Best-before labels must be abolished!

Sophie Morris thinks best-before labels are past their sell-by date. Find out why!

Our relationship with the fridge can be a funny old thing. On the one hand, in any British fridge you’re likely to find a few ancient vegetables settled into a soft pap on the bottom of the veg drawer, just “in case” we need them. On the other, we do raids on the fridge and throw out anything past the “best before” date on the label.

That could mean discarding a perky pack of green beans, a jar of pesto with just two teaspoons gone or a whole block of cheddar. The estimates for how much food waste we create each year vary from around 5 million to 10 million tonnes.

We’re throwing away edible food

At either end of the spectrum, that’s an astonishing amount. And probably 5 million tonnes of it is edible. At last, it looks like these patronising labels are set to be scrapped.

Different dates

Some of us are more militant still, chucking good food out if it’s reached the “sell by” or “display until” dates, which have very little to do with the quality of the item. The term “sell by” was invented by M&S in the 1970’s as a guide for consumers. “Display until” is printed on packets for the retailer’s records, so it doesn’t have older stock hanging around on its shelves.

Best before dates cause £££ of waste

Once you’ve bought the food, the best before date is designed to indicate until which point the food will be at its best. This seems like the shops are doing us a favour – a helping hand to get the most out of the money we’ve spent.

Unfortunately, the result is that we throw away food past its best before date but perfectly edible – to the tune of £680 worth per household per year.

How else can you tell?

People excuse this by saying they are not sure when food is ok to eat, and that they are worried about getting ill. Apparently we’re less used to handling food and cooking than our forebears, which is why they were able to tell whether an apple was rotten or not where we can’t see the difference between a crisp, rosy specimen and a blackened rotten mulch.

Oh please. Anyone with a nose and eyes can tell for themselves whether fruit, veg, milk and cheese are fit to eat or not. When fruit or veg starts to go off, it might lose its colour and go a little soft, but if it isn’t covered in an inch of green mould, it’s fine.

If there’s a thin layer of mould on a corner of your family-sized block of hard cheese, cut it off and get on with your sandwiches.

If the smell of milk makes you gag, don’t drink it. If your bread is rock hard, that won’t taste good either (but you could fry it up into croutons).

We’ve been mollycoddled into believing we can’t assess the contents of our fridges and cupboards without a degree in food safety. This is causing grotesque waste. The only useful label currently is the “use by” label, which is expected to remain in some form.

Some guidance is useful

The use-by date is a mandatory label and tells us when a foodstuff might become a health hazard. Help is certainly welcomed for foods such as prawns and eggs, where the risks of food poisoning are much higher and potentially fatal.

The truth is, we were better off before foods came stamped with a selection of labels. When meat or cheese was just wrapped in some waxy paper, we remembered when we had bought it, and how fresh it was then, and checked it was ok before eating. The idea of wasting food was laughable anyway. Who would throw away anything unnecessarily?

The new plan

The current idea is to replace the best before and sell by labels with some information on the potential health risks of eating the food in question past its use by date. This sounds fraught with complications to me, but some sort of advice is required, if only to put off lawsuits.

The idea has been mooted before, a few years ago.  It’s long overdue. Let’s hope it gets sorted this time, before the policy wonks working on it pass their own expiry dates.

What do you think?

What do you think of the plan to abolish best-before dates? Let us know using the comments box below!

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