New York (CNN Business) When you go to the supermarket and pick up an item — from milk to cereal to a can of beans — you’re likely to see a small date on the package, preceded by the words “enjoy by,” “sell by.” ” or a similar phrase.
You might think that this date is the absolute last day when the food is safe to eat. You’d be wrong. But you wouldn’t be alone in this mistaken conclusion, because the system behind food label dates is a complete mess.
There are no national standards for how these dates should be determined or how they should be described. Instead, there’s a patchwork system — a hodgepodge of state laws, best practices, and general guidelines.
“It’s the absolute wild west,” said Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFed, a nonprofit that works to end food waste. And yet, “many consumers really believe that they’re being told to throw food out, or that even if they don’t make that choice, they’re breaking some rule,” he said.
For food manufacturers, the sell-by date is really more about brand protection than safety, explained Andy Harig, vice president of sustainability, tax and trade at the food industry association FMI.
The sell-by date, often called the expiration date, is the company’s estimate of when a food product will taste best, its optimal date. “You want people to eat and enjoy the product when it’s top-notch, because that increases their enjoyment and encourages them to buy it again,” he said.
The main consequence of this unclear labeling? Food waste. A lot of it.
“Consumer uncertainty about the meaning of dates is believed to account for about 20 percent of food waste at home,” the Food and Drug Administration wrote in a 2019 post.
Wasted food often ends up in landfills, making it a major contributor to climate change. According to some estimates, food loss and waste account for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Wasting food also means wasting money, which many consumers cannot afford, especially now that grocery prices are rising. And the thrown food is directed from food banks to places where it is urgently needed.
Making sense of dates
While many companies put dates on their products, infant formula is the only food that must have an expiration date in the U.S., said Meredith Carothers, a food safety expert with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.
Companies choose dates based on when they think the product will taste best. But FSIS has its own safety recommendations. According to the agency, many canned goods can last between one and five years on shelves if stored properly. See the article : Emotional patterns are a factor in children’s food choices. Under the right conditions, packages of rice and dried pasta can last for about two years. The FDA provides food storage tips and guidelines on its website.
But the rules are wildly different for many perishables.
While shelf-stable items past the “best before” date are probably fine, fresh meat and poultry can go bad before the date on the label. That’s because store refrigerators tend to be colder than our home refrigerators, Carothers explained.
He said consumers should follow home storage rules when taking meat and poultry home. FSIS instructs people to cook or freeze some meat within two days of bringing it home from the store.
How we got here
Manufacturers began printing sales information about products in the early 20th century. On the same subject : Wire WIC for better working families with no food. At first, the date was written in code: retail workers had to match each code to the date using a key, but the codes remained incomprehensible to customers.
In the 1970s, grocery shoppers demanded more information about the quality of foods on supermarket shelves. Under pressure from activists, including the distribution of pamphlets deciphering sales codes, food manufacturers began labeling dates.
At first, this “open dating” tactic seemed to work.
In February 1973, The New York Times published an article titled “Food Dates Are Customer-Like and Loss-Cutting.” The article cited a study by the Consumer Research Institute, supported by the USDA and food manufacturers, which concluded that open dating has cut in half the number of consumer complaints about buying expired or spoiled food.
But by the end of the decade, researchers of the system were less convinced of its benefits.
A 1979 study by the now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment noted that open dating may not have been the right way to allay consumer fears.
“There is little evidence to support or refute the proposition that there is a direct relationship between open shelf life and actual food freshness,” the study found.
There is no way to “accurately determine the dates of different products, no consensus on what type of date or dates … to use for which product, or even which products to use at all, and no real guidelines on how to display the date,” the report’s authors wrote.
Decades later, we’re still in the same boat. Under current USDA guidelines, there are no uniform or universally accepted descriptions used on food labels for open inspection in the United States.
The FDA said manufacturers cannot put false or misleading information on labels, but “they are not required to obtain agency approval for the voluntary quality-based date labels they use or specify how they arrived at their applicable date.” Carothers of FSIS reiterated that the dates can be applied until, as long as they do not mislead customers and comply with the service’s labeling rules.
Where we go next: The sniff test
Where we go next: The sniff test
To prevent food waste, some advocates encourage people to rely on their senses when deciding whether certain foods are safe to eat. To see also : ‘Fonio grows naturally’: could ancient indigenous crops guarantee food security for Africa?.
British retailer Morrisons announced earlier this year that it would remove sell-by dates from some of its branded milk, switching to “best before” dates instead and encouraging customers to decide whether to discard the product based on its appearance and smell.
Morrisons offered this guidance to consumers: If it looks curdled or smells sour, discard it. If it looks and smells okay, you can still consume it after the date.
“When food has decayed past the point where we would want to eat it, our defense mechanisms work very well,” said ReFedi’s Gunders. “If the food doesn’t look good, if it doesn’t smell good, if it doesn’t taste good, if it’s slimy … then we shouldn’t eat that food.”
In general, Gunders advised those concerned about food safety to remain strict about consuming food before the sell-by date, when it has a “higher potential to carry listeria.” One way to identify these items? He said these are foods pregnant women are advised to stay away from.
Another way to avoid confusion, experts say, is to regulate the language used to describe these dates.
“Best by” versus “Use by”
The Food Date Labeling Act of 2021, passed last December, wants manufacturers to only use “use by” or “best by” dates on labels. The bill is the latest in a series of legislative efforts to create a national labeling standard.
The logic is this: companies that decide to put a date on the label need to make it clear to consumers whether the product is potentially dangerous after that date or just tastes a little off. If it’s a safety issue, they have to use the word “expired by”. When it comes to food quality, “best if used” is the way to go.
Gingers and agencies like the FDA and USDA point to this labeling harmonization as a good solution. Many companies have already made the switch.
Del Monte, which sells canned fruits and vegetables among other products, uses “best if used.” In an email, the company explained that the dates are “guidelines.” Dole, which has dates on its packaged salads, also uses a “best by” label.
Even if the bill becomes law and all companies make the same changes, there’s still a piece of the puzzle missing: warning consumers about the shift and what it means.
After all, consumers who pick up a product today may not necessarily know that “use by” is different from “best if used” or that either is different from words like “enjoy by” or “sell by.” “
Making the dates clearer to the public requires a “consistent and dedicated effort to help consumers think it through,” FMI’s Harig said. “I think it’s going to take some work to figure that out.”
