounts of edible food which is beyond the “sell-by” date. This creates a surprising amount of edible waste, enough that dedicated freegans like Rob Greenfield can cycle across the U.S. and provide for more than 70 percent of their food needs from dumpstered fruit, vegetables, bread, and other products in sealed packaging.

Although my only experience dumpster diving for food by choice was in college with the freegans while traveling the South, I was so shocked by the quantity of good quality produce we were able to obtain that it permanently changed my consumption habits. Watch the video below, which shows some of the bounty that Greenfield is able to pull from the trash largely because of “sell-by” dates, and you may reconsider tossing those eggs out so quickly, too.