What if neither of you believe in expiration dates but one of you think it turned and the other doesn't?
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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Many years ago (I was there) expiration dates were useful and only on products that would actually expire--mostly just milk, cheese, and meat.
Then, I think it was Budweiser came up with the "born on date" marketing campaign for beer. Since then, on anything that doesn't actually expire, like beer, it's been used to prompt people to throw away perfectly good food, so they'll hopefully buy more "fresh" food.
It's been going on for so many years, we now have at least two generations who have been duped into believing them.
I believe in expiration dates, my dogs do not.
Expiration dates have a lot of leeway.
Yeah this is me.
If it's on or after the last day I need to leave it in the fridge for several weeks until I'm in the mood to acknowledge that it's dead.
My partner does believe in use-by dates but she has very poor situational awareness and is just oblivious to the concept. Recently she tried drinking a flavoured milk that had been in the fridge for a few months.
Was it flavored when she put it in the fridge?
Joke's on you - I'm not in a relationship.
Expiration dates are a myth
They’re not a myth; they’re a scam. They’re set by the brands, by determining when the food is the “freshest”. But that determination is made entirely by the brand, and they have a direct financial incentive to encourage food waste. Because if consumers throw more food away, they buy more food. So they set the expiration dates extremely short, so people will throw food away, well before it actually goes bad.
They're also highly incentivized to make you eat it when it's freshest so you have a good experience with their food and become a repeat customer.
But the point is that it’s not truly an expiration date. In most cases, the food is perfectly safe to eat after the date. It may taste stale, but it’s still safe. Many people treat expiration dates as a food safety thing, when it is not.
These are two different things, and it's usually worded as such:
Expiration Date: we cannot guarantee that eating food after this date will not cause sickness. Eat at your won risk, and we are not responsible if you get sick.
Best By Date: basically means nothing. We think it tastes better before this date but there are no actual health implications after this date.
Fuck "Best By" dates. I'll decide if it tastes good or not, and if I don't like it, I'll throw it out. As long as there are no actual health implications. You usually only find expiration dates on dairy meat, and sometimes bread.
If they go to the expiration date while still on the shelf ig going to go back to them, the supermarket isn't going to pay for that.
It also very much depends on your country, food authority, and retailer. Some food authorities have stricter categories for very perishable foods where unless it has gone very bad, you can't see it's not suitable for consumption anymore, eg. meat and vegetable. And while the producer has an incentive to encourage waste, the retailer has the incentive to reduce it, as you typically can't sell items to consumers that are no longer within date (Again, depending on your location). If an item is unreasonably often thrown out by the retailer, that leads to consequences in the deals being made between the retailer and the producer, which pushes the producer not to be too inaccurate either.
Most things taste off or stale anywhere near the expression date.
If you can afford it and it's a wildly overproduced thing like milk, I certainly wouldn't encourage you to force it down.
If it's scarce, don't do it again. Maybe force it down. Probably use it in something where the lessened/worsened taste becomes a non-issue.
My wife just threw out a ~12 hour old fried rice we doggy bagged last night that I was planning on lunching on because we "touched it with our spoons". Sigh.
She does know that reheating leftovers is a thing, and that heat kills bacteria, right?
A lot of food doesn't even have an expiration date. It's more common on a lot of foods to have a sell by date, which is not the same thing as an expiration date, and some foods are even just labelled with a packaged date, which is hopefully always in the past. Otherwise you've got bigger problems than spoiled food. MREs are especially notorious for this.
That being said though, I'm still usually the one throwing food out. At some point you just have to admit you're not going to eat it, and no one wants your dubious opened packages or half eaten leftovers. It's just gonna have to go eventually.
My wife is servsafe certified and I have a terrible sense of smell. Guess which one I am?
Oh they're real. They're just arbitrary most of the time.
Expiration dates are useful, but they are not usually a hard end point to a food's safety or edibility.
One's own nose is usually the best way to see if old food is edible. Doesn't smell good enough to eat? Don't eat it.
My sense of smell is pretty bad. I only keep milk in my fridge for coffee so it lasts a while, and once it's past the date I smell it every day assuming it could have gone bad. Usually it hasn't, but occasionally it has curdled into chunks, and apparently I can't tell the difference with my nose - only once the pour feels "off" or the chunks make their way into my coffee can I have any better indicator.
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