Best before 23.04.26 — Tip #21
Understand expiry dates and manage your groceries better 🥕
For most of human history, the link between where your food came from and your stomach was as direct as possible. At first, you sourced it entirely yourself. Later, you exchanged with members of your tribe who produced it directly. Eventually, you bought from trusted members of your community. Throughout all these phases, you judged the safety and freshness of food using your senses: eyes 👀, nose 👃, and touch 🤌.
From the 20th century onward, with the advent of industrialization and global trade, most of us began purchasing food through (super)markets, where that trust factor is not as strong. The 24/7 access we expect to all types of food, even when they’re out of season, means our food often comes from a wide range of distant places, where transport safety and shelf life become concerns. At the same time, we’ve gradually become worse at using our own senses to judge food quality.
In roughly 200 years, we still haven’t found a perfect solution to this problem. The closest system we have is called the Codex Alimentarius, a collection of international standards, guidelines and codes of practice that are generally voluntary unless adopted into law. The EU has clearer and more harmonised consumer food-labelling rules than other jurisdictions, but there is still work to be done.
As we move through increasingly uncertain historical times, understanding how this works will become even more important, both to keep yourself safe and to reduce food waste (and, as a result, your grocery bill).
So what do we have for now?
🔝 Best Before (or BB): Consume before this date if you want to ensure the product’s freshness (taste, texture, smell, crunchiness)
Food is generally still safe to consume after this date.
🗓️ Use By: Do not consume after this date, especially if it’s fresh food (e.g. meat), ready-to-eat food, or packaged fresh food (e.g. salad).
Food may still be safe to eat, but if you can’t confidently rely on your senses, you should not eat it.
🧑🔬 Sell By: You may bump into this on eggs or milk, it’s not really for the end consumer but for the food distributor to know when to remove from shelf if unsold.
One caveat: these dates are generally set by the food business operator and/or the manufacturer. Of course, it’s in their best interest to choose appropriate dates, because either the product won’t taste good anymore (and you won’t buy it again), or it may be harmful to your health, which can lead to legal consequences.
The real “hack” is to avoid overstocking fresh food. Try to buy only what you need for a few days, eat it while it’s fresh, and then restock. Instead of stockpiling fresh food, you can rely more on canned and frozen items, since their shelf life is much longer and they often remain safe past expiration dates if properly stored and unopened.
Personally, for the last few years, I’ve been in the fortunate position of outsourcing this problem, since I have a restaurant preparing and delivering all my meals daily (fresh, not packaged!). But in the rare cases when I do cook for myself, I still follow these guidelines.
Your weekly tip: For the best taste, consume food by its Best Before date. For safety, especially with fresh food, consume it by its Use By date. Avoid buying fresh food in bulk, and encourage yourself to shop more frequently.
Don’t forget to share this tip with a friend who stocks food like a supermarket 🫰
See you next week, until then…
Don’t Panic 😱
In Greece, at least in the past, it didn't say “best before” or “sell by,” but rather “expiration date,” which led most people to reasonably assume that it would be harmful to eat that food after the date.
That's just not true though. In most cases, I don't think the manufacturers are intentionally misleading; they just don't want to risk it, so they write the earliest date when the product could potentially go bad. A prime example is milk. It's easy to tell using your nose whether milk is safe to consume. I've consumed milk up to five days after the expiration date many times, and it pains me when I hear of friends throwing away perfectly good milk cartons on the day they supposedly “expire.” :')
What really bothers me though is the fact that honey still has “best before” dates! Honey never spoils though! My parents told me when I was young, so I always knew, and I assumed that everybody did as well. But through the course of my life, I've met multiple people that thought honey expires, and they (used to) throw it away after the date…
I liked this post, thanks. You have made me curious though… how have you gotten a restaurant to deliver all your meals? 😆 that sounds ideal