Do your kids or grandkids go through your frig and cabinets when they visit and toss out everything with an overdue “Best if Used By” date? Many of my friends share that complaint.
Woman on a mission to rid of expired food
I wonder if being fanatic about expiration dates is a generational thing. It seems it’s mostly the Gen Xers or Millennials that freak out with expired food. I was raised in the 50s when there were no expiry dates. We used the look and sniff test. Looks good, smells good – it’s edible.
Legend has it that Al Capone was the one who made it mandatory to add expiration dates on milk bottles in Chicago (1) Why was a notorious gangster, worried about milk being sour? You’d think he’d be more worried about his rival Bugs Moran. Oh, I forgot, he killed Moran’s gang in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. So once Bugs’ gang was out of the way he started worrying about milk.
Gangster Al Capone worried about sour milk?
I’m also surprised that milk was the first food with an expiration date. You’d have no sense of smell or taste to not know when milk goes bad.
Food expiration dates started appearing in the 1970s. I was preparing meals a while before food expiration dates became popular, so I wasn’t used to checking the label for the date.
Recently, I did check the expiration date on a loaf of bread. I returned home after a four month trip and noticed the unopened bread in the cabinet. It appears I missed the bread when I had emptied the refrigerator and cabinets before the trip. I opened the wrapper and didn’t see any mold. It was still soft. I tasted it. It tasted fine, so I ate it. My husband refused to touch it. What scares me is not that it was past the expiration date, but that it was still quite edible four months past the best if used by date. What the heck did they put in that bread to keep it nice for four months? Can they put the same thing in people?
The sniff and sight tests can sometimes lead you astray. According to a family story, my husband’s newlywed parents broke the budget to buy a fancy cheese, Roquefort, for their guests. When they unwrapped it, they panicked when they saw blue spots. They didn’t realize the blue was there on purpose. They spent hours using a toothpick to remove the mold.
Moldy cheese brings up important questions: Why is some mold valued and other molds dangerous? (2) Is there an expiration date on blue cheese which is already moldy? Will moldy mushrooms make me high?
The answer to the mushroom question is yes, if it’s the right type of mold. I don’t know how you are supposed to know the right type of mold. Apparently, a blue mold called psilocybin is a hallucinogen. (3) (4) Last week I took a picture of blue mushrooms growing on our senior community’s golf course. They were pretty. If I would have eaten them, could I have gotten high? Or maybe dead. The only way I know that a mushroom is safe to eat is if it’s in the produce section at the supermarket.
Magic Mushrooms on the golf course?
Some foods are rumored to last forever. Urban legend has long deemed Twinkies, the cockroaches of the food world, can survive for decades. It turns out Twinkies have a rather short shelf life of 45 days. (5)
Then there’s all the food that doesn’t have expiration dates: fresh produce, eggs (I searched the packaging and didn’t see any date), and dried beans. According to Parade magazine, there are 12 foods that never expire and 93 others that last ‘a really long time.’ (6) And did you know it’s ok to eat moldy fruits and vegetables, hard cheese, and cured meats if you cut the mold off? (7) I know that probably grosses a lot of people out. Me too; if I see mold, it’s too old.
Carry-out food also doesn’t have an expiration date. It should. If you looked in my frig right now, you’d see a collection of 5 uneaten or ½ eaten desserts that I take home from our senior community restaurant every night, I intend to eat them for breakfast. But I’m usually not that hungry at breakfast time so I might nibble on it, or save it for tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. My husband gets frustrated seeing all those plastic boxes. I usually throw them out once a week.
So, is freaking out over expired food a generational thing? Are most people from my generation a bit laxer when it comes to ‘best if used by’ dates because we didn’t have them when we first started preparing food? Did you know there’s a name for the phobia of eating expired food? Cibophobia. At the other end of the spectrum, I found an article “Food Expiration Dates are a Hoax and You’re Dumb to Believe Them.” Where are you on the spectrum: toss on the ‘best if used by’ date or cut the mold off and eat it?
After reading this, if you are afraid to eat dinner at our house. I promise when we invite you to dinner all food will be bought fresh from the store no more than 3 days before you come. Except for maybe the bread. It could be four months old.
References
Maria Isabel, The Day Al Capone allegedly invented expiration dates in milk bottles, Culture Collectivia, Deccember 31, 2021
Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D. If Cheese has mold growing on it, should I throw it away? Mayo Clinic, September 12, 2020
Annamarya Scaccia, What Psychedelics Really Do to Your Brain. Rolling Stone, March 9, 2017
Katrina Kramer, Mystery of why magic mushrooms go blue solved, Chemistry World, December 10, 2017
Maria Godoy, The Science of Twinkies, Why Do They Last So Darned Long, NPR, the Salt , July 10, 2013
Alison Ashton, 100+ Non Perishable Food Items To Keep on Hand That Never Expire (Or at Least Not For a Very Long Time), Parade, May 7, 2022
Audur Benediktsdottir, Is Moldy Food Dangerous, Not Always, Healthline, Sept. 30, 2017
My mom would cut the mold off of cheese and eat the rest. I do it too. Never got sick or noticed a difference in taste. We do look at expiration dates in the store and do our best to buy the freshest food.
I figure that my mom never put an expiration date on the things we canned and none of us died from eating something that was 4 or 5 years old, canned with just a hot water bath and no pressure. Nothing much scares me and I eat it until it is really inedible! Too expensive to waste nowadays!