Would you out of date tin?

Blue cheese is riddled with mould. It is delicious.

True, I love Stilton. ?

‘I didn’t know it was safe to use limp veg.’

Sorry, but I was honestly almost speechless reading that.

I can understand that Witzend ?

I do have a problem.

I don't really look at the dates on tins so I suspect I may have eaten stuff that was out of date without even knowing

I have always opened tins to check the contents first . About a month ago I opened a tin of peaches that was 3 years old & as I started to open it ( ring pull opener ) there was a whooshing noise & the contents shot out , it gave me a fright . I tasted them & they tasted fine but I decided to bin them just incase gas had built up inside & caused a reaction to the food . Friday I opened a pit of crem fresh I had unopened in the fridge. It was dated April 2022 . It smelt fine , looked fine , tasted normal so I put it in my curry . I did they sn upset stomach so I’m presuming it was fine ?

MerylStreep

There are only 2 of us. My OH does all the shopping and cooking.
He would eat his own feet before he wasted a crumb.
Does any one know anyone else who eats apple cores ?

A friend of mine, who died earlier this year, aged 96, always ate the cores of apples. She formed the habit during WW2 when she was employed to do top secret work for the government. There had to be no evidence left in the workplace at the end of the day. Therefore, if my friend had an apple with her lunch the cores always had to be eaten. A habit that remained to the end of her wonderful life.

I see that Waitrose is removing 'Best by Dates' on hundreds of products in an attempt to tackle food waste. It will remove the dates from nearly 500 items of fresh food - including fruit and vegetables - from September.

Tesco and Marks & Spencer have also scrapped 'best before dates' on some of their products. Morrisons is scrapping the 'use by' date on milk in favour of the sniff test.

So we are going to be left more and more to our own judgement as to whether food is still useable.

I would and I have, but an exploding tin of chopped tomatoes makes a terrible mess.

MOnica
Well that information is really going to mess with some peoples brains: thinking for yourself, whatever next ?

Does this mean we won't know how long they've been on the shelves?

Witzend

^‘I didn’t know it was safe to use limp veg.’^

Sorry, but I was honestly almost speechless reading that.

Me too! Seriously - just use a bit of common sense! How do you think our mothers or grandmothers coped in the days before we had 'use by' or 'best before' dates on things? They cut the mould off cheese, scraped mould off the top of jars of jam, milk which was 'on the turn' was used to make scones...I could go on and on, and yet we all lived to tell the tale.
Food waste is a pet hate of mine - very very little gets wasted in this house.

Does it also mean they won't have to reduce items on the date on the package?

I see Co-op is removing use by on yoghurt.

nadateturbe
You could scan the bar code and contact the company. They could then maybe give you the date of when it was canned.

nadaturbe Looking and handling the fruit and vegetables should be sufficient to tell you how fresh they are.

Most vegetables come frozen these days and we are always being told that they are fresher than the 'fresh' veg on the supermarket or greengrocer's shelf.

I buy my fruit and veg off a market stall. They have plastic bowls, £1 a bowl, for fruit and veg nearing the end of its stall life. My f&v shop always starts there. Things like carrots and onions will last for weeks after buying them there, although grapes and pineapples need to be eaten within three or four days. saves me a fortune over the supermarket - and not a 'sell by' or 'best by' in sight.

Monica, that's fine and what I will definitely make an effort to do.

But when buying in a supermarket some people are going to get food that goes off much quicker than that bought by others. It will be pot luck, as you can't tell when it went on the shelf, and everyone will be paying the same price. No reductions on oldest produce.
This isn't fair, and no one will convince me that retailers are doing it to save waste/help us.

MerylStreep

nadateturbe
You could scan the bar code and contact the company. They could then maybe give you the date of when it was canned.

Even if there is no use by date, we are entitled to know when food was canned/packaged.

nadateturbe

MerylStreep

nadateturbe
You could scan the bar code and contact the company. They could then maybe give you the date of when it was canned.

Even if there is no use by date, we are entitled to know when food was canned/packaged.

I agree.

A 'packed on......' date would be very useful.

It's all very well people saying what we did in the old days, but our mothers were accustomed to buying from shops with shop assistants who could be trained to rotate the stock and sell the oldest stuff first.

Unlike our supermarkets where fishing at the back of the bottled milk shelf could bring you out the oldest milk on the shelf rather than the newest. (I've had milk that has gone off before it's use by date I presume because of poor handling by the store.).

So I would like to know how fresh a perishable item is.

P.S. Supermarket cream keeps for weeks past its use by date if unopened. I've used it up to at least a couple of months past. Completely fine

There will still be batch numbers on fresh food packaging that store staff recognise so that they know when to start marking down because it is going out of freashness.

Also, like anything, you may make a few mistakes to begin with, but you will soon earn to recognise the look and feel of fresh from the lorry veg compared with lain around for a bit veg.

I think the supermarkets have very good stock control on fresh foods andI doubt much of it is on the counter more than a day, or even few hours, and if it is (batch numbers) it is quickly reduced.

And how did you manage before best before dates?

Monica a date is a definite way of knowing how long a product has been on the shelf.
And something could look fresh but be "on the turn".
If the staff can read the code, why keep it secret from shoppers?

I will be asking for the date.

Well, as I said, it is unlikely if fruit or veg will be on display more than a few hours, and fruit and veg do not suddenly turn, they just gently drift down a slope from the moment of cropping.

This thread has made me realise how little I use the array of dates etc on food of any kind. If I read a packet it is far more likely to be for calories than best before/use by or any other date.

The sniff test for milk is all very well, but you can’t sniff milk before buying it. Most of ours is delivered in glass, but when I buy any, I do check the date.

Ditching dates on fruit and veg wouldn’t bother me - good idea IMO - but I trust they won’t think of doing the same for e.g. chicken. When I buy one to roast, I need to know by which date I need to cook it.

During the first lockdown when supermarket shelves were often half empty, I used all sorts that had been lurking at the back of the cupboards, inc. some split peas dated 2017 IIRC - they made a v. nice soup.

And some GF flour last used for a GF Bil even before 2017 - it made a perfectly edible barm brack (only one egg needed, eggs were short at the time.).
TBH I rather enjoyed rummaging through cupboards and freezer, seeing what I could concoct with what we had.

They interviewed someone from Waitrose and they made it very clear, that they would not do this to any food that had 'use by' dates, which is something else entirely. All they are removing are 'best by' dates.