What’s Up With Those Dates?

Do the freshness dates on food really mean anything? It’s Friday morning and we’re trying to get out of the house and get to school on time.  I recite the litany of breakfast choices for my daughter, and as usual she chooses yogurt and granola.  She gets everything out and before she puts the yogurt into her bowl, checks the date.  “This expired two days ago, I can’t eat it” she says.  And we have the same conversation we’ve had about two dozen times; the yogurt is fine, yogurt is good for at least two weeks past the date on the container, which, it turns out, isn’t actually an expiration date, but a sell by date, and yogurt remains fresh for about another seven to ten days after that date. Please, eat the yogurt.

Freshness dating in fact is somewhat of a shell game.  There are no consistent laws or regulations imposed on food manufacturers or producers, and very few products except milk, fresh meat, and infant formula have actual expiration dates.  The dates you see stamped on the box of cereal or crackers is some vague indication of how long someone guesses believes that product will be at its peak of quality.  If you regularly throw away food because the date on the packaging has passed, you are probably needlessly wasting a lot of food.  I recently taught a webinar on food safety, and what I said to the class, and now say to you is this—most food will let you know when it has spoiled, you don’t need a date on a package to notify you.

Almost everyone has had milk spoil in the fridge—it smells bad; it curdles if you put it in your coffee, and you don’t need to check the date on the carton to know.  Fresh food, like milk, meat and soft cheeses like cream cheese look and smell spoiled, and if they don’t they aren’t.  The type of bacteria that form on these kinds of products aren’t odorless and tasteless; they aren’t stealth, they make their presence known.  If you see pink mold, on your cream cheese throw it out, it your milk smells bad, toss it, it your meat feels slimy and has an off odor, pay attention, it’s gone bad, same with deli meats.  If it smells OK, and it tastes OK, it is safe to eat.

This week the Today Show had a great piece by Jeff Rossen on product dating, and though Matt Lauer wasn’t convinced about the mayonnaise, most commercial condiments, including mayo have a shelf life when unopened of about one and a half years, and once open will still last almost as long, and in fact commercial mayonnaise has so many preservatives in it, it can actually help preserve things like chicken and egg salads that are prone to spoilage. When mayo gets old, the quality will start to suffer, and the oils will start to separate from the solids, but there is still little chance it will make you sick. Ketchup has so much sugar in it that bacterial growth is inhibited, and mustard is too acidic, both can generally last up to a year in your fridge.

There is a great website Still Tasty where you can look up individual foods you may have a question about.  Her advice, like mine is this; if it looks bad, smells bad, or tastes bad, don’t eat it.  When it comes to spoilage, most bacteria, and molds will leave evidence that you don’t need to be a scientist to detect.  I am not talking about things like e-coli, salmonella, or other bacteria that can be found on perfectly fresh, raw foods.  Those are undetectable, and why it is important to cook food to the proper temperature, and practice good food handling in your kitchen, but that isn’t what we’re talking about now.  We’re talking about the peanut butter in your pantry that went out of date last week, but still looks OK. (Spoiled peanut butter smells bad, it turns rancid, and it tastes bad too.  It can make you sick, but you probably wouldn’t eat something that smelled and tasted bad, would you?)

There are many things wrong with our food supply today; things I could write about endlessly, but somewhat as a result of those things, the commercially produced products you buy have been so sanitized, neutralized, preserved and in many cases, chemically altered, the chances of them spoiling is very low.  They will taste yucky way before they pose any health threat.  According to Emily Broad Leib director of the Harvard Food & Law Policy Clinic there hasn’t been one incident of food poisoning or food-borne illness linked to someone eating food past the freshness date*.

So go ahead and exhale, and stop fearing your food.  Pay attention to your food—obviously this is a good practice for many reasons, but for safety’s sake, before you eat it, or cook it, or even put it into your bowl, take a look, a smell and a taste, and trust yourself and your judgement.  Nature has provided you with some excellent survival instincts, don’t be afraid to use them!

 

*this doesn’t include fresh meats, poultry, fish and dairy items