Have “best before” labels gone out of date?

I don’t understand why there’d ever be confusion. Sell By is rule for retailers, Use By is health advice for consumers, Best Before is taste advice for consumers. Who doesn’t understand this?

And if we were to lose Best Before, there’d be products with no date at all. At which point we’d end up demanding a manufacture date. So what’s the benefit?

I’ve never thrown away a “best before” item until after that date is well gone – as it simply means that the item is usually edible but might not be as palatable. The date is very pessimistic anyway..

I’ve tended to ignore “use by” dates unless the food looks or smells off.- but depends on the difference in the date – a few days is ignored – a few months isn’t.

Fur on cheese is usually simply cut off – never had an ill effect from doing so.

We always buy expired “sell by” food and sometimes “best before” or even “Use by” food for our kennel dogs from the wholesalers.- so it is eaten and not wasted.

Interestingly enough our 50 dogs have never had problems from eating such food prepared at the kennels for many years – but do sometimes have sickness problems if volunteers prepare their own bought food for the dogs at weekends – So we’ve come to the conclusion that bad home preparation is the cause not the date on the meat from wholesalers.

I’m old enough (just!) to remember when Marks and Spencer pioneered the “sell by” date and used it as a major advertising and sales campaign in the 1970’s.

Presumably before they did this no one had any dates on the food and had to reply on honest retailers and commons sense in their own kitchens.

Being more realistic people bought fresh foods from greengrocers, butchers, fishmongers, bakers, dairies and grocers and ether home froze it at once or ate it within at most a week of purchase.

To my mind the only reason we have ANY of these dates is that society has evolved so that it is now ‘normal’ to shop once a week or once a month, stock-pile obscene amounts of food of all types, and then expect to be able to eat it as and when we feel like it over the next week or month.

At the same time Home Economics has disappeared from school curricula (thanks Maggie), microwaving has become as good as universal, specialist shops have been forced out of the marked by supermarkets (thanks Lady Porter … don’t forget the homes for votes scandal), the “litigation society” has come to the UK (thanks USA) and the concept of a house wife or house husband, for whom a primary duty was DAILY shopping and food prep has all but become extinct.

Put together these changes in the way we live and you get a society where most people expect all food to come from a one-stop-shop, each item ridiculously over-packaged and with evidence ready to be used against the store if the consumer so much as doesn’t like the taste or colour, let alone becomes ill after eating the items concerned.

At some point we have to take responsibility for ourselves (we used to call this “growing up”) and we have to learn what is at it’s best, safe or unsafe and deal with it accordingly.

We can’t blame the people who currently can’t do these things: they have been either never taught how to or have been carefully “untaught” what they used to know, and guess what: it’s all for profit!

Bottom line for me: keep the “sell by” date to protect us against the unscrupulous retailers, of which there are many including big names (remember the “blue meat” scandals of which there have been several in the past decade), but get rid of “best before” and “use by”, replacing them with some real education.

I doubt my views are popular, but should we ever be faced with a disaster like Japan recently was with the earth quake, we will be far better off if people have these skills!

In all of these discussions, please spare a thought for us anosmics. Being unable to smell food makes it much harder to assess whether it’s safe to eat.

I now have an augmented nose, my wife, (who I didn’t marry specifically for her sense of smell although it does come in handy) but when I lived alone I would throw food away or avoid some types of low shelf life options.

Dave

One of the best ways to cut waste and save money is to buy food from one of those sites which sell food approaching or past its best before date (ie totally safe and perfectly good to eat). I use bestbuy-foods dot com

I have recently discovered that M and S Best Before date refers to the end of the day stated as being ‘best before’. e.g. If a product says Best before 9 March – it means best before the end of 9 March. My logic is that best before 9 March means it is best eaten by the end of 8 March.

M and S says its way of doing this is the same as other retailers. Whether it is or not – it makes little sense to me.

best before dates should definitely be done away with.
even my local Tesco admits to using the best before as a use by date on things like fresh strawberries for example. In other words, they ditch the food when it has reached its best before date
In my mind, the confusion is caused by not knowing how long after the best before date food is safe to eat