CHP Magazines CHP Magazines Spring 2019 #16 | Page 64
From
By Daron Taylor
This man ate ‘expired’ food for a year
Last year, the founder of the chain
Mom’s Organic Market, Scott Nash, did
something many are afraid to do: He
ate a cup of yoghurt months after its
expiration date. And then tortillas a year
past their expiration date.
“I mean, I ate heavy cream I think 10
weeks past date,” says Nash, “and then
meat sometimes a good month past
its date. It didn’t smell bad. Rinse it off,
good to go.” It was all part of his year-
long experiment to test the limits on
food that had passed its expiration date.
It turns out the dates on food labels
may have little to do with food safety.
In many cases, expiration dates do not
indicate when the food stops being safe
to eat – rather, they tell you when the
manufacturer thinks that product will
stop looking and tasting its best.
Some foods such as deli meats,
unpasteurised milk and cheeses, and
prepared foods like potato salad that you
don’t reheat, probably should be tossed
after their use-by dates for safety
reasons.
Tossing out a perfectly edible cup of
yoghurt every once in a while doesn’t
seem that bad. But it adds up. According
to The Dating Game, a 2003 report
by the American agency the Natural
Resources Defense Council and Harvard
Food Law and Policy Clinic, 91 per cent of
consumers said they occasionally throw
out food past its sell-by date because
they think it is unsafe.
64 Complete Health
That food waste in landfills
generates carbon dioxide and methane,
a greenhouse gas 28 to 36 times
more effective at trapping heat in the
atmosphere than carbon dioxide. And
you’re not just wasting calories and
money. You’re wasting all the resources
that went into growing, packaging and
transporting that food.
In Australia, while many of us
assume the date on the packet is a firm
cut-off, according to Food Standards
Australia and New Zealand date marks
are “a guide to how long food can be
kept before it begins to deteriorate or
may become unsafe to eat”.
The food supplier is responsible for
placing a use by or a best before date
on food, and foods that must be eaten
before a certain time for health and
safety reasons are marked with a “use
by”. Foods cannot legally be sold after
that date.
Most foods have a best before date,
of which the regulator says: “You can
still eat foods for a while after the best
before date as they should be safe but
they may have lost some quality.” Foods
that have a best before date can legally
be sold after that date provided the food
is fit for human consumption.
Foods that have a shelf life of two
years or longer, such as some canned
foods, do not need to be labelled with
a best before date because they may
retain their quality for many years and
are likely to be consumed well before
they spoil.
In the US, researchers from the
powerful American regulator, the FDA,
and the grocery manufacturing industry
largely agree on one solution to the
part of the food waste problem caused
by confusion around expiration dates:
clearer package-date labels.
In 2017, the grocery industry, led by
the Grocery Manufacturers Association
(GMA) and the Food Marketing Institute
(FMI), announced a voluntary standard
on food-date labelling. They narrowed
the plethora of date-label terms down to
two: “best if used by” and “use by”.
“Best if used by” describes product
quality, meaning that the product might
not taste as good past the date but is
safe to eat. “Use by” is for products
that are highly perishable and should
be used or tossed by that date. The FDA
announced in May 2019 that it “strongly
supports” the GMA and FMI efforts
to use the “best if used by” label to
designate food quality.
When it comes to food safety, the
FDA says that manufacturers can put
whatever terminology they want to
convey health risk. But while the FDA is
encouraging manufacturers to use “best
if used by” as a best practice, it’s still not
required by law. There is no federal law
that requires dates on food, except for
infant formula.
Emily Broad Leib, of the Harvard Food
Law and Policy Clinic, says that to have
an impact, changes to expiration dates
generally need to be federally mandated.
“We’re going to need the main
government agencies that regulate food
to be able to say: These are what these
labels mean. When you see these on
products, here’s what you should do,
here’s how you should interpret them,”
Broad Leib said.
Others who advocate replacing
current food date labels suggest using
language that indicates shelf life
after opening or the date on which
the product was packed. Mom’s CEO
Scott Nash argues for something more
unambiguous.
“They’re trying to bring clarity to the
descriptor of the date. OK, that’s great,
that’s better than what we have now,”
he said. “But I think some things just
shouldn’t be dated.”