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But the incentives for virtually everyone involved are high - and a good place to start is by figuring out what those labels actually mean and how to interact with them. The bad part is that solving the broader system around it takes time, education, and a shift in our consumption habits. The good news is that the problem wouldn’t be all that hard to fix, in the abstract. “Add that to convenience culture and rapacious late-stage capitalism and, well, we’re fucked.” “It’s really hard to imagine you’re supposed to trust your own nose and mouth,” Adler said. Chef, journalist, and cookbook writer Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, explains: “In the absence of culinary information, people assume that any information they’ve been given must be the most important information.” A big part of the problem is that most of us don’t really believe we’re capable of determining if a food is good for us. If you’ve been throwing out food based on the freshness label, though, you’re not alone. And the broader public’s misunderstanding about them is a major contributor in every single one of the factors I named above: wasted food, wasted revenue, wasted household income, and food insecurity. Put another way, they’re not expiration dates at all. Researchers have found that “expiration” dates - which rarely correspond to food actually expiring or spoiling - are mostly well-intentioned, but haphazard and confusing. Because what can you do, right? When the date says it’s done, it’s done, right?Īpparently, very wrong. But I’ve rarely been clear on how that translates to how I actually treat the food in my refrigerator. Michael Siluk/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesĪmerica has a food waste problem. A billboard in Minnesota, telling us what we probably already know.
Yet state-level regulations often make it difficult to donate past-date food to food banks and other services. On top of this, I know that in the same country that throws away so much food, about 42 million people could be living with food insecurity and hunger. Right now, landfills are piled high with wasted food, most of which was perfectly fine to eat - and some of which still is. The study found that 25 percent of fresh water in the US goes toward producing food that goes uneaten, and 21 percent of input to our landfills is food, which represents a per-capita increase of 50 percent since 1974. It’s a huge economic loss for food growers and retailers, who often have to ditch weirdly shaped produce or overstocked food that didn’t sell.Įnvironmentally it’s bad, too. Every year, the average American family throws out somewhere between $1,365 and $2,275, according to a landmark 2013 study co-authored by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Forty percent of food produced in America heads to the landfill or is otherwise wasted. I know, on some intellectual level, that throwing away food is probably wrong. You’ll probably never catch me dumpster-diving. I’ve only had food poisoning once or twice in my life, always from restaurants, but the idea is still there in my head: past the date, food will make me sick. This habit is so ingrained that when I think about eating food that’s gone past its date, I get a little queasy. I might stop to sniff, but for my whole adult life, I’ve figured that the problem was obvious - my jam or almond milk or package of shredded Italian cheese blend had “expired” - and the fix was simple: Into the garbage it goes. Every so often, I go through my refrigerator, check labels on the items, and throw out anything that’s a month, or a week, or maybe a few days past the date on the label.
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