Are you throwing away perhaps more than 1 in every 5 of your food dollars because you misunderstand expiration dates!? One of my fav pet peeves... Why? “That’s because the ‘expiration date’ is not an indicator of when you can eat you food; it’s an indicator of when the brand is willing to stand behind that food,” says NRDC’s Dana Gunders. The date is printed on a product “so that you can have the peak consumer experience with it. No one is pretending that you can’t eat that product after the date—that it’s bad, that it’s going to make you sick.” Writing specifically on the topic of canned goods, food scientist Harold McGee points out that, “Food technologists define shelf life not by how long it takes for food to become inedible, but how long it takes for a trained sensory panel to detect a ‘just noticeable difference’ between newly manufactured and stored cans.” The report suggests that confusion over dates adds significantly to America’s food waste problem. There’s no comprehensive reporting on how much of the $165 billion of food that goes to waste in the U.S. every year is due to “expired” foods being tossed. But a 2011 report by the food-waste-reduction group WRAP found “confusion over date labeling accounts for an estimated 20 percent of avoidable household food waste,” in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 22:24:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015