to agree with scrapping "best before" dates?

[TinfoilHattie]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39747327

Man on news this morning saying that Best Before dates on food should be scrapped because they are meaningless, and lead people to throw away perfectly good food which is safe to eat but might be less than optimum condition. Also huge confusion between "use by" dates on short shelf-life products like dairy and meat which should be adhered to, and "best before" which is a quality indicator.

I am very relaxed about best before - quite happy to eat things weeks or months "out of date", especially tins or packets. A tin of tomatoes which has a shelf life of 2 years isn't going to kill you if you eat it a fortnight into May when the best before date is the end of April.

So yes, scrap them. And stop everyone being so silly about food waste.

I'm old, we never had dates on anything.

I like them, they are useful to make sure you are buying the freshest produce. I'd rather buy something that has a longer shelf life than something that is bbe tomorrow

I agree with this. Only today I bought some cucumber, all the (full price) whole cucumbers were best before tomorrow while the half portions were best before 3rd May. I chose to buy the cucumber portion because it was two days fresher. I always look at the back of the shelf or at the bottom of the pile for my fresh food because I want to buy the freshest available produce. If you take away best before dates I would want a 'produced on' date in exchange.

So with no BBE dates on things, how is anyone supposed to know if that tin has been sat on the shelf for a week, a month or a year? It might be totally fine to eat at any of those points, but what happens if it is there for two, three, four years?

I work in a supermarket and one of the jobs of the shopfloor staff is to keep an eye on the dates and rotate stock so that shorter dates are brought to the front of the shelves so that they are more likely to get sold, and not just shoved to the back of a shelf never to see the light of day ever again. But they can only do this if they have a reference point to work from, so what are they supposed to do? How are they supposed to know whether that tin of beans was brought in yesterday or is the same tin that has been getting moved around the shelf (but never actually getting sold) for the last 5 years?

There are also guidelines about reducing items on/around the BBE date because you'd be surprised about the number of people who will bring things to customer services and say "I bought this today and the date was yesterday on it!" and you have to explain that it is a BBE date and therefore we can still legitimately sell it as it is a guideline not a cut off (obviously if it is well out of it's BBE then it would be an issue but a day or two is fine). So to save us all the stress and hassle, most supermarkets just reduce any items on/just before their BBE date, because then people can feel like they're getting a bargain, we save on waste and it keeps the stock rotation going rather than just having things sitting on the shelves not selling.

Presumably a production date would solve that. "Packed on/baked on/bottled on...." Then you could see how old it was.

I get particularly annoyed with all the sauces etc that say use within 6 weeks. Stuff like mustard and sweet chilli sauce really isn't going to go off that quickly - they're full of, variously, sugar, salt, vinegar and other natural preservatives.

I don't disagree with the principle of either BBE and use by dates and agree that they are useful for stock control and prevent rogue retailers from selling old stock.

However, I think the way a lot of people treat them is batshit and wasteful. People throw away so much perfectly good food because they see the date as gospel.

If something is in a tin with a 2 year date, it is going to be exactly the same after 2 years and X months. I had soup the other day that was 4 years out of date, and apart from the fact that the rice had lumped together at the bottom (it was mulligatawny) so I threw the rice away, everything in there was totally fine.

Following use by dates on fresh whole fruit and veg is is simply idiotic, and even meat could well be fine the day after the date. If it was OK on the stroke of midnight the day before, it probably also is a few hours later. If you are finding that meat is going off before the use by date, you need to check the temperature in your fridge.

If I had to buy packaged foodstuffs, I would prefer to know when they had been packed and to be able to make up my own mind on whether it was edible or not.

I dont agree with scrapping the dates. We should be teaching people what they mean, and about food science instead so they can make an informed decision.

I don't agree with scrapping dates at all. In fact a little shop near me has done it for packeted fruit and veg and it has caused me to not shop there anymore. What was happening is that when staff restock shelves it isn't obvious how long certain items had been there for and then they get mixed with the fresh stuff.

Eg tomatoes in six packs with no dates. Some ended up going mouldy on the shelf because clearly they got mixed with new stuff and the old ones remained. Ditto for other fruit and veg. I bought a packet of peppers which I discovered at home were extremely soft so were well past their best.

I lost my patience with the mouldy stuff so just shop in a supermarket now where it's clear when stuff should be used by. It's not just for consumers, it helps stores manage their stock.

I rely on my sense of smell. Yesterday I cooked bacon from a sealed pack that had a best before of 8 April. Last week I used cheese, again from an unopened pack that ran out last October. It was strength 6 so had probably been in a chilled storeroom for a couple of years. It smelled and tasted fine. It is shocking how much food is wasted all over the world.

This thread demonstrates the problem perfectly OP - so much confusion between use by and best before. There is pretty much no health risk in eating out of date dried pasta or beans but people assume there is because they have dates on.

DH used to work at a food research institute, which did a lot of experiments to try to establish optimum use by dates.

Their results only ever confirmed the ’Harvard Law' which states:

"Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, any experimental organism will do as it damn well pleases"

I heard this interview too. I work in the food industry and I am regularly rounded on during debates about eg old flour and eggs to make pancakes a couple of years ago.
I think food manufacturs/retailers often take the rap in this kind of debate, but we are only doing what the customer/law requires.
Despite middle-class angst about food waste, the average person does not want to buy food that food not look pristine. I have manned our stand at various festivals and regularly see people rummaging to the bottom if the pile to get a uncrumpled bag, even though our product is sealed and ambient. Virtually everyone picks up the top bag, looks at it, puts it down and rummages for a prettier bag. And his many attempts have there been over the years to sell imperfect produce at supermarkets? All have failed, presumably because the customers were passing them by.
Manufacturers are also criticused for food waste, but I would ask if anyone knows his hard it is to give food away? Most food banks/charities will not take opened packets/unlabelled food or good beyond the BB date. We tried to give waste away to a local farmer but were told it would have to weighed, documented and recorded every week as part of our standards audit. All of this takes staff time and therefore costs money, so the sad fact is that the easiest and cheapest thing to do is throw waste away.