When food is actually too old to eat

this video is sponsored by squar space how are you supposed to know when food is too old to be eaten especially with things like dry goods that don't tend to decompose in any really visually apparent way well one thing that you could do is look on the box look at the expiration date and britz by that of course I mean the expiry date ah you see this box of couscous is set to expire April 11th 2025 that's pretty soon I've had this for a while yeah couscous is one of those things that have a bad habit of buying on the assumption that I might need it at some point in the future because I figure hey it'll last forever but here we are just a few weeks away from its expiry date does that mean I need to throw it away absolutely not first of all it doesn't say it expires on this date it says it's best before that date that means its quality might degrade how would the quality degrade with a dried pasta product like couscous couscous is just very small little bits of pasta well um I think what would probably happen is that it would start getting kind of brittle instead cooking up all um sort of chewy and stretchy it would get sort of crumbly in the mouth but even if this said do not consume after April 11th 2025 I still wouldn't necessarily take that as gospel because I'm a thinking person and uh this is just a corporation telling me what they want me to believe which is not necessarily like a bad thing I mean I think there are legitimate reasons for corporations to exist and for them to communicate about their products nothing wrong with that but my problem with an expiry date is that I think it tends to imp apply some government sanction right which is simply not the case at least not in the United States and similar jurisdictions with the notable exception of baby formula there is no law in the US that says you have to put an expiration date on your food product and there's no law governing how that date should be calculated so when food companies put a date on their products they're kind of freelancing they're doing whatever they want to do and that requires us to interrogate their likely motives I'm certainly not speaking specifically about the good people of the Deo company I like their pasta very much and I'm sure that they're lovely people but they have several motivations for putting an expiration date on their product one is so that you don't have a bad experience right if you eat a bunch of crumbly pasta that's all mealy and not stretchy and chewy and delicious well you might get mad and then you might go on Tik Tok and do like part 43 of my beef with Theo right or you might get mad at the retailer who sold this to you and if the retailer gets lots of complaints about a product from a particular company that retailer is going to turn around and get mad at that company which is a bad thing because you know they sell a lot of pasta food companies also don't want you to get sick eating their products which could happen pretty unlikely with old pasta but you know old milk or something sure you could get sick from that they don't want that to happen a because they're decent human beings presumably and they don't want you to suffer for no reason a fellow sentient creature but uh they're also perhaps more immediately worried about legal liability right getting sued and losing so in that sense expiration dates can be interpreted as a kind of cya policy cover your ass legally right what they're saying is that if you eat this Beyond this date then we cannot be held legally liable for whatever happens to you and of course they cannot unilaterally declare that they are not liable of course they try to all depends on what the courts say but another reason why companies might want to put an expiration date on their product is to make you worried that it's too old causing you to throw it away without eating it go to the store and buy another one and then they get two sales for one dinner right it's probably less likely to happen on the individual level but on the retailer level oh my gosh stores grocery stores they don't want to be seen selling expired merchandise and so they're very motivated to take expired merchandise off the shelves before consumers even get a chance to buy it and again I'm not talking about these people in particular I just think this is generally true of food manufacturers they do have a certain money-making motive in encouraging grocery stores to take older product off the shelves so that they can sell more to that grocery store so that grocery store can sell more to you as a result of all these factors nearly every prepackaged food product that you find on the shelves the United States at least is going to have an expiration date on it I found this thing of a fancy salt in my pantry and it has what looks to be an expiration date on it uh September 2027 that can't be a manufactured by date because it's in the future unless this came from the future anyway this salt expires in 2027 it's a rock salt is a rock rocks don't generally expire but they do dissolve and in a really humid climate or something this might start like clumping up and that's a reason for them to put an expiration date on it I get the business practice but from a consumer standpoint I think expiration dates especially on Dry Goods just don't tell you very much that's very valuable what I want to know instead is when was the product manufactured how old is it and believe it or not you can usually tell if you know how to read the code it depends on the package and the product but it usually works something like this down here you have the expiration date this is what's known as the open date it's easy to read over next to it is a whole bunch of letters and numbers and stuff and this is referred to as the closed date and it might include information Beyond just the date of manufacturer it could also include um you know the batch number the plant where it was made if they ever need to trace down the product and where it came from companies will put their own little personal internal code onto the package that tells them all of that information and you can usually Crack the Code some companies will actually put the information on their website on their FAQ they'll tell you how to read the closed date on their package for other companies um there's like resources online I think usually made for like retailers or Distributors that just kind of compile all of the codes from lots of different companies and you can this is a googleable thing put in the name of the company and like closed date format and you can generally find something but a lot of them tend to work exactly the way that this one does you will find a five-digit number two of those digits will indicate the year three of them will indicate which Day in the year it was so here we see a 22 and let's just assume for a second that the 22 indicates the year it's a logical assumption because Dry Goods usually are set to expire 2 3 years after they were manufactured and next to the 22 we have a three-digit number which is 101 guess what the 101st day of the year 2022 was it was April 11th yeah this is set to expire exactly 3 years after it was produced this was produced about 3 years ago canned goods actually are legally required in the US to put some kind of information to make them traceable on the bottom though not necessarily an expiration date because cans are sealed there's no air you can get anerobic bacteria like the kind that caused botulism which isn't super common anymore because of advances to can technology the plastic liners on the inside make it a whole lot less likely to happen but botulism is such a horrific disease that they still really want to make cans traceable and I'm down with that anyway the expiration date on these beans is December 27th 2026 and then the code above it has a 24 I'm guessing these were made in the year 2024 I see a 27 next to it which I would guess probably indicates the day of the month which is 27 and then there's an L uh I don't know they sometimes use letters to indicate months that are beyond the number nine which would be uh September right so maybe l means December in their system I'm not sure but my guess is that this is just set to expire once it's about 2 years old right anyway the more you do this and you look at different products you'll start seeing something interesting about expiration dates is that they're always at these really even numbers relative to the date at which they were manufactured so something like fruit juice that you might keep in the fridge it'll often have an expiration date that is two weeks exactly 14 days after the date of manufacturer or a month and then with uh you know Dry Goods like these it'll usually be a year or a year and a half or three years so what does all that tell us I mean at face value what that would seem to tell us is that food items have an incredible property where they tend to expire at nice even round numbers relative to the date at which they were manufactured I mean you could imagine that a really well-run food company would take samples of its product hold them at different humidity levels and different light levels and such and uh then do a a systematic testing of their quality at certain time intervals over the course of years and from that you could end up uh putting together a number that is uh sort of the average of when quality starts to noticeably fall off if you did that what are the odds of that number would be two weeks a month a year a year and a half or three years those odds seem rather low to me these numbers are arbitrary actually no that's too strong a word to use it's not random these dates uh they are Ballpark estimates enormous gaping ballparks right and when food companies make those kinds of guesses they have every motive ation in the world to guess very conservatively to say that their product is best after a very very small window of time because a they're trying to cover their asses legally and B uh they just want you to buy more so they want you to convince yourself that this is not good anymore and to throw it away and go out and buy more this is absolutely fine so what did Public Health authorities say about how old something can be before you need to throw it away well the first thing that most of them will say if you go to their websites and read their literature that's intended to inform people in the public like you and me is that uh the first thing you need to do is uh use your senses right the expiration date is not necessarily indication of safety what is a better indication of safety is does something look or smell or feel rotten does it feel off does it seem little bit something not right about it when in doubt throw it away right that's not going to keep you out of all trouble because there's absolutely bad things in food that can hurt you that you would not taste whatsoever so things like uh chemical contamination but that wouldn't have anything really to do with the expiration date um things like pathogenic bacteria um spoilage bacteria and pathogenic bacteria are usually not the same ones spoilage bacteria are ones that kind of make the food smell or taste kind of rotten they usually just don't hurt you that badly whereas the uh the ones that do tend to hurt you badly also unfortunately tend to not make the food taste rotten but they tend to uh exist in tandem with each other right because conditions that result in the growth of spoilage bacteria will probably create a growth of path pathogenic bacteria so if you smell or feel spoilage bacteria there's a good chance that it has pathogenic bacteria but there's a chance that you just have a whole lot of pathogenic bacteria and very few spoilage bacteria and as a result you've got something that's going to taste just fine and it's going to make you sick and that's not great but it happens and it's a risk that we live with uh the odds probably go down at least a bit when you eat something that's fresher and so that's a reason to prefer fresher food that's also not necessarily a reason to throw something away just because it's old if we go to foodsafety.gov a US govern website that is uh still here and uh we look at their sort of dates for uh you know refrigerated food when should you eat these different things H 3 to 5 days for fresh beef uh ham if it is uncured 3 to 5 days 5 to seven if it is cured or salted right leftovers in the fridge they say 3 to four days I don't know where they're getting the range from 32 4 that's kind of odd given these are all obviously just kind of round number estimates and these numbers are also pretty conservative because the United States Department of Health and Human Services also wants to cover its ass if not legally because they have you know some amount of protection from lawsuits but uh morally right ethically the people who work there especially the scientists tend to really care about how their work is going to affect humanity and they don't want to risk getting another sensient fellow human being sick likewise I as a hopefully relatively responsible YouTuber I'm really scared about getting you sick and as a result I tend to kind of not really give you very much information inform about how long something can be kept because I want to cover my own ass and I suppose by extension cover your ass as well like I don't really care about being sued that much these days I I probably should but I care more about whether or not I hurt someone there's a kind of information that the public wants but that experts are hesitant to provide because they don't know for sure because they can't know for sure it's going to depend so much on your storage conditions and the particular product involved and all of that we can't be sure and so we don't say anything because to get it wrong would be to hurt someone so now is when I say something ostensibly indemnifying right like eat at your own risk you know rely on your own Senses at your own risk but that honestly is probably my best advice and it's also the best advice of the experts if you read their stuff right they basically say look look at it does it have mold on top then don't eat it if it smells like roadkill don't eat it if it looks and smells fine it probably is because food can and does last far far far longer than the numbers would indicate and there's a legitimate public interest to be served in encouraging people to eat food that they might otherwise be a little too scared to because our food system wastes depending on what study you look at something between 30 and 40% of all food ends up in the trash with much or most of that waste happening at the consumer level that means all of our food is 30 to 40% more more expensive than it needs to be and 30 to 40% less sustainable than it needs to be so minimizing food waste is a good thing another good thing is Squarespace sponsor of this video whether you have a a public health message that you need to get out there or if you just want to advertise your small business or even your very large business you can do all of that with Squarespace set up a whole business online where you can take people's money sell them products anything you could need it's all a One-Stop shop right here at Squarespace let's get started so you can go over here and browse some templates if you want or you can use design intelligence from Squarespace to design your own just answer some questions the computer will do a lot of the work for you what do I want to do I suppose uh promote uh an event or project my project to get people to eat slightly older food and I want to maybe collect some donations while I'm at it cuz you know this ain't free eat older food.org and I want my brand personality to be let's say friendly seems accessible what kind of section do I need an intro section an about section my Social Links all of that stuff choose my color palette and none of 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internet for you they can even register your custom domain for you designing a website is free but hosting it or getting a a custom domain name those you have to pay for so when you do that think of your old buddy goose and save 10% using my code rusia checkout squarespace.com rusia thank you Squarespace and thank you dry goods under ideal storage circumstances you can keep these essentially forever if you don't believe me hey check out the story of the honey that they found in King Tuton Common's uh tomb 3,000 year old honey scientist did a chemical analysis on it it was still edible it's possible I'm not saying eat anything that's 3,000 years old though you know CU honey has like some particular enzymatic and microbial sterilizers in it and low water activity lots of sugar it's just really really depends so you know it's up to you