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."

Shampoo/Conditioner bars are better for the environment and your wallet

Does your shower look like a plastic bottle-filled hoarder’s nest?

In the US alone, 550 million shampoo bottles are thrown away each year! That’s enough to fill 1,164 football fields. 

Crazy right? To make matters worse, that figure doesn’t even include conditioner, body wash, or face wash bottles. And given that only 5% of plastic in the U.S. gets recycled, that’s a disturbing amount of forever passengers in our landfills and dumps. 

There are other downsides to using conventional, plastic-bottle brands too: 

• Many of these products are filled with up to 80% water, so you’re also paying for an unnecessarily large bottle and additional shipping weight.
• They can contain detergents called sulfates, which can be overly harsh and drying, especially if you have color-treated, dry, or curly hair. Do you really want to wash your hair with the same ingredient that’s in toilet cleaner?
• They contain synthetic fragrances, which can cause skin irritation and are linked to hormone disruption. 

There is new approach to shampoo that’s better for your health, the environment, and your wallet: shampoo and conditioner (all-in-one) bars

• The bars are plant-based, vegan, and non-toxic.
• They are suitable for all hair types, including color-treated.
• They use recycled and recyclable packaging.
• Their bars have an 80 to 90% lower carbon footprint than comparable liquid shampoo and conditioner.
• They’re also TSA-friendly and perfect for travel.

One shampoo/conditioner bar is equivalent to 2-3 standard 8.4 oz bottles of conventional shampoo. One bar will last for months.

Source: https://www.thecooldown.com/