Apparently there is a movement in Europe to do away with sell by and use by dates in England. I found this article and thought that it was worth posting here.
From
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1192223/CLARISSA-DICKSON-WRIGHT-These-rotten-food-labels-past-sell-date.htmlHere's a little game to liven up a dinner party.
Wait until all three courses have been devoured appreciatively by your guests. And then tell them that the food you served up is past its supermarket 'use-by' date.
Look at the horrified faces around the table. Savour their silence.
At best, you have identified yourself as a slovenly wretch; at worse, a potential poisoner.
This is absolute rubbish, of course. We're all led to believe that adhering to use-by dates mean we are safe, healthy, responsible and hygienic - but it's just not true.
Use-by dates and their absurd companions, 'sell-by' and 'best before', are not there to save us from food poisoning.
They are just a marketing scam, intended to persuade us to throw away perfectly good food so we have to buy more.
Which is why I welcome the news that sell-by and best-before dates on almost all fresh produce and thousands of other food items are to be scrapped.
These labels are responsible for tons of meat, cheese, fruit and vegetables being dumped in landfill sites when we could be happily eating it.
In these cash-strapped days, more than ever, we should trust our instincts, avoid the rubbish bin and enjoy the food on which we have spent our hard-earned cash.
Indeed, I would encourage shoppers to hang around towards the end of the day in the supermarket waiting for an assistant with a sticker gun to mark down prices on items about to pass their sell-by date.
This food will almost always be safe for a few more days - and it's probably at least half-price.
The sensible cook will save a fortune by understanding what can be eaten after its use-by date and what can't.
There's no great science to this. We all have in-built sensors to help us - our noses.
The smell of meat when it is off is unmistakable: instinct alone would tell you to avoid it.
Fresh fish has a light, sweet smell - while a heavy, repellent odour indicates that it isn't suitable even for the cat.
Equally, a sense of smell is all you need to know whether milk and eggs are fresh.
sell by date
All you need to check whether food is safe to eat is your sense of smell
It is, of course, daft to suggest that a use-by date can be calculated accurately or that a single date would cover all situations.
There are too many variables.
It depends on how you store food - a couple of pork chops left in the back of a hot car for a few days will smell very differently to the same chops kept in an efficient fridge or well-ventilated cold larder.
Moreover, how food is eventually cooked affects how long it can be kept safely.
Dishes using raw ingredients such as properly made mayonnaise or sorbets must have fresh straight from-the-chicken eggs.
An older egg, on the other hand, will carry little salmonella risk if it is brutally hard boiled.
Fermentation, rotting and bacteria have always been part of food and cooking.
Sauces made from fermented anchovies or soy are better if they are left a while after opening.
Cheeses mature wonderfully - blue varieties are streaked with the very stuff nannying food safety officers are trying to save us from: mould.
Imagine the idiocy of putting a use-by date on a newly bottled Bordeaux: the point is that it gets better with age.
If use-by is irrelevant, then best before is plain silly. Best before dates are commonly used on dry goods - pasta, cereals and biscuits.
Here, the biscuit manufacturers aren't even suggesting there is a risk in keeping the package for longer: merely that in their opinion it would taste better if eaten sooner.
Well they would say that, wouldn't they? Any baked product will have a long life only if it is stored properly in a tin.
Don't think, incidentally, that retailers print use-by dates on food out of the kindness of their hearts.
Besides encouraging us to throw out perfectly good food, it provides them with legal protection.
If we are sick after eating food that has passed its so-called use-by date, we can't sue them.
sell by dates
Tonnes of food is thrown out and goes into landfill because it is past its sell-by date
We have been warned, so it's not their fault - in the same way that health warnings on cigarettes give tobacco companies a defence against legal action from cancer victims.
So how can we avoid the tyranny of the use-by date? Well, I <cite>never buy meat from supermarkets.
Their meat is tasteless and tough, plumped up by fluid and coloured by dyes to look fresh.
Instead of this pre-packaged pallid fare, I go to my local traditional butcher, who will have hung his meat for between four and six weeks.
Hanging breaks down the meat slowly, making it richer and more tender. There is no risk as long as you keep the flies away.
I know and trust my butcher, but he never provides use-by dates. If he failed to keep up his high standards of hygiene, his customers would soon know about it and he would find himself out of business.
Vegetables should not need use-by dates: it is obvious when a vegetable if 'off'.
They should be grown locally and go straight to the cook after harvesting, rather than being freighted, chilled and packaged.
English asparagus, for instance, tastes completely different to the supermarket offering if it is freshly picked.
Of course, the season is short - from late April to mid June. Before airfreight, we could enjoy this wonderful vegetable for only a short season - and it tasted so much better for it.
This relationship between a local farmer or shop is far stronger than the anonymous transactions between the modern consumer and supermarket.
Perhaps this alienation from our food is why the British are especially picky about food safety.
Our food was industrialised long before other nations and we were the first Europeans to take to big supermarkets with enthusiasm. Food sell-by dates first appeared in the Seventies, introduced by Marks & Spencer.
I'm sure they would say otherwise, but the move turned out to be a smart sales gimmick: a demonstration that certain supermarkets cared and were different from more callous rivals.
Others were obliged to follow and dating is now part of EU legislation.
Use-by dates assume food is kept in a fridge. While I would never argue that the fridge has not been a brilliant invention, it is certainly not the be-all and end-all of food safety.
It encourages cross-contamination between cooked and uncooked meat by placing them close to one another, and can leave food over-cold in its centre and resistant to cooking.
Equally, it provides a false sense of security. If it's been in the fridge, it must be OK.
Not necessarily. There are equally good traditional ways to store food.
I use a well-ventilated cold larder, which keeps food at three or four degrees centigrade - the ideal temperature.
Potting - where meat or seafood is covered by a layer of fat in a glass or ceramic vessel - will preserve food for months, with only a cloth to keep the flies off.
Equally, storage in wine and oil, drying, pickling and salting will keep food just as well as a fridge.
Man has survived and prospered for more than 150,000 years on this planet without the help of use-by dates.
As hunter-gatherers, we passed knowledge of what could be eaten safely down to our children and grandchildren.
Where there was once instinct and skill, there are now meaningless numbers printed on plastic.
Use-by dates are not a mark of technical and scientific superiority, but merely a sign that we have lost touch with the sources of our food.
We do not trust our supermarkets - nor, sadly, do we trust ourselves.
I opened it, smelled it, added a little water and heated it up. It tasted fine and I'm still here to talk about it. I don't know how much nutritional value it had but it was edible.