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When it comes to labels on food, there's no agreed upon wording to let consumers know when to toss packaged grocery items. Public confusion over how long they can keep and safely eat products is part of the reason Americans throw away roughly a third of their food -- about $161 billion worth -- each year.
Compounding the uncertainty for consumers about when to toss food is the array of descriptions producers use to signal a product's shelf life. Those include "use by," "sell by," "freeze by," "best if used before" and "expires on," leaving the public unclear on the safety of products and causing lots of perfectly fine food to get tossed.
[...] Looking to stem the tide of still-edible food that ends of in landfills, the FDA is backing a voluntary industry effort to standardize the "best if used by" wording on packaged food, saying it should curb consumer confusion thought to contribute to about 20% of food wasted in U.S. homes.
[...] Still, the FDA's guidance may not go far in clearing up the public's misunderstanding about labels, observers said. For one, the labeling only applies to food quality, not its safety.
[...] The [Grocery Manufacturers Association] and the Food Marketing Institute in January 2017 recommended making the phrase uniform, along with use of the "use by" phrase to indicate when food should no longer be eaten for safety reasons. In a letter to the food industry, the FDA said it would not address the latter phrase "at this time."
Predicting when food is past its prime is an inexact science, according to Kevin Smith, senior advisor for food safety in the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. He said consumers should regularly examine food in their kitchen cabinets or pantries that have passed their "best if used by" dates, and throw out if they've noticeably changed in color, consistency or texture.
"Food is much safer than it was a few decades ago, largely because of refrigeration and dramatically improved manufacturing processes. But to really address the problem with food waste, the FDA should tell people something more meaningful than open it, look at it, smell it, and if it seems OK, eat away, otherwise, toss," Steinzor added.
The FDA should instead define when foods become risky to eat based on shelf life and require those dates be disclosed, she said.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Saturday May 25 2019, @03:13PM (4 children)
That's quite enough to get some forms of food poisoning anyway, botulism, etc, sadly.
Also there's probably some kind of funny sex joke in there somewhere.
(Score: 3, Funny) by hemocyanin on Saturday May 25 2019, @03:40PM
That's what she said.
(been rewatching The Office recently)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25 2019, @05:31PM (2 children)
> botulism...
This! Canned string beans killed a friend of a friend this way, possibly the pH was wrong? The person that canned them at home ate his own product, remarked on how tasty they were, and died in minutes in front of my friend (who luckily didn't try any of these beans).
Taste catches many kinds of food poisoning, but not all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rleigh on Saturday May 25 2019, @06:29PM
That sounds like a failure in the canning process, and really bad luck. I've not come across it being done at home before. Industrial canning and bottling usually puts the product through a Pasteuriser prior to labelling. That should kill off the bacteria. If that or the seal fails, then the pressure in the can and/or the smell should be indicative of spoiling. We've recovered cans from Victorian shipwrecks which were still perfectly sealed and edible (though with some contaminating lead leached out of the solder seals used back then).
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday May 25 2019, @08:06PM
Here in the US this is extremely rare, literally a one-in-10 million (per year) chance.
Source: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/9/03-0745_article [cdc.gov]