Do you follow Use by and Sell by Dates, and other food safety issues

spike7451

galaxysurfer wrote: »

Like everyone else; smell it & look at it.
I was alive well before these sell-by dates came into being, and what does everybody think we had to do BEFORE these daft 'health & safety' labels came into being?
I love reading about true survival stories; peeps who've been lost in the jungles/deserts etc for weeks for example.
If I see a food item's S.B.D. has expired I often ask myself thus;
'If I'd come across this after 7 days starving in a remote location, would I say to myself; ''Oh, can't eat that, the sell by date has expired!'', or would I try it anyway''...
..I think the answer is obvious.

Same here! I always take a butchers at the reduced lines in the shops,for stuff on the sell by date.If it smells ok & looks ok,then go for it! Food nowerdays is often loaded with preservatives anyway.
I mean I have Muller Corners in my fridge 2 weeks over the use by & they're OK (ate one last night with no dramas!)
Only thing I draw the line at is meat,eggs & milk.(although meat does'nt get left long enough to go off in my gaff!)

stinky_onions

I ate a Muller lite strawberry yoghurt at Christmas, to prove a point to my B-I-L. It had gone out of date in June, it was a bit watery on top but after a good stir was absolutely fine and tasted exactly the same as usual.
B-I-L couldnt beleive it. He throws things away that are going out of date tomorrow if he thinks they might not be eating them in time:eek:

craftycrafter

Jo6673 wrote: »

I'll risk anything for a couple of days except milk, bit funny about that!!!

... they taste delicious. I presume the heat of the oven deals with any germs.

Gloomendoom

Bean13 wrote: »

I am training my kids to trust their nose, eyes and ultimately taste to check food they also check dates and use common sense on food which it seems is a forgotten art.

I do the same. I used to try it on the cat first if I had any borderline cases. If he pulled a funny face and walked off, I definitely didn't eat it.

idreamofbeingfrugal

I take no notice of best before dates! years ago I was shocked when my partner of the time got a new job (in stock control). What was he to do, you ask?

He had to control stock coming in for their labels to be changed to read new dates!!!! So why throw out that ketcup because of a date, when a shop can re-sell the very same with a new date just because it remained unsold.

We were talking a big formal set up too, not some small corner-shop lark!

Common sense should prevail - if it smells bad, looks funny or has mould growing then chuck it out. Think how it can be used otherwise eg mouldy bread crusts - cut off the yucky bits, then have a leisurely walk in the park and feed the birds/ducks with the remaining good bits! Waste less, spend less but feel good!:j

charlies-aunt

idreamofbeingfrugal wrote: »

I take no notice of best before dates! years ago I was shocked when my partner of the time got a new job (in stock control). What was he to do, you ask?

He had to control stock coming in for their labels to be changed to read new dates!!!! So why throw out that ketcup because of a date, when a shop can re-sell the very same with a new date just because it remained unsold.

We were talking a big formal set up too, :j

I think that this practice must go on in a lot of industries - I used to work for a well known high class manufacturer of expensive chocolates.

Any of their own brand of chocolate that is out of date on the shelves is returned to the factory - easter eggs, choc novelties, bar chocolate or boxes of assorted chocolates.

The bar chocolate is added back in to batches of freshly made chocolate. Good quality chocolate has a very, very long shelf life and potentially using their return and reuse methods, it is recycled many times over a long time period.

The chocolate from the boxes were carefully sorted by what the filling was - those that were suitable such as rum truffles were added to new batches of the rum truffle filling mix.

Its not 'sharp practice' to do this - its completely legal for them to do this type of recycling and they have to obey the guidelines for how much recycled stuff they can add and the manufacturing unit where the process takes place is immaculately clean - the Quality Control is very stringent too.

The chocolates they produce are high quality, delicious and very popular - although I suspect that a lot of people might think twice about buying them if they knew that the expensive chocolates they were buying contained "recycled" chocolate!

Hannah_10

It's a well known fact that retaillers have been manipulating dates for ages in order to induce people into throwing away food uneaten and thus spend more. The anecdotal evidence is here, but the hard facts start to become established when you read this, straight from the horses mouth at the Food Standards Agency. In the coming weeks and months I hope we will find out more about how the FSA is going to put this right and restore confidence in labelling again.

I'm always surprised not only by the number of people who don't know the difference between a Use By Date and a Best Before Date, but also the reasons why something has a UBD so I'll try to explain them really simply.

What it's about is bacteria multiplication. A UBD is calculated (or should be calculated) by the potential multiplication rate of disease causing bacteria (such as baccilus cereus or streptococcus aureas) on the food when stored correctly. So, if the number of bacteria double every 20 minutes and you need figures of [figures expressed as ten to the power of lots] bacteria in order to cause a person to become unwell then the food will be safe until [date].

There are two large flaws in this however...
1. The UBD dates are devised from a lower bacterial level than is appropriate to an average healthy person. The level would be appropriate to perhaps a baby, an elderly person or a person who is unwell anyway. An averagely robust person can stick quite considerably more bacteria than that!
2. The most serious consequences of unsuitably old foods for an averagely robust person are diarrheoa and vomiting. Not nice, but equally not exactly catastrohphic.

Don't get me wrong, people DO die of food poisoning, yes indeed, this can not be denied. They are almost always very frail people such as patients in nursing homes or people with AIDS. These are also the kinds of people for whom the common cold is life-threatening. If you've ever had a nasty dose of the shtts then you may have felt like you were going to drop dead at any moment but that is hardly the same.

There are people who will eat yesterdays yoghurt without a moments concern and there are those who will stand and sneer superiously. It is my experience that if you confront a sneerer and ask them to explain how a UBD is calculated or who determines a BB date the sneerers get a bit vauge. I am hoping after hearing a bit more about it that those who sneer may be inspired to do a little research of thier own and find out what food labelling actually means before dismissing the non-conformists so glibly.

Fozz

My DH's Dad was a butcher, and brought home the out of date meat and pies for the family! They ate them with no ill effects. I used to be a slave to dates, but am now much more relaxed about this. I eat yogurts well past their date and will use ham etc for a couple of days past its date if it smells OK. Will cut mould off cheese and scrape it off jam and use the rest.
I'm sure there is quite a safety margin built in, have heard that it's up to two weeks for dairy produce and a week for other stuff, but have no hard evidence for this, just word of mouth.
We do tend to treat food like a toxic substance waiting to poison us, my MIL & stepmum (88 & 87 years old) had a much more sensible attitude!

Kevie192

Hannah_10, I take it you work in some kind of food research lab do you?

Hannah_10

Kevie192 wrote: »

Hannah_10, I take it you work in some kind of food research lab do you?

Nope, why do you ask?