The absurdity of the “best before” date
How a stupid system encourages us to throw away perfectly good food
My hometown in rural Nova Scotia recently launched a community fridge and pantry; a public location where people can drop off fresh vegetables or canned goods. Anyone is welcome to grab what they need anytime, day or night. With grocery prices soaring, food insecurity is on the rise and there is a desperate need for low cost (or free) food options like this.
Soon after opening, the fridge organizers faced a conundrum: what do we do with donated items that are past their “best before” date?
According to research conducted in the US, the majority of people (54% ) believe that a food item past its “best before” date should be thrown away because it is no longer good to eat. This, however, is fundamentally incorrect. Here in Canada (like in the US and Europe), the “best before” date indicates that the food will be at its peak freshness on or before that date. But it remains perfectly edible and safe to eat long after. Most products will taste fresh for many months after their “best before” date has passed, and are safe to eat (although less tasty) for years to come.
Even fresh products like bread, meat, dairy, and eggs are edible long after they are past their “best before” date. The only way to know for sure if these types of products are no longer edible is to smell or taste them. In the case of canned or dried goods, they almost never spoil; they just become less flavorful.
The only products that have a true “expiration date” (which you should justifiably throw away after that date has passed) are baby food and meal replacements items like nutrition drinks or protein bars because “these products have specific compositional specifications that might degrade after the expiration date.”
Despite most people’s misgivings, items past their “best before” date are so incredibly safe that there is nothing stopping a grocery store from selling them, as the Canadian government makes clear:
“It is not illegal to sell a product if its best-before date has passed. However, when this date has passed, the food may lose some of its freshness and flavour, or its texture may have changed.”
In practice, however, you will almost never find a can of peaches past their “best before” date at your local grocery store. These items are sometimes donated to food banks or community fridges, but more often simply thrown away by the retailer. Since the majority of the buying public believes that a food item that is past its best “before date” is potentially dangerous to eat, it’s no wonder that grocery stores do not want to be seen as selling “dangerous” food. They simply do not want to scare off customers, or waste time explaining what “best before” really means.
This state of affairs is utter and complete madness.
According to Feed Nova Scotia, 1 in 6 households in the province is food insecure (i.e., “lacking reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food”). And yet, 60% of the food that we buy is not eaten but thrown in the garbage. And one third of that wasted food (11.2 million tonnes per year here in Canada) is perfectly edible.
In other words, both the grocery stores and individual households here in Nova Scotia throw out enough edible food to easily feed everyone in the province and completely eliminate food insecurity.
So how the hell did we wind up with this bonkers system?
It’s not that we are collectively stupid. In fact, this madness is the product of a completely reasonable—and rather intelligent—system to prevent foodborne illness. With the advent of factory-made food in the 20th century, governments had to step in to regulate food safety in order to prevent large-scale, national food-disease outbreaks from unsanitary conditions. The public demanded it, in fact. The Capone family of mobsters was credited with forcing the government to put labels on dairy products after Ralph Capone (Al Capone’s brother) got sick after drinking old milk.
“My grandfather went to Springfield, Illinois, totally on his own and he lobbied the milk industry to start putting the date that they bottled the milk right on the bottle,” Deirdre Capone (Ralph’s granddaughter) told The Huffington Post. “Then people would make up their own mind if it was too old.”
But this perfectly reasonable labelling system has created a modern society that is incapable of thinking rationally about food safety. Many grocery stores in Europe (e.g., Tesco, Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Morrisons, Asda) have begun removing the “best before” labels from products in order to stop people from misunderstanding them and throwing away edible food. This idea was floated here in Canada, but the vast majority of people (62%) oppose the initiative.
Here in Canada, consumers would prefer to have more (as opposed to less) information about their food, which seems entirely reasonable. But since the majority of people do not understand how to interpret that information correctly, the end result is obscene food waste and hungry families.
And this is what is so frustrating about human intelligence. We have created a remarkable food production system – growing and distributing enough food to feed everyone here in Canada. But because we have intelligent and logical systems in place (commerce, legal, regulatory) meant to protect people from food-disease, we end up with millions of people going hungry unnecessarily. In my town, this means there are quite literally people looking out of their living room windows at garbage bins filled with edible food while their own children go to school without breakfast.
It’s madness.
Hopefully, we can use our collective human intellect to think our way out of this unnecessary problem. At the very least, each of us—at the individual level—can think twice about throwing away edible food that is past its “best before” date, and instead drop it off at a local food pantry. It’s just one small act of sanity, but it will make all the difference to your hungry neighbor.