just sniff it b 4 you eat it OPie ~



you will be OK OPie ~

Depends on what type of food. Fish or shellfish should be put out quickly, but some stuff like honey keeps indefinitely in certain conditions.

I have a glossy printout of all the different kinds of mold that can cause harm to the human body and I use that to compare with the mold I might find on food in my refrigamarator or panty. If I don't find a picture of the mold I'm looking at, I go ahead and consume the particular comestible.

This way I don't ever have to worry about the 'use by' date.

So far, so good!

Yes,very wise to be careful of mold on the edible panty.

Thank you for preserving my faith in the future of human silliness, because sometimes I worry! Yay Silly!!

Yeah, I am one to get rid of anything that is past the use by date.

Depends. Any milk products are usually going bad before their best by date.

TSCC is like a carton of milk with chunks floating in it.

Please, everybody- in general, few foods have "expiration dates". Processed foods have a "Best when used by" or "Sell by" date- but that is NOT the same thing as a "Eat it and die" date. They are dates chosen somewhat arbitrarily by the manufacturer to suggest time span for maximum palatability.

There are very few foods that develop outright toxicity upon storage, and most of those are animal flesh products, and you don't need a date stamp to know when to toss them.

Rotten fruit juice is called wine. Rotten cabbage is called kimchi.

You do need to be careful with canned green beans and tomatoes. Usually a bulge in the can is evidence to not eat it (botulism).

Most types of food poisoning cases have no relationship to storage conditions.

To repeat: those "Use by" dates are not mandated by any sort of health regulations. They are picked by the food producer to help you have successful dinner parties.

Military family with a lot of brothers and sisters. We never had much money and a big treat was K-rations left over from WWII that my did would bring home. This was mid 1950's. The tropical chocolate was white and crumbly but sure was good. The meat tins and crackers and cookies were something we kids fought to get first.

A lot of folks across the world would eat well if they got just the stuff we throw out.

Thank you.

The “sell by” dates insure the supplier will get a new order cause the grocer will have to throw out product and buy more....and hopes you will do the same. I’m a “smell tester”.

I've eaten WWII rations in the 1970s that were still good, tasted a little bland but killed the hunger pangs.

I've seen survival food at Wal-Mart that were marked as being good for 25 years, must be dehydrated food.

Someone's comment on dairy products having a short life, here in the Pacific NW, we can get half gallon milk cartoons of Dairy Gold that have expiration dates about 2 months in the future.

I'm not usually too picky about the dates, but my wife acts like the food can read the dates and go bad at midnight.

She also says that it's cheaper to toss it then having to go to the emergency room and pay having to come up with the $100 insurance copay.

Same as the MREs from the 80s, the ones in the heavy , brown or green bags. Most guys liked the beef stew and spaghetti. They looked gross though, a big clump. Most of them came with a cookie or some kind of dessert and a small bag with a napkin and plastic utensils and a VERY small piece of toilet paper.

I keep a sharp eye on expiration dates, and I've noticed a trend over the past few years of manufacturers tightening dates significantly. So while I do pay attention to the dates, I also now take them with a grain of salt.

It should be said that it is not unusual for food items that are donated to community pantries to be out of date. And these food items are mostly donated by stores and manufacturers. The foods are considered to be usable and viable for consumption.

Food has expiration dates ?

So should god. Should have thrown out long ago.

My father was into Army surplus, for all our camping gear. We had US Army issue mummy sleeping bags with an outer bag, both down-filled, and those always kept us warm, though claustrophobic, on camping trips.

The K-rations came in square tins. We kids used to fight over the malted milk balls--remember those?

I'm with Tumwater's wife. Food expires at midnight, on the printed date. I have avoided food poisoning, by paying attention to the dates on the bagged salads and vegetables. I would never donate expired food, either, and risk poisoning someone else.

I also date everything I freeze, and follow the recommended times on a freezer-life chart I have. I also date leftovers in the fridge. For brown bag lunches, I never have used mayonnaise or fresh meat or anything else that will spoil, such as unrefrigerated milk or yogurt. Most schools sell cold milk.

