Some excerpts from the Atlantic article "Expiration Dates are Meaningless" by Yasmin Tayang, published in 2022. Enjoy!

"It makes sense for people to be wary of expired food, which can occasionally be vile and incite a frenzied dash to the toilet, but food scientists have been telling us for years—if not decades—that expiration dates are mostly useless when it comes to food safety. Indeed, an enormous portion of what we deem trash is perfectly fine to eat: The food-waste nonprofit ReFED estimated that 305 million pounds of food would be needlessly discarded this Thanksgiving."

"The problem is that most expiration dates convey only information about an item’s quality. With the exception of infant formula, where they really do refer to expiration, dates generally represent a manufacturer’s best estimate of how long food is optimally fresh and tasty, though what this actually means varies widely, not least because there is no federal oversight over labeling. Milk in Idaho, for example, can be “sold by” grocery stores more than 10 days later than in neighboring Montana, though the interim makes no difference in terms of quality. Some states, such as New York and Tennessee, don’t require labels at all."

"Date labels have been this haphazard since they arose in the 1970s. At the time, most Americans had begun to rely on grocery stores to get their food—and on manufacturers to know about its freshness. Now 'the large majority of consumers think that these [labels] are related to safety,' Emily Broad Leib, a Harvard Law professor and the founding director of its Food Law and Policy Clinic, told me. A study she co-authored in 2019 found that 84 percent of Americans at least occasionally throw out food close to the date listed on the package. But quality and safety are two very different things. Plenty of products can be edible, if not tasty, long past their expiration date."

"Consider milk, which is among the most-wasted foods in the world. Milk that has already soured or curdled can—get this—still be perfectly safe to consume. (In fact, it makes for fluffy pancakes and biscuits and … skin-softening face masks.) 'If you take a sip of that milk, you’re not going to end up with a foodborne illness,' Broad Leib said, adding that milk is one of the safest foods on the market because pasteurization kills all of the germs. Her rule of thumb for other refrigerated items is that anything destined for the stove or oven is safe past its expiration date, so long as it doesn’t smell or look odd. In industry speak, cooking is a 'kill step'—one that destroys harmful interlopers—if done correctly. And then there is the pantry, an Eden of forever-stable food. Generally, dry goods never become unsafe, even if their flavor dulls. 'You’re not taking your life into your hands if you’re eating a stale cracker or cereal,' said Broad Leib.

"...But as long as food doesn’t carry these germs [like salmonella or e. coli] to begin with, pathogens won’t suddenly appear the moment the clock strikes midnight on the expiration date. 'They’re not spontaneous. Your crackers aren’t, like, contracting salmonella from the shelf,' said Broad Leib."

"Although there’s no perfect way to know whether food is safe or not, there are better ways than expiration dates to tell. The adage 'When in doubt, throw it out' doesn’t cut it anymore, said Neff; if you’re not sure, just look it up. Good tools are available online: She recommends FoodKeeper, an app developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which lets users look up roughly how long food lasts. The Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, by the food-waste pioneer Dana Gunders, gives detailed practical advice, such as scraping half an inch below blue-green mold on hard cheese to safely recover the rest. Leftovers require slightly more caution, noted Broad Leib, because reheating, transferring between containers, and frequent touching with utensils (which, admit it, have been in your mouth) introduces more risk for contamination; her recommendation is to eat them within three to five days, and reheat them well—to a pathogen-killing internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. And if doing so proves tedious, consider Roe’s take on the old saying: 'When in doubt, cover it with panko, fry it up, and give it to your kids.'

"Yet for most foods, one tactic reigns supreme: the smell test. Your senses can give you most of the information you need. 'If something smells off, you know,' said Broad Leib."