As part of the publicity surrounding yesterday’s launch of the DEFRA report and public consultation on food security, Hilary Benn suprised (and no doubt outraged) a lot of people by suggesting that shoppers should ignore “best before” dates on food to reduce the amount thrown away,
Checking the original DEFRA announcement (July) on its food labelling review (being conducted with the FSA and WRAP), these statistics caught my attention in particular:
“consumers often lack confidence in date labelling: 53% of consumers would never eat fresh fruit and vegetables past the “best before” date; 56% would never eat bread and cakes past the “best before” date; and almost 10% leave a day’s ‘buffer’ before any date. 21% would never “take a risk” with any food close to its date, even if it appeared fine.”
It appears that a lot of us get confused between best-before dates, use-by dates, sell-by dates and display-until dates. And so we throw away food, which goes into landfill and generates harmful methane, and also puts pressure on farmers to produce more than is actually required (and that’s before you start taking over-eating into consideration).
With the world looking ahead to serious food security issues created by climate change and population explosion, the last thing we need is needless waste increasing the amount our food producers need to provide.
“Use by” dates indicate time during which food is safe to eat. “Best before” dates indicate a period in which food is of optimum quality and after which it is may still perfectly edible but may decline in quality. These are mandated by law. Sell-by and Display-until are stock control dates used by retailers and are not mandated by law.