The Tradeoff of "Sell By" Dates, Food Waste, and Food Safety

Readers: I might be posting a bit sporadically over the next few weeks. I'm still kind of recovering from last month's 29 straight days of new recipes.
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Why do we require "sell by" dates on food?

Well, ostensibly, it's to protect consumers. Nobody wants themselves or their loved ones to become sickened--or worse, killed--by food that's past its prime.

Unfortunately, greater safety usually involves tradeoffs. We could require perfectly safe cars, for example, but they would cost $infinity (and probably get really really bad gas mileage). Likewise, we could make our food supply perfectly safe, but we'd end up requiring food distributors and retailers to date food so conservatively that they'd be forced to throw out a nauseatingly high percentage of it.

This will make food prices go up. A lot. It's an obvious tradeoff, because farmers, transportation and delivery companies and the entire food retailing industry will need to recoup the cost of a far greater level of food waste.

And then there's the planet to think about. From an environmental standpoint, there's nothing more wasteful than using up perfectly good land to plant and grow food, then using energy to harvest it and take it to market... just so you can later throw that food away and have it decompose in a dumpster or landfill and give off still more greenhouse gases.

Worst of all, imagine requiring the disposal of food when there are people in our communities who might need that food to survive. All because of some dates and numbers somebody stamped on the outside of the package.

So, readers, where do you place your priorities? Towards food safety? Or towards minimizing food waste?

Do you think we should place relatively short term sell-by dates on food? Or are you willing to trust food consumers with some degree of agency and choice in deciding for themselves what foods are past their prime or not?

Or, do you think, as Ralph Nader so revealingly said, "the consumer must be protected at all times from his own indiscretion and vanity"--and therefore we consumers must defer to regulators and the government on this question?

If we choose the latter, who then do we go to to solve the problem of food waste? To the same regulators who inadvertently created the problem by requiring stringent sell by dates in the first place?

Share your thoughts!

Read Next: When Do You Throw Out Food? A Question for Readers


The inspiration for today's post came from a letter to the editor in an Australian newspaper, which I featured a few weeks ago in a Friday Links post.


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When Do You Throw Out Food? A Question for Readers

Last Tuesday's article on food waste raised an interesting question (it came up in the comments) that I wanted to ask to the entire Casual Kitchen audience.

When your food passes its expiration date, do you throw it out?

This is my blog after all, so I'll go first. Here's my answer: Never.

The milk we buy, for example, is almost always good for several days after the sell-by date. I use the sniff test. When it comes to meat and other dairy products, we do the same thing. Visually observe and smell. If it's still good, why waste it?

With eggs I'll go even further. We've eaten eggs that were weeks past their sell-by date and never had a problem (and if that idea scares you, why don't you take a look at this provocative post on eating eggs stored for four months without refrigeration).

Produce is another story, I suppose. Usually there are no expiration dates. And the amount of time that can pass between field and grocery store for many fruits and veggies, combined with the varying treatment of the produce (example: some produce might get bruised or bumped during transport, hastening spoilage), essentially means you have to check out the merchandise carefully before you leave the store. Even then it can be a crapshoot.

But then again, once in a while you get lucky. Two weeks ago, I found some potatoes buried in the back of our fridge that had to have been more than (shudder) four months old. They predated our departure to Chile! But they looked fine, smelled fine, handled fine and tasted just great in a batch of Yellow Split Pea Soup. You just never know.

Finally, with cookies, chips, granola bars, frozen ice cream and other "shelf-stable" food products, I have to admit, I never even look at the sell-by date (another shudder), I just eat them.

Readers, where do you stand? What do you do when your dairy, meat or other food products "expire"?

Related Posts:
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My Seven-Day 100% Raw Foods Trial
Ask Casual Kitchen: Advice for a New Blogger


Help support Casual Kitchen by purchasing Everett Bogue's exceptional book The Art of Being Minimalist. (This is an affiliate link for an e-book that I strongly recommend to my readers--and if you decide to make a purchase, your purchase will help fund all of the free content here at CK!)

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me from your own blog, or by subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Why Reducing Food Waste Is Harder Than it Looks

It's difficult to think of a more pointless practice than to go through all the effort of growing, harvesting, transporting, storing and selling food--only to waste it by throwing it away.

Unfortunately, consumers, and the food service industry we buy from, waste food preposterously. In fact, a 2004 study from the University of Alabama claims Americans waste nearly half of their food. And a highly detailed recent study of UK consumption habits suggests that as much as 25% of UK consumers' food is avoidable waste.

However, it also shouldn't surprise Casual Kitchen readers to find that, sometimes, studies capitalize on fear and alarmism at the expense of calm and rational analysis. The fact is, there are often serious tradeoffs involved when we try to recapture food that otherwise might be "wasted."

In fact, in some instances it can be downright dangerous to attempt to reduce food waste.

Let's go over a couple of examples in the data (and prepare yourself, because these waste numbers are truly disturbing). The UK study claims in one example that 210,000 tons of "processed vegetables and salads" is wasted each year. The study further claims the majority of this waste occurred because the food was "not used in time," which simply means the food passed a sell-by date label (see page 4, and then pages 41-42 of the study).

The study calculates the cost of this waste (what I call "date-label waste") to be a shocking £240 million per year (about US$350m--and this is just in the UK!), and it further claims that practically 100% of this waste is completely avoidable. Sheesh.

Another disturbing example: a full 96% of the waste in the category of "coleslaw and hummus" is due to date-label waste, and, you guessed it, this study claims that this waste is also totally avoidable. It's obviously a smaller category, and the dollar value of that waste is "only" £71 million (about $US100m), but to me, it's the nature of that waste that seems so shocking.

Wow. Okay. If this is all true, then why don't we just add three or four days to the sell-by date on all food products that have a high propensity to be wasted? Usually foods never go bad by the sell-by date anyway. Why wouldn't that dramatically reduce waste?

Here's where things get a little tricky.

If you read my article that exposed the inappropriate alarmism of the so-called "Ten Riskiest Foods" study, you know that despite the impressions we get from the media, food-borne illnesses are actually quite rare in this country, and deaths from food-borne illnesses are shockingly rare.

However, the odds of contracting a food-borne illness would increase meaningfully if we were to eat more expired food, or, more specifically, if we were to eat food that was dated with less conservative sell-by dates.

Yes, we could change the sell-by dates on our food and we would definitely reduce our food waste. But it would be at the risk of increasing occurrences of food borne illness.

The CSPI, the organization that I lampooned in my Who's Watching the Watchdogs? post, wrote an inflammatory and fear-mongering report based on a food-borne illness rate of just 2.4 thousandths of a percentage point, and a death rate so low that it rounds to zero.

If that is enough to generate a flood of mindlessly alarmist media stories (which it did, sadly), imagine the media firestorm that would erupt if that illness rate ticked up even slightly. And that would likely cause regulators to step in and force the food companies involved to recall and destroy (in other words: waste) all related food products that might be at risk.

None of this changes the fact that we can and should try to reduce our own sources of food waste in our homes. We can all do our best to by purchasing only as much perishable produce as we need, by freezing or using meat or dairy products in a safe and timely manner, and being smart about our purchasing and cooking habits.

Here's my point: Our food regulators have put in place certain safety measures that definitionally create waste because they want to do the best they can to insure our safety. And if food companies or food retailers were to try to reduce food waste by dating their foods using even slightly less conservative standards, they would get crucified by the media and by so-called watchdog groups like the CSPI.

So, let me ask a difficult question: Who is being wasteful?

Readers, what are your thoughts?

Update: The debate that follows below in the comments led to a follow-up article: When Do You Throw Out Food? A Question For Readers. Have a look!

Related Posts:
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The Worst Lie of the Food Blogosphere
Survivor Bias: Why "Big Food" Isn't Quite As Evil As You Think It Is
The Problem with Government Food Safety Regulation
Who's Watching the Watchdogs? Ethical Problems in the "Ten Riskiest Foods" Report By the CSPI


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me from your own blog, or by subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!