Best-before dates are a confusion (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Best-before dates are a confusion

9:18am Wednesday 8th February 2012 in Keith Thomson By Keith Thomson

A quick search through my food cupboards established that while most of the food had been purchased recently, some was beyond the best-buy date.

While the jars of mince meat were historic, the can of kippers was only a month out and the leek and potato soup just a couple of months older. I can confirm that they were delicious.

With most foods, it’s quite a simple matter to decide whether it can be eaten or not, and that’s by just looking at it, and perhaps smelling it.

If it looks alright, and smells alright, then it is alright. It’s very unlikely that baked beans or corn flakes will go off – they might be less than perfect, but they can still be eaten with confidence.

However there is a small range, including eggs, fresh fish, meat and milk products, that certainly should be eaten with care. With these, it is prudent to take heed of the use-by date information, even if the food looks and smells fine.

It’s also very sensible advice to abide by the instructions on refrigeration, freezing and time to consume after opening.

One of the problems seems to be that there is confusion about what the various dates on the products actually mean, and this isn’t helped by instructions such as ‘display until’ or ‘sell by’ which are there to help the shopkeeper and not the customer.

The Government is considering scrapping these two dates to simplify matters, leaving just the’ best before’ and ‘use by’ instructions and this would certainly help.

There is an important difference between these two terms. The ‘best before’ refers to quality, and even though the date may have passed the food is still good enough to eat, though perhaps not quite so perfect. Recently, a tin of food from Scot’s hut in the Antarctic was opened, tasted and eaten and it was a century out of date.

The use-by date is quite another matter. This is a health statement and implies that exceeding the date may well cause unpleasant side effects, some of them very serious. In these cases it’s not worth the risk and that means shopping carefully, and managing the fridge so that such foods are always eaten in date.

One of the results of this confusion is that the estimated amount of wasted food ranges from five to 12 million tonnes with the average household throwing out £680 of food every year.

We shouldn’t really be throwing out any food, and with a little care we could save money as well as the large volume of CO2 that is produced in landfill sites and compost heaps.