U.S. consumers throw away 90 billion pounds of food a year; confusion over expiration dates is a big reason

Wall Street Journal graph, from ReFED Food Waste Monitor data

Food-safety people hate "best by" food labels because consumers mistakenly think once a product is past the date, it's longer safe to eat, which wastes tons of decent food, reports Josh Zumbrun in his opinion for The Wall Street Journal. "Food experts broadly agree that the expiration dates on every box of crackers, can of beans and bag of apples waste money, squander perfectly good food, needlessly clog landfills, spew methane and contribute to climate change." No oversight body regulates product "best by" labels. Martin Wiedmann, a professor of food safety and food science at Cornell University, told Zumbrun: "Those dates are not about safety, that's not why they're there, that's not what they're doing. . . For many foods, we could completely do away with it."

Most date labels on food don’t claim that anything is
expiring or unsafe. (Photo by Alexander Cohn, WSJ)

What are they for? "The dates originated as a coded system for manufacturers to communicate to retailers when to rotate stock," Zumbrun explains. "Consumers clamored for information on the freshness of food, and in the 1970s and 1980s consumer-facing dates became widespread, though never standardized. . . . Food manufacturers have tried, largely in vain, to explain that these are mostly general indicators of when food is at its peak quality. Most foods, properly stored, remain edible and safe long after their peak. . . . This misunderstanding is one reason Americans waste a colossal amount of perfectly good food. The Department of Agriculture has estimated that 31% of the available food supply goes uneaten. . . . Retailers discard 43 billion pounds of food annually, consumers a further 90 billion."

Andrew Harig, vice president at the Food Industry Association, a Washington trade group representing food retailers and producers, told Zumbrun, “It’s intended as a sort of consumer guide to be helpful. It’s just that it morphed into less of a guide and more of a rule, and that’s one of the challenges. Food technologists and food-safety people, they absolutely hate these labels.” Zumbrun reports, food-safety experts prefer using just two labels: "'Best if used by,' which indicates the product might not taste quite as good after that date but is still safe, and 'Use by' for those cases where the food might actually be unsafe, such as meat from the deli counter."

"U.S. consumers are wildly confused about the labels’ intent. In a 2019 paper, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University found 84% of consumers threw out food at the package date 'at least occasionally' while 37% did so always or usually, though that wasn’t what most labels recommended. Over half thought date labeling was federally regulated, or were unsure," Zumbrun adds. "In fact, with the exception of infant formula, the labels aren’t federally mandated and the food isn’t unsafe. Safety concerns usually arise from food that is contaminated or improperly stored. If you care about food safety, Wiedmann advises you to ignore 'best by' dates and just set your refrigerator no higher than 37 degrees. Keeping food too warm is a real safety risk that has nothing to do with an expiration date."