Why does billions of dollars worth of food go to waste every year? Ask the consumers of the 1970s.
The “sell by” date is not what you think it is
A Danish grocery store this week became the first in the world to flout an inviolate rule of the supermarket world by selling “expired” food — food that otherwise would get tossed.
Today’s consumer relies on expiration dates (as opposed to their senses) to detect when foods are bad, which is partially to blame for a staggering amount of waste — nearly 3 trillion pounds of food a year. That’s enough, according to the UN, to feed every hungry person on the planet twice over.
But Denmark’s WeFood will sell food past its expiration date, as well as surplus produce, at prices 30 to 50% lower than in traditional stores — an attempt to both give shoppers perfectly good food for less money and to take a stand on food waste.
Expiration dates began in the US as a consumer-driven phenomenon. Manufacturers and retailers began slapping “sell by,” “use by” and “best by” dates on products when more processed foods began lining grocery store shelves and consumers started to feel disconnected from the ingredients in them. They wanted assurances that these products, filled with dozens of ingredients, could be trusted.
The industry obliged, and by the 1970s, manufacturers put sell-by or use-by labels on all kinds of food products.
“Around that time consumers started to demand some kind of indication of freshness,” said Dana Gunders, of the Natural Resources Defense Council and author of a major report on food waste. “It seemed to be part of the evolution of buying your food at local, smaller markets to the big grocery model where consumers don’t really know how long the food is sitting there.”
But as much as consumers seemed to want the labels, they were also confused by them, and not without good cause. For most foods, excepting infant formula and certain baby foods, the sell-by labels aren’t regulated by the federal government, which means they’re based on arbitrary terms that have no defined meaning or timeframe.
The industry largely sets its dates based on a food’s absolutely optimal freshness, not on safety, but most consumers don’t understand that, so they throw out perfectly safe product. Canned or frozen foods, for instance, are often safe long past the sell-by date.
Gunder’s group would like to see sell-by dates — which are largely intended as signal between the manufacturer and retailer — go away, because they confuse consumers. Instead, NRDC wants dates that directly communicate to consumers when a product is no longer safe to eat, especially for foods that can be particularly dangerous, such as luncheon meats or cheeses.
Food gets tossed for other reasons — spoilage in transit, imperfect (and consumer unfriendly) appearances, over-ordering and over-buying, among them. But altogether in the US, $162 billion worth of food goes to waste each year, much of it because of non-standardized and confusing labeling.
So, until the current system of expiration dates changes, you might want to use the ol’ sniff test.
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