Time to expire
I sometimes wonder about expiry dates.
I made some strangled eggs yesterday. I noticed that the eggs were four months past their expiry date. The spread was only two months past its date and the bread was the freshest part at a mere four days past. I might add that my culinary product was absolutely fine and met with some praise from Herself, which is something rare and wonderful.
Recently I finished off a jar of Marmite. I am the exception that proves the rule in that I neither love nor hate Marmite. I can take it or leave it but sometimes a bit of Marmite on toast can fill the spot. I noticed that according to the label, the jar had expired four years ago. Once more it was fine. Not a problem.
I can understand how some produce is inclined to have a lifespan and I keep a careful eye on the date on milk cartons. There is something a little nauseating when I go to pour some milk into my tea and comes out in globbets looking like it’s well on its way to becoming cheese.
There is plenty storage space for food here and I can guarantee with a fair level of confidence that you wouldn’t find much within its theoretical lifespan. Tins get shoved to the back and various packets and cartons are there “for emergencies”. My method of food dating is to give the jar or carton a good sniff and, if in doubt, a wee taste. The only thing I seem to have trouble with [apart from milk] is rashers that tend to pong a bit if a little past their date. Come to think of it, chicken can be a little iffy [sniffy?] too. My worst experience with chicken pieces was a while back I noticed a horrible smell in the car. After a thorough search I found a pack of chicken breasts under the passenger seat that had obviously fallen out of a shopping bag a couple of weeks previously. It was rank!
So what’s the point in expiry dates? In the majority of cases I reckon they’re a marketing ploy, aimed at the nervous and the neurotic. People throw out perfectly good stuff just because of a theoretical date. If I went down that path my cupboards would probably be bare and I would be spending a fortune replenishing perfectly good stuff with more stuff.
If it doesn’t have a layer on top of nice blue and green furry spots then it’s probably grand.
I have lost track of the number of times my lovely bride of 30 some odd years (I may need to check the math here, it feels like a lot longer). Anyway, she will occasionally hand me a milk carton and ask me to taste it because “it smells funny”.
It usually turns out that there is not one damned thing funny about it.
Milk is the only thing I tend to check regularly. There’s rarely a problem as we get through it quickly enough.
I have always told anyone who’s worried about sell by dates to sit and watch the product at midnight on the day of expiry and see what happens.
If it doesn’t go all runny and weird right then, then the date is probably a guideline and they should use their wit and common sense (no matter how lacking) to check it at each use until its all gone, or is gone off!
Use-by dates are for the hard-of-thinking. Almost all foodstuffs offer clues, by sight or smell, that they are perhaps a tad over-aged. But even then, a light crust of mould on cheese can be removed and the rest of the cheese-slab safely eaten.
You can still get the occasional dodgy prawn, even within its date range, but with no other clues. Life has risks, it’s about managing them, you don’t need use-by dates to do that.
It a simple 1st world issue. People are too dumb nowadays to check things out for themselves so our nanny state has to hold their hand and dates are allocated for everything. Million year old salt has an expiry date in a few years.
Some people will discard them before the date as its nearly there and thus must be nearly gone. We waste so much because of these dates and yet people are starving in the world. The best bit is shops can’t even give the stuff away in case they get sued. So it goes in the bin.
Personally I check everything regardless of the date as sometimes, especially with seafood, it can go off before the date. A simple look and smell test is sufficient.
The worst part of it is the waste. The least shops could do is have a cheap section for tinned food that “has expired” with a simple warning.
if someone reported them for it they would get fined by the Stasi. If someone claimed they got food poisoning they would get sued and they would lose. It just isn’t worth it for any shop to do so.
The shop around the corner has informed their staff that they must throw it away. If any are caught giving any of it away they will be sacked immediately. I asked for some stuff for the chickens and they said they couldn’t take the risk.
Simple warnings are much to complicated for the dumb people we have today. They are not allowed to accept liability because the Stasi know they are too dumb to understand.
A very sad reflection on the current generations.
Why has bottled water got a sell-by / use-by date, when the label tells that the water fell as rain millions of years ago and since then has been percolating through the various layers of rock before being captured in a sterile bottle?
The nicest surprise I had was finding a nice Adelaide bottled beer that had a best- after date. The fermentation finishes in the bottle. Cooper’s beer.
The canned food at Capt. Scott’s Antarctic camp was still edible when it was found years later.
Seems to me that the ‘use by’ date is more for protection of the producer than the consumer.