Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
While we were recently visiting the family cabin recently—which is shared by three extended families—my wife started poking through the refrigerator. It contained a variety of half-used bottles of salad dressing, hot sauce, mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, and various other sundries. She was—of course—checking expiration dates. Some of the stuff in there had been bought relatively recently but we saw a few old-timers at least one year past their prime. Surprisingly, (to her) many of the expired products were perfectly good. The barbeque sauce, the ketchup, and the pickles were fine. Even the cottage cheese (a week past its prime) tasted great.
I’ve never been a huge believer in “Use by”, “Best When Used By”, or “Expires on” labels. I think that in many cases we are being told to throw away perfectly good food—and that we should trust our own senses more than these labels. I’ve often noticed that milk is often good up to a week—or more—past its expiration date. Just sniff it. Taste it. You can tell.
In fact, according to Alissa Wilkinson’s article in the July 8, 2021 posting of the Vox website, “The Lie of Expired Food and the Disastrous Truth of America’s Food Waste Problem” expiration dates are not the best metric for determining whether a specific good has gone bad. According to Wilkinson, “most packaged foods are perfectly fine for weeks or months past the date. Canned and frozen goods last for years.”
Consumer labels are problematic, to say the least. First, the guidelines for expiration dates vary wildly from state to state, and with very few exceptions, there are no federal guidelines for food products. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the labels themselves are ambiguous. What’s the difference between “use by” or “sell by” or “best if used by”? Apparently, producers label “best by” as a means of guaranteeing that consumers eat the food at its peak of its freshness. Consuming the food on or before that date is a way for producers to protect their product. The food doesn’t spoil after “best by”, it just doesn’t taste as fresh. But all the average consumer sees is the date. And once that date is past, many perfectly good food products get tossed.
According to the USDA website (https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs) between thirty-one and forty percent of the American food supply ends up in landfills. Not all of this can be attributed to the consumer caution: vermin, disease, shipping, spoilage, or faulty storage equipment also contribute to this vast waste. And it is not only the food that is wasted. The labor, cost, resources, and energy necessary to dispose of trashed food is also significant. But the consumers do their share. We buy too much and throw out whatever we can’t use. Expiration dates are not an insignificant factor in this.
In her article, Wilkinson states that freshness codes, which originated shortly after World War II, were never originally meant for use by the consumer. They were instead designed to help inform grocers when to rotate their food stocks, but when savvy consumers realized what those strange rows of numbers were, they began to clamor for an easier means of determining freshness. When producers realized that their consumers wanted freshness dates to guarantee they were getting the best product, they responded.
We have been conditioned to shop for our food in certain ways. Labels are only a part of it. Many grocers overstock their shelves to attract more shoppers. According to Wilkinson, people want to see everything they want in a store. She states, “We may not even realize it, but we’ve trained ourselves to see full crates of beets and shelves of salad dressing as a sign that the store is good, and therefore the food in it is good. Abundance indicates quality.” Wilkinson maintains that half-empty shelves put off shoppers, that they’d rather go somewhere else. Of course, stores never sell out of all their stock. When cheese or eggs go past the “sell by” date, supermarkets are required to throw them out.
Stores are also reluctant to donate expired products to shelters or the homeless even though they may be perfectly fine to eat. Fear of lawsuits or the negative optics of giving “bad” food to homeless people are considerations in these decisions. All this leads to a shameful amount of waste and a horrific amount of suffering in this country. After all, people are going hungry—or starving. According to the Feeding America website, nearly forty-two million citizens—including thirteen million children—may experience food insecurity. And yet we throw away tons of food every day.
Perhaps it’s time to reeducate ourselves as consumers. That box of cereal that’s a couple days past the “best by” date is probably fine. And not all food has to be pretty. Those beautiful round ripe blemish-free tomatoes are bred to look good. Not to be tasty or nutritious. That funky-looking cucumber you might pass by in the produce aisle is perfectly good to eat. A store with empty shelves (as many of us experienced during the lockdown) is not a bad thing.
Producers have skewed the psychology of shopping in this country. Walking into a supermarket isn’t just about putting a meal on the table. It’s about getting exactly what we want—or might want—at some point. We are spoiled as consumers. We buy more of what we need—especially if it’s on sale. We can buy anything. Look down the cereal aisle at the supermarket. We don’t need all that.
And we don’t need Kellogg’s or General Mills or Nestle telling us when a food is no longer good to eat. We have to start trusting our own senses again. Do the smell test. Get away from the packaging and the marketing and focus groups. Go to your local farm or co-op. Grow a garden. Get food from the source. Eat that bent zucchini.
The consumer also needs clarification from the food industry when it comes to labeling. If there was a single standardized labeling system that was easily understandable, less food would be wasted. If consumers understood that “best by” labels pertained only to freshness and not to spoilage, there would be no stigma in giving them to the needy or keeping them in the back of the fridge for an extra week. Let’s no longer trust the food industry or the supermarkets with our food choices. We don’t need their instructions; we can tell when something has gone sour.
Food providers need to clean up their act. They need a smell test of their own.