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posted by janrinok on Saturday May 25 2019, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the look-smell-then-taste dept.

CBS News:

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday May 25 2019, @03:36PM (5 children)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday May 25 2019, @03:36PM (#847624) Journal

    I was born a hippy child. One of my photos from a very early prewalking age, is of me sitting in the dirt and rocks of a river bed chewing on a stick I found with muddy drool oozing from the side of my mouth. Whatever made my parents think that was cute is beyond me, but suffice it to say, I don't get sick much.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday May 25 2019, @04:40PM (4 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Saturday May 25 2019, @04:40PM (#847650)

    That's a riot! And well-known to be true. I never quite did anything like that, but I remember eating dirt (mud pie!) and playing in dirt and covering myself with mud, swimming in ponds and rivers, getting leaches on my feet...

    That said, as an adult I met a friend who is a medical expert (brilliant VMD (veterinary medical doctor)) who will never touch grass or dirt. She told me about the parasites that will go through your skin and feet. There's speculation that Schistosomiasis (parasitic worm) probably killed King Tut. And there are many others. And MRSA. And maybe you and I and others are inherently immune to MRSA? I know I have no allergies, and there's some thought that early life exposure to varieties of germs builds a healthy immune system.

    Don't read if you have a "weak stomach": One of my friends is a world traveler, has lived in very unclean areas of undeveloped countries. Back here in USA, some mutual friends bought a house and started setting things up, including stocking the refrigerator with some kind of liquid yogurt. Well, major renovation / construction ensued, and the world traveler sees the many years out of date yogurt, just opens a bottle and chugs it. Never tasted it, never poured it out to see what's in it. Never got sick from it either. And now I've lost my appetite... sorry if you've lost yours too.

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday May 25 2019, @08:21PM (1 child)

      by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday May 25 2019, @08:21PM (#847697) Journal

      LOL -- eating lunch all through reading. Still reading. Not grossed out in the least. The acid in yogurt probably makes quite stable so long as it doesn't catch a mold spore.

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday May 26 2019, @04:32AM

        by RS3 (6367) on Sunday May 26 2019, @04:32AM (#847814)

        So a few months ago I did a rare for me food adventure and ate some yogurt that was a month or two out of date. It didn't seem to taste much different- to me yogurt by definition has gone bad, and bad is bad, right? Well, the next day, or maybe that night, had a bit of an issue- not too bad, but I won't eat yogurt that's out of date by more than a few days.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @03:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @03:08AM (#847789)

      Similarly, we were dirt poor (sorry for the pun). Seriously though, whenever we got meat it was usually so cheap we stocked up as much as we could afford. Of course it got "funky" pretty quickly. I remember my mom yelling at my dad "I wouldn't feed that to a dog," and my dad yelling back "It's fine just cook it." Long story short, I'm known among my friends as the man with the cast iron stomach. The real test was when an LA restaurant got a whole lot of people sick from food poisoning on day. It was the salads. I had one too. I was the only one who didn't get sick. Everyone else sat on the toilet for a week.

      I'm not poor now, but I've made sure my kids have eaten some pretty funky meat. In some countries it's called "aged beef." There are restaurants in Mexico where you can actually order steaks that they have to scrape the green fuzz off of before they cook it. Pretty tasty too.

      So far, my kids have never had any stomach issues. Now if I could only get them to eat broccoli...

    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday May 27 2019, @10:05PM

      by edIII (791) on Monday May 27 2019, @10:05PM (#848289)

      Never tasted it, never poured it out to see what's in it. Never got sick from it either. And now I've lost my appetite... sorry if you've lost yours too.

      No worries. I've seen 2-Girls-1-Cup, thus I've developed quite the immunity to crap on the Internet.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.