I do have some old prescription medications that are waaaaay past their due dates. I know this is bad, but meds are so expensive, and you have to buy a whole bottle, when you need just one or two doses.

Slskipper nailed it. Canned goods are sterile, and as long as the can remains intact, they will never "spoil". High acid foods like fruits, especially citrus, can eat through cans given enough time. I've only actually seen can failure in canned mandarin orange slices. Now acidic foods are put in plastic lined cans, which may have solved that problem.

The fruit can also discolor or get a bit mushy. It is still perfectly safe to eat. Palatability degrades some, but frankly, canned products are not all that palatable to start with. Canned goods are often loaded with salt or sugar to mask the fact that they more or less suck when compared to fresh.

Dry foods like wheat and beans will keep a very long time if stored in low humidity, and will keep for your lifetime if stored in oxygen-free cans. Biggest danger with cans is that if they get wet or even stored in a damp location (basements are often dampish), they can develop microscopic pinholes from rust/corrosion. Cans with any visible rust on them, or bulging cans, should be tossed. Otherwise, they can go well beyond the "best by" date and still be fine. Again, canned fruits tend to degrade the fastest



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2019 04:08AM by Brother Of Jerry.

Expired fresh foods taste and smell bad. There is no expiration date on fresh foods, but trust me, your hooter will not lie to you. Vegetables and such in tins don't really expire. But if the lids are puffing outward, don't even open them. When we lived in Okinawa, the Air Force commissary refused to get rid of any expired or damaged foods. So every now and again we'd get a puffy can, and you're in for a bad experience when you pierce it with a can opener. But we were eating expired foods all the time. There was no other choice.

From what I've read, a puffy can is bad news and should be avoided, as it's a sign of possible botulism.

I just cut the cheese.

The exp or use by dates are mostly to make more money and avoid litigation. As a third generation grocer, I know this well. Milk bottled the same day at the same plant will have three different expiration dates stamped on it depending on which state is its final destination. It's all political with agribusiness lobbying legislature under phony pretenses of health and safety to get you to throw out and then buy more. The amount of food Americans throw out as "bad" that in other countries is considered "the best" (especially produce) is abhorrent.

Came across this article and in a way can be related to the information discussed in this message stream.

I thought mold on cheese wasn't good, so I would trim it off, wife would toss the entire block.

I did gag years ago when the "Galloping Gourmet" on TV chopped off a chunk of blue cheese with mold and ate it, mold and all saying it was it was good and natural.

Now this article linking breast cancer and moldy cheese, makes you think twice.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/doctors-want-fda-to-warn-women-about-cheese-and-breast-cancer-link/ar-AAINcGd?ocid=se

The link went to a 404 page not found.

As luck would have it, nytimes today had an interesting article on the problems of food research. For one thing, the term "linked" indicates a correlation, and as you've probably heard many times, correlation is not causation. Either could be caused by the other, or both could be caused by some unknown third factor, or it could be just a statistical outlier and there was no real correlation.

Often the correlation is so small that it takes very little change in the data to invalidate or even reverse the correlation. The foods that are bad for you one year and ok the next and bad again the year after generally fall into this category.

Here's the full article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/upshot/diet-soda-health-myths.html

Mold on cheese won't hurt you. You can cut it off or just eat it. How do you think the cheese got to be cheese in the first place? Throwing out the whole block of cheese is just absurd.

Wine, cheese, bread and yogurt are all "spoiled". They're the foods that make life worth living, fear cryin' out loud. Except yogurt. That's gross. :)

Looks like MSN has killed the link, sorry.

The comment about cheese being cheese because of the mold is spot on, I chide my wife by asking her how she can tell when sour cream goes bad.

She cringed when she found out that the best steak restaurants age their meat until there is a layer of mold on it.

tumwater Wrote:
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That used to be a common practice with wild game. Venison would hang until moldy, game birds hung by the neck until the bodies fell off the head.

>
> She cringed when she found out that the best steak
> restaurants age their meat until there is a layer
> of mold on it.