Did you know none of those dates on food products – sell by, use by, best before – indicate the safety of food, and are not federally regulated? Did you know that it is usually safe to eat your expired food? Did you know food manufacturers trick you with expiry dates to scare you into squandering perfectly edible food so they could earn more money? Did you know confusion over dates, according to a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, leads 9 out of 10 Americans to needlessly throw away food worth $165 billion annually?
Using the website StillTasty, which collects data from the USDA, the FDA, the CDC, and the food manufacturers, Business Insider created a graphic that shows just how long certain foods can stay in your fridge and pantry before they are inedible.
The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) says that expiry dates are merely “suggestions by the manufacturer for when the food is at its peak quality, not when it is unsafe to eat”. The organization therefore wants to see a labeling system that better explains to consumers how long their food will last beyond the sell by date.
As a consumer, you too can start making changes by educating yourself on how best to handle and store food, including with this handy graphic that helps demystify your refrigerator.
This Article (Food Expiry Dates Trick You To Throw Perfectly Edible Food) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.
Anonymous has lost it’s trajectory. This misleading title and assortment of facts designed to pit consumers against manufacturers is disgraceful of the name Anonymous. I mean no shit a company isn’t going to say after this day it is bad. It might last longer. It might not even last that long. They have to set the dates before their tests register the foods as unsafe. They are federally regulated, but the date printed can be made for an earlier date than the ones tested.
Not sure what country you’re from but in Canada there are only five types of products need to be labelled with an expiration date:
Baby formula and other human milk substitutes.
Nutritional supplements.
Meal replacements.
Pharmacist-sold foods for very low-energy diets.
Formulated liquid diets.
So that sour cream that is still fine in my fridge that “expired” yesterday, has nothing to do with testing or regulation.
There is no one person in Anonymous to chart its trajectory. It’s many people with many interests. Food waste actually helps get me fed some great stuff that markets don’t want to sell anymore, so this angle is actually pretty subversive.