Time to ditch food expiration dates

 Americans waste a colossal amount of perfectly good food. 

This is bad because resources and money are being wasted while contributing to climate change due to methane generated by food in landfills. 

Stop throwing away good food!

Food Expiration Dates? What a Waste By Josh Zumbrun in The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 2023 explains the history behind food packaging dates and why they are so misleading.

'Contrary to a common perception, “those dates are not about safety, that’s not why they’re there, that’s not what they’re doing” says Martin Wiedmann, a professor of food safety and food science at Cornell University. “For many foods, we could completely do away with it.”'

According to Zumbrun, "The dates originated as a coded system for manufacturers to communicate to retailers when to rotate stock."

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that 31% of the available food supply goes uneaten: Retailers discard 43 billion pounds of food annually, consumers a further 90 billion. That’s 387 billion calories of lost food, which the USDA says works out to 1,249 calories per American a day." 

It’s hard to determine exactly how much of that waste owes to labels, but probably more than most people think. ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste, has used data from kitchen diaries to estimate annual U.S. food waste because of labeling concerns as nearly 7 billion pounds. There is reason to think this is an undercount. In a grotesquely amusing study, households that kept such diaries reported tossing 8.7 pounds of food a week, usually saying it was inedible or spoiled. Then researchers literally dug through their trash, and determined that 68% of the food was probably edible. Consumers might not even realize that they’re junking perfectly good food not because it’s bad, but because they are putting too much faith in expiration dates."