141–150 of 288 posts
If you're like me and slightly paranoid about food expiration dates and sometimes checks things in corner stores, you might notice they like to sell items that can be razor thin on the "sell by" date.
You know who hates food waste more than Gavin Newsom? Every greedy supermarket market executive that throws away 30% of their inventory. Especially when their profit margins are often in the low single digits. The article says there is no mandates on any types of dates. So I imagine these dates serve some purpose, otherwise they wouldn't be there. Laws like this often sound like they're helping but since no one is fo…
Not sure whether it was the removal of best before dates or Brexit, but fresh food and veg in Britain is often already rotting in supermarkets. So now instead of the store throwing out loads of produce past its best, I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.
I have always been under the impression that the entire point of pre-packaging produce like avocados, apples, and garlic is to mix items that are bad which no one would buy in with some good items so you can still sell the bad ones.
This seems to have always been the case in California - where you can generally get good produce.
You know who hates food waste more than Gavin Newsom? Every greedy supermarket market executive that throws away 30% of their inventory. Especially when their profit margins are often in the low single digits. The article says there is no mandates on any types of dates. So I imagine these dates serve some purpose, otherwise they wouldn't be there. Laws like this often sound like they're helping but since no one is fo…
Not sure whether it was the removal of best before dates or Brexit, but fresh food and veg in Britain is often already rotting in supermarkets. So now instead of the store throwing out loads of produce past its best, I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.
Though it'll get worse. The regime for imported fruit and veg is still in transition, with a lot of stuff that the UK was supposed to bring in in 2021 recently delayed til 2025.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also much confusion about how food actually goes bad. There are some foods that absolutely should be avoided after a specific amount of time. But most will go bad somewhat randomly, mostly after but often before their sell/best by dates. Sometimes a jug of milk will be bad before it even arrives at a store. Sometimes mold will appear on fresh bread very suddenly. Food is more complicated than fixed dates. I…
Geez, that is aggravating. Do they really think that a completely unsealed cardboard box with holes in it is keeping out all the germs? Sometimes I think we've really failed ourselves regarding basic biology and education requirements.
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I wish regulators stopped trying to be poetic and just use clear English. What's "best by?" You need to write "do not eat after." Nobody needs to be explained what that means.
"Clear English" is using as few words as possible.
When safety is on the line, the goal can't only be "as few words as possible"
Let's hope this catches on elsewhere!
It likely will. Unfortunately, California laws tend to be de facto national laws for consumer goods, because manufacturers don't want to make one version for Cali and one for the rest of the US.
Meanwhile in Maine, you're questioning the sanity of Californians.
When my wife and I moved in together, we had a spat about what "sell by" dates actually meant. She had been throwing away loads of perfectly good food because she misunderstood the meaning of the sell-by date. I don't remember who taught me what they actually mean, but I was able to point her to a USDA site that showed the actual meaning. I'm pretty sure that was the only time I have ever been right when she and I di…
My wife does the same thing, and I've been unable to convince her. Not talking perishable stuff, either - she'll throw out something like a bottle of hot sauce because it is a few months past the "best by" date. No matter how much I try to tell her that these things are shelf stable and will be good for even a year or more after the date, she doesn't believe me. I think that the show Kim's Convenience said it perfect…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Clear English" is using as few words as possible.
If they make sense yes, but clearly people don't understand this. When safety is on the line, the goal can't only be "as few words as possible"
Yes, I'm serious and I say that as a fellow American. We are not literate.
So use as few words as possible and a date. Honestly we could probably do without the words, just the date.
This article claims that 12 million tons of food are wasted in California annually, and that this law will save 70,000 tons of food from going to waste. California's population is 39 million. Does that mean that every Californian is wasting a pound of food every day? That seems suspiciously high to me. I'm curious how they came up with those numbers. I think this law is like plastic straw bans, or mandated bag fees,…
That seems plausible. Figures vary a bit, but generally you're looking at 20-30% of food in supermarkets ultimately being wasted. An average person eats something like 1.5kg a day, so a pound seems about right. (Of course it's not as simple as that, because there's also wastage at home, and that's very hard to measure.)
That said, there's also a lot of wastage by restaurants and other catering operations, and this won't really help there, so the impact may not be as great as people hope.
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American eggs are incredibly sensitive due to the chlorine washing they go through before making it to the store. Not oddly specific. Here in Sweden (and I assume the rest of the EU) when I buy eggs they are not refrigerated and I keep them in the pantry at room temp for weeks or months without issues. The price I pay is that they sometimes come with a little bird poop on them from the store.
(Most of) Europe doesn't wash their eggs, allowing them to be stored at room temperature, but as you said, the standard for physical contamination is lower. The US washes our eggs, requiring refrigeration but greatly extending shelf life and greatly reducing physical contamination. Advantages to both (Europe wins hands down if you need to whip egg whites to stiff peaks) but very interesting how the two regions addres…
Let's say I have unwashed eggs and washed eggs, and I put both in the refrigerator. Won't the unwashed ones last longer, because they haven't had the natural protective coating removed?