What Do Food Expiration Dates Actually Mean?
Sell By, Best By, and Use By... do these dates actually tell you anything? Food science can be tricky, but we're here to clear some of it up. The Financial Diet: ...
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[♪ INTRO] You know that horrible, sour smell that comes from expired milk? Yeah. You only need to smell it once to make sure it never happens again. Luckily, many food manufacturers put some kind of Sell By, Best By, or Use By date on their products to tell you... well, actually, they don’t tell you much. These labels are mainly for quality and flavor purposes, not safety. And a lot of common foods are edible past what it says on the label. This can make it difficult to figure out what you can eat and what needs to go in the compost bin. But understanding what’s happening chemically when foods go bad, both before and after those dates pass, can help you out. A product’s real expiration date is tricky to predict, because it can be affected by everything from the sanitation...
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[♪ INTRO] You know that horrible, sour smell that comes from expired milk? Yeah. You only need to smell it once to make sure it never happens again. Luckily, many food manufacturers put some kind of Sell By, Best By, or Use By date on their products to tell you... well, actually, they don’t tell you much. These labels are mainly for quality and flavor purposes, not safety. And a lot of common foods are edible past what it says on the label. This can make it difficult to figure out what you can eat and what needs to go in the compost bin. But understanding what’s happening chemically when foods go bad, both before and after those dates pass, can help you out. A product’s real expiration date is tricky to predict, because it can be affected by everything from the sanitation...
