Skip to main content

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

Image
By
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 You're out of date, mate...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!)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shouting in the social media mirror

By
It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...
Post a Comment
Read more

A fisful of change at the shops

By
A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...
2 comments
Read more

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more