FINALLY! Some sense about the "sell by"

A little insight in the Wolf family dynamics; despite my wife's inherent gorgeousness (which I've got to talk about more in general context, to explain why I'm happy like Orlando Bloom is happy with Miranda Kerr), she has some ideas that are hard to break.

Here's one of them: http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/hotelkey.asp

Another one is that you have to throw away food that is past it's "sell by" date because that means it has probably gone bad and could cause food poisoning.

Despite my protestations, I end up throwing away perfectly good food with alarming frequency.

So today (via the esteemable Daily Mail), is confirmation that the lovely Mrs. Wolf is WRONG about this one -- and confirms that a lot of perfectly good food gets thrown away because of the "sell by" date confusion.

Sell-by date to go in war on waste: 450,000 tons of good food are dumped every year

Finally, there is a 'use-by' date, which is actually the only definitive safety guide for a shopper and signifies that a product may cause harm if eaten after this date.

The Government and the Food Standards Agency are looking at replacing this system with a simple 'use-before' date - the only piece of information that offers a safety cut-off point.

Alert the FDA! I wonder how many of the foods I currently have in the panty have a "use by" date that I can actually find. Time for research.


They've come up with another good idea -- end the "buy one, get one free" marketing strategy. It's a very stupid way to sell fresh bread, because the second loaf rarely stays fresh long enough!