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Has ‘Best before’ passed it’s ‘Use by’ date?

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Sling yer hook! You're out of date, mate...

99% of the time, an apple looks exactly the same the day after you first scrutinised it.

In all probability, it will taste exactly the same. Should it have deteriorated in either look or taste, I’m pretty certain you would identify that rapidly and decide if you wanted to start/continue your fruit-based snacking.

Based on this simple fact (and applying it to all other fruit and veg too) it’s safe to say that putting a ‘Best before’ date on the packaging is pretty damn pointless. For many other products in packets and tins, that it supposedly means that the quality of your product may deteriorate after the specified date means very little too. ‘May’ is the key word in that sentence.

Anyone with a vintage grandparent will have heard rattling yarns about consuming a tin of bully beef from World War II sometime in the 1970s and it never doing them any harm. I’m 92 you know! We made our own fun in them days! (etc.)

Your baked beans with a date in 2020 aren’t suddenly going to turn rogue at the stroke of midnight on the date printed on the bottom, and leap from your cupboard intent on killing you. I did have that dream once, but the therapy really helped and I’m almost ready to try alphabetti spaghetti again.

On the other hand, anything that says ‘Use By’ needs your attention – eating products beyond the specified date could prove dangerous to your health. And carpet.

But ‘Best before’? Maybe we need it on products we can’t see through the packaging, but your retailer should be making sure items are sold rapidly, and if you’re keeping food for decades, you should probably rethink your life choices.

For fruit and veg, though? You can tell if they’re OK using four out of your five senses (I’m not aware that you can hear if something’s off, but do let me know if you think otherwise!). It’s time to bin that Best Before.

Tesco think so too. This week they’ve announced that 70 of their fresh pre-packaged products will now be date free, to help cut down on the terrible waste of “perfectly edible food” getting binned based on the date on the bag, rather than the condition of it’s contents.

Credit to the supermarket for making this move – a rare show of common sense. Now we just need to work on the fact that it’s all pre-packaged...

This post first appeared as my 'A wry look at the week' column, in The Mail, on the 25th of May 2018. As in today. So I haven't seen it yet myself!

 Most unlike me to be efficient at posting, but after some successful tidying up of old paperwork today, I'm on a roll ;-)

(CD A-Z: "Really Free" - Given away with Q magazine no 99, December 1994!)

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