Best Before, Best Buy, Expiry Date, or whatever language you see on labels identifying the expiration date of a good, especially with food items has drawn a lot of controversies. I was at the supermarket two days ago, and I saw a woman who was going to tear down the building because the store still had on their shelf good that was going to expire in a week's time. She was consistently making claims that the store was going to sell items that were not good for her health and were intended to poison her. There was a scene there and it got me to start wondering, what exactly does buy before mean, and it is really true that goods that already reach their buy before date are poisonous to us?
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When we purchase goods, we see the date when they are manufactured and the best-before date, and a lot of us can be so paranoid when we see food items with labels that have reached their best-before date being sold to us. First, I encourage safe eating, and I will in no way say that you should eat food that is not nourishing to you, but then, what does the USDA say? The USDA says that the Best if Used by/Before date on the product does not indicate that the good isn't safe after the date, it only indicates the time when the product would be at its best flavor or quality.
Have you bought edibles from the market which is yet to reach its expiration date, only to realize that they are spoilt already? Identifying the real-time date when a food item isn't edible is very tricky, and personally, I would trust my nose, my tongue, and my eyes to judge that. This is because a food item can be termed inedible, depending on different things such as temperature, sanitation, moisture, and so on. Depending on these factors, products can become moldy and this means the food is spoilt but the label would not account for these things. These molds would grow faster in warm temperatures, and so in the market, while the labels would show a different best-before-use date, the product is already spoilt.
For products that have been kept in freezers and fridges, they would last longer. It is surprising how a lot of people would want to tear down a company with lawsuits about best before that they do not will all the time, they tend to trust their already cooked meal to be in the freezer for days and weeks without checking the expiry date provided it was kept at a frozen state. It is funny that people would not worry about the meal that they kept in the freezer when in actual fact, refrigeration is only slowing the growth of molds and not stopping the growth.
Let's look at milk, which has an expiration date. Milk undergoes pasteurization to kill the bacteria and milk can stay for more than two weeks before it begins to get sour if properly kept but then it can have its expiry date and still get spoilt if exposed to air and the microbes that do not die during pasteurization or a new microbe gets into the milk converting sugar in milk to lactic acid and this will lead to the milk spoiling. When it comes to milk, even after checking the expiration date, sniffing with the nose is still the best way to ascertain if it is good or bad for consumption. Meat on the other hand doesn't last longer, and in my country, I barely see an expiry date on meats purchased at the local market but then it doesn't take more than a few hours to days to get spoilt seeing that it breeds bacteria since it is wet and nutrient dense. When your meat has been infected by bacteria, it would leave compounds known as Volatile Organic Compounds which give the smell of meat, and also a bad-looking smell (Hydrogen sulfide convert meat muscle pigment in meat into greenish-looking compounds). Eggs are another product that should be watched out for, when it is expired, it might still be consumable but when it is spoilt, there is a problem. Salmonella can easily stay around the shell and get into the egg. This might be easily fought by the immune system in healthy people, but in immunocompromised people, it can require antibiotic treatment.
What is your take on expiration date, food spoilage and food consumption after expiration?