I searched the site for episodes and articles concerned with the issue of food waste. I came across a very interesting article called 'Best Before By', which discussed the levels of waste in the US, particularly of dairy products in grocery stores. The article was full of obscure facts and statistics which shocked me. For example, The average American wastes somewhere between 20-25% of the food they acquire. The EPA and USDA recently announced a goal to cut food waste in the U.S. in half by 2030, and having a better date labeling system is one way to get there.
The main article:
Montana throws more milk down the drain than other states because the sell-by date on the milk is required by state law to be just 12 days after pasteurization (the industry standard is 21 days). After these 12 days, Montana law requires that the milk be thrown away. It can’t be sold or donated. Thousands of gallons of milk are thrown away each week that many believe is perfectly fine to drink.
In theory, Montana’s
strict date label law is about food safety and protecting the consumer. But it
hasn’t been updated since the 80s, and some believe it’s more about protecting
the interests of the dairy industry.
Date labels of course,
aren’t just on milk, they’re on a lot of products. Forty-one states require a
date label on at least some food product but there are huge
inconsistencies, not just in the wording, but in the meaning of these labels.
Some states require them only on dairy, some on shellfish, some on any
perishable foods.
It all began
in the 1970s. Americans had moved further away from their food sources and were
eating more packaged foods and getting more of their food in supermarkets.
Consumers wanted a way to measure how fresh their food was. At the time, most
manufacturers already put encrypted dates on their products to help retailers
rotate stock and consumers craved access to this information.
In 1977, the New York State Consumer
Protection Board published a booklet called Blind Dates: How to Break the Codes on the Foods You Buy.
The booklet told consumers how to decipher the encrypted date codes on their
favorite products. The board distributed more than 10,000 copies, and posted
the booklet in supermarkets.
Eventually consumers started to demand that
these dates be put clearly on packaging, and retailers and grocery stores
responded. A few states began to regulate these date labels, but there was
no federal level regulation, even though there were a number of attempts.
Still, consumers wanted freshness dates, so all kinds of different ones popped
up (“use-by”, “sell-by”, “best-by”, “best if used by,” “expires on”). Some
dates were stamped right on the product, some printed on the label. There was
no consistency in how this information was displayed or the language that was
used.
Some date labels were meant for consumers,
while others were just meant for retailers. And as is still true now, There
were no clear definitions for any of the phrases and no consistency even within
the same brand or product. Dates could differ from state-to-state,
manufacturer-to-manufacturer, or store-to-store.
Over the years we’ve lost track of what these
labels meant in the first place. We’ve come to associate the dates with safety,
when in fact, they’ve always been about freshness. As much as we might want
them to, the dates on our food are not going to tell us if we’ll get
salmonella or e-coli.
Most date labels are arrived at by conducting
taste tests. Does a product still taste good on day 4? Day 5?
And yet today, according to a report that Emily Broad-Leib co-authored, a majority of
consumers believe that eating food past it’s sell-by or use-by date is a risk
to their health. And as many as 90% of Americans throw out food based on date
labels at least occasionally.
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