to think we are going INSANE over food 'expiry' dates??

[PacificDogwood]

Bread that gets thrown out on its sell by date?
Sugar/salt with sell by dates?
Nothing can be reheated for fear of Death by D+V?

As far as I am concerned, if it looks ok, smells ok, has not grown fur and cannot move under its own steam and I want it, I will eat it.

All this throwing out of perfectly good food really gets on my wick.
Supermarkets locking bins so nobody can help themselves to out of date stuff that is being chucked out anyway? WTF?

We have gone insane. Please nobody spoil my rant by mentioning the very rare case of botulism from tinned food - I'll still take my chances.

I feel better. Thanks for listening.

DH will eat anything past it's use by, he just sniffs it and says "yeh, it's fine". The other week we opened a tin of pineapple rings from 2004. They were a bit bland but edible aparently. DH ate them.

Thats why I never eat Marmite. That stuff never goes off. I am wary of food that even bacteria won't touch (puts on hard hat to protect from Marmite lovers!!)

sorry that should have read on facebook. But yeah, this woman in her 30's really did ask this and I was sorely tempted to tell her to have a fucking look at the banana and engage her brain.

Lizzie the toast crumbs DH leaves in the marmite jar go off! Grrr.

Naoko, I am not British either and have wondered whether it is something to do with the whole Anglosaxon hygiene obsession - see above comment about American husband .

StrandedBear's sugar talks sense.

My grandparents used to buy 100kg of potatoes around the time of their harvest and store them all winter in the basement of their house. Every now and then you'd have to throw the odd mouldy one out. Same with apples - they'd last all winter if stored correctly. OTOH, you'd have to be prepared to eat a wrinkly apple once in a while...

What is Marmite actually made of?? Genuine question.
I don't eat it because it's vile, not b/o any health concern .

Some things never go off because they don't offer any food to germs ie salt, but some preservatives are just a bit scary.

I have a Little Gem lettuce in the fridge I bought for Christmas; it is a bit limp, but will go nicely with lasagne tonight. I shudder to think what made it keep this long though . Anybody know what lettuces get treated with?

What is mould? I mean, is it dangerous? I have eaten mouldy bread without realising and normally just cut the mould off cheese and eat the rest. Am I risking my children's lives?

And are potatoes ok to eat after you have removed the growing roots? I do this all the time but just want to make sure!

YANBU. If it looks and smells fine and has been stored correctly then I won't worry about sell by dates. The major outbreak of botulism would have happened whether everyone had eaten in date food or not.

Botulism is relatively rare in the UK. There have only been 33 recorded cases of food-borne botulism in England and Wales since 1989. Twenty-seven of these were linked to a single outbreak that was caused by contaminated hazelnut yoghurt. Since 1978, there have been eight cases of infant botulism. None of these cases resulted in death. link

I am using some gluten free flour that is 6 months past its date. Dry goods I use the sniff test. I do find that things like rice, nuts and cous-cous just taste unpleasantly stale if left too long, but my nose would tell me when opening the packet anyway.

Meat and fish I am far more wary ever since I suffered a really nasty bout of salmonella. My stomach simply isn't as strong as it used to be, so if it looks and/or smells off it goes in the bin.

Cheese - I juts scrape the mouild off and use in cooking. Yogurt I will use if it smells OK and is only a few days out.

Marmite is the yeasty by product of brewing. There is an extra strong one out now, I may have to try it.

Mould is fungi growing on food. They do produce spores that penetrate whatever the obvious mould is growing on.
Regular ingestions of mould has been linked to health problems - sorry, I am a bit vague on what kind of problems.

I still cut it off cheese and scoop it out of Philadelphia - I seem to be utter, utterly incapable of eating a tub of Philly before it grows fur...

Thanks for that info, ariadne - that also explains why I could not stomach Brewer's Yeast when I was trying to take it to help with milksupply many moons ago

Should it be 'funghi'??

i used to work with a perfectly normal-seeming woman, we didn't have ready access to drinking water so would buy big 2L bottles of supermarket still water. she would actually throw it away if it wasn't drunk 'within 3 days' because that's what it said on the label!!!!!!!!!!!!! seriously. water.

I reckon Marmite is fine because it is 99% salt. Mmmmmarmite.

I'm in the 'sniff to see' camp. I'm a bit more fussy with things I give DD, but for myself I trust my own food sense.
A friend of mine works for a big food company, and says the sell-by and use-by dates on most food are bollocks. She says trust your nose.

Only the nose knows

I would be marginally more wary with poultry than most other food but other than that surely you're better off sniffing and making an intelligent decision on that basis than you are blindly trusting dates etc anyway?!?

I always just scrape the 'eyes' off potatoes and cut out any black bits. No one has ever gotten food poisoning from my kitchen.

I do all of this out of sight of my husband, BTW, who reads dates as sent down on high from the Lord.

Also, I'm American. I do think we are more relaxed about it on that side of the pond. My husband is Irish, BTW.

I had some Marmite a couple of months ago and only noticed the date afterwards. It went out of date in 2009 but you couldn't tell. Not sure how it managed to get that out of date though.

I've never taken any notice of freeze on day of purchase, what difference does it make as you don't know what date the supermarket had it so does it magically go off when leaving the store? I usually end up freezing the day before it goes out of date if I haven't got round to using it by then and it can then live in the freezer for months before A) I remember it exists and B) remember to take it out in time to defrost.

There's a difference between use by and best before dates though. I have emetophobia so am quite funny about use by dates.

We had some marmite 'go off'. Took me a while to work out what was causing our upset stomachs. Eventually realised it was only on days we had marmite with breakfast (assume it was crumbs/margarine dipped in it accidentally which caused the problem). MIL didn't believe me and took the marmite home with her. 24hrs later she was forced to admit we were probably right.

Yes, my grandparents still do that with the vast amounts of potatoes. At the start of winter they get a kilo each from a few local farmers, and decide which ones they like best. Then they go to that farmer and buy an enormous sack of those to last the winter. They keep them in a large box in the barn. And they have tastier potatoes than I do, bought fresh every week from the supermarket... (because I have nowhere to store a season's worth of potatoes or I'd do the same). Wrinkly apples - fine, or if too wrinkly, they'll be fine in apple sauce/apple pie/apple crumble/apple anything else.

Cutting the sprouted roots out of potatoes is fine, it's why potato peelers often have a bit at the top to scoop them out with. If they've actually managed to grow several inches worth of root I don't eat them but that's because they're not very nice at that point, I doubt it'd make you ill.

And yes, mould on food - even once you've cut the visible bit off - can make you sick. It often won't because you have a functioning immune system. We've all eaten a piece of toast and only later realised the bread's gone mouldy. It's not good for you, though, and can make you very ill if you get unlucky.

I don't throw food out just because of its sell-by date. I would use my eyes and nose to decide. It also matters if the food is to be cooked or eaten as-is.

I think sell-by dates are helpful. In the US, shelf-stable goods do not have a use-by date, and it is quite easy to keep things for over 10 years without realising or without rotating stock.

My dried apricots say to refrigerate and consume within a week they've never suffered from sitting in my pantry for months. We grew up eating sun-dried meat that was stored in the outhouse. This country is far too paranoid about use-by dates.
Strangely enough DH and I were just having this rant this morning (after I spotted the apricot packet).

I use a scratch and sniff approach. Dd1 is 15 and doing food tech gcse, where they must have taught them some guff about use by dates because she keeps telling me that things like bread can't be eaten because it's out of date.

If it's not mouldy and doesn't smell then it can be eaten.

My husband is fussy. I can go shopping, knowing the fridge has things in it I want to use that night, and he's cleared it out thus bugering up tht nights recipe [grr]. He sort of stands there at one minute past midnight and slings stuff. Now I de-packet it mwhahahaha so he cant see the dates.

Actually, last week I did chicken that was on the turn. I just put cajun spice on it, and no one knew the difference .

casserole/stew/soup/shepherds pie/spaghetti bol etc were invented for the use of wrinkly veg!!!

I do hate food wastage and I do predominantly shop at 4pm and hover round the yellow label cabinets.