Today, Fandango provocatively asks:
How much attention do you pay to the dates stamped on food packaging? Do you find the various labels confusing? Will you toss out any food that has passed whatever date shows up? Or will you go ahead and consume it if it still looks and smells okay?
It’s funny, actually. Since my stroke I get out but not nearly so much. One of the side effects of this is that my visits to shops are spaced out. Even before I split from my wife, we got into the habit of only going shopping once a week. So I plan my eating a lot more than I used to.
One of my worst cases is throwing food out, which means that, yes, I pay attention to Use By dates. Not so much Best Before. If I get a bunch of fresh meals, say, I’ll eat them in the order of Use By date. There’s generally a little scope for breaking this rule – if I specifically fancy a pizza one night, say – but I do my best to follow it. I really don’t like throwing food away. A lot of things, the dates don’t come into it much since I freeze it to eat later. In that respect, it hampered my trying to eat vegetarian a lot because a lot of vegetarian food, you can’t freeze.
If food goes past its Use By, it depends on what the food is, what it smells like etc. I’m wary ‘cos I have a poor sense of smell, but I’ll still eat some low-risk food sometimes if it seems okay. Occasionally I’ll cook high-risk food anyway, and let one of the cats decide if I should eat it.
Mister Bump 
Haha! Don’t the cats mind being the Guinea pigs?
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Only if it’s bad
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Yes that’s true
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With the exception of cheese and yogurt, if something has expired more than a few days I will not eat it. My stomach isn’t the greatest so why take chances? Bill isn’t particularly bothered by expiration dates unless they’re crazy old. Nothing seems to bother him. Since it’s just the two of us now, he will pop down to the supermarket two or three times a week to buy any fresh ingredients I may need to prepare whatever we’re craving on a particular day. It’s different in the fall/winter when I make more stews, soups and slow-cooker meals; those dinners are planned in advance and I make sure I have everything I need at home at least one day in advance. During the summer, we grill outside often and eat a lot of fish that Bill catches. Summer meals are light and casual and we like to just play it by ear.
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I’ve gotte into a routine where I stock the freezer from online orders every 2 or 3 weeks, also but fresh at weekends. The stuff I buy at weekends only has a shelf life of a few days, so the first half of the week is fresh, the rest is frozen. Used to be we’d buy fresh as required.
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I watched a very short youtube video a while back which essentially busted the myth of the dates stamped on packaged foods. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDg8DQl7ZeQ
I hope wordpress doesn’t mark this spam
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Good idea to let the cats be your taste testers! 😀
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I eat everything regardless of the use by date. I ate Yoghurt which was six weeks out of date, using the justification … it’s curdled anyway
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I’m not sure I could bring myself to do that.
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We often debate this topic, I won’t go past a day or two of the stamped date, but my husband will eat almost anything, maybe that has something to do with the fact that he too can’t smell anything! 😉
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Leave it to the cat!
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I have a horrible sense of smell
So I go by stamped dates and the look of the food
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I always figure that if meat is that off, you’d smell it.
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Or it would look pretty repulsive like grey 🥵
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