Food For Thought: A Pumpkin At Midnight
The fairy tale of “best before” dates
The fairy tale of Cinderella may be thousands of years old. Versions of the story can be found in cultures all over Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Europeans have as many as 500 versions of the story alone. It’s popular because it’s timeless.
While the story is both well-known and well-loved (and long-ago been Disneyfied) it is, like all fairy tales, steeped in symbolism and morality. The slipper, the gown, the fairy godmother – all carry meanings well-beyond their literal ones. Some people enjoy parsing the weighty meanings while others cringe at the flashbacks of high school English class.
But literature isn’t the only source of fiction in our lives. Every day we are surrounded by things that aren’t quite true – not lies exactly, but constructs (stories, as it were) that may or may not serve us very well.
One of those stories are the dates on our food packages. Here are the rules as they stand in Canada:
Any packaged food product with shelf life of less than 90 days and packaged other than at the retail store are required to sport a “best before” date and storage instructions. In this category are things like milk, yogurt, and some of your “refrigerate after opening” type stuff.
Food with shelf life of less than 90 days that’s packed in the retail location has to have a best before date, storage instructions, and information about when the product was packed and its durable life (i.e. how long you can keep it) either on the package or displayed next to it. This is where you’ll find the stuff from the butcher shop, seafood counter, bakery, and pre-made meals like salads and rotisserie chickens.
The best before dates explain the durable life of the product, essentially how long it will keep the manufacturer’s standard of freshness, taste, nutritional value, and any other criteria they choose to promise. They operate on the assumption that the package is unopened and stored under ideal conditions.
Products with a shelf life longer than 90 days are considered shelf stable and are not required to carry a date, though if a date is printed on the package it must follow a specific format. These are the products like dried pasta, canned vegetables and meat, and many frozen foods.
Terms like “sell by”, “freeze by”, and “manufactured on” are voluntary and not necessarily consistent from one product or brand to another.
The only items that carry drop-dead “expiry dates” are meal replacements, medical dietary supplements, infant formula, and similar products. They have very specific nutritional value that cannot be guaranteed beyond the expiry date.
But what if we examine these rules through the lens of food waste?
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) clearly states: “Best before dates are not indicators of food safety, neither before nor after the date.” But is that how consumers understand them?
Food waste is huge issue worldwide and Canada is certainly no exception. In fact, 63% of the food that we pitch in the trash and compost could have been eaten. So this it leads to the question: Are best before dates helping us make better decisions or are they part of the problem?
The food industry has long had a vested interest in keeping us pre-occupied with quality. Food manufacturing and processing, in North America at least, is extremely safe. It’s highly-regulated, monitored, and traceable. Millions of products are recalled and disposed of if there is even the possibility of contamination. Food-borne illness outbreaks make big news but are statistically quite rare.
But once we’re convinced that food is safe, what’s to differentiate one product from another? Words like “fresh”, “quality”, “premium”, and “natural” that have no objective meaning enter the game. We’re conditioned to seek the “best”, or at least the very best we can afford.
And then there’s those dates and that word “best” again. Are we selling our families and ourselves short if we use things after that magic date? Does “best before” mean it’s bad after?
I don’t know about you, but I love the clearance racks at the grocery store. Blackening bananas, slightly wrinkling peppers, grapes that just need a few picked off the bunch? 80% off? Yes please! Meat that is “best before” tomorrow can be frozen tonight. Most of the fancy cheeses I’ve tried have been driven by the 50% off stickers I can spot from across the store. I pay basically no mind to the best before dates on canned goods and cheerfully stock up when things are on sale - canned beans with a best before date this fall are not meaningfully “fresher” than those dated for next year.
Am I sacrificing on quality? I have to be vigilant about using what I buy in a reasonable amount of time and I do end up composting the occasional rotting tomato. Decline in quality is a slope, not a cliff and depending on the product isn’t noticeable for weeks and even months after. The savings are well worth it - many times over in fact.
As inflation starts to pinch families even harder you can bet there will be a lot more sniffing and poking before food gets tossed. You can shop the flyers and clip coupons all you want but the food you already have is the cheapest because it’s already made the trip home. If the environmental and social consequences of food waste don’t worry you the economic cost soon will.
But it seems that, so far at least, Canadians aren’t too keen to do away with best before dates, with 25% believing that they are an indicator of food safety. Dates, it seems, drive behavior, even if they are neither an indicator of safety nor value.
What to do though? With more than 60% of Canadians opposed to eliminating best before dates, don’t expect government and regulators to move too quickly. In the meantime though it’s useful for us, as individuals, to examine our understanding of the labelling rules and how they affect our behavior.
Cinderella’s coach, as the story goes, turned into a pumpkin at midnight. It’s thought to be a symbol of transition between this world and the otherworld, and more specifically, of death. But unlike the coach, your food doesn’t suddenly transform or even die on a specific date. It’s just a story, and perhaps one that’s time has passed.
How much stock do you put on best before dates? Do you treat them like gospel? Consider them a general guideline? Let your nose be your guide? Let me know in the comments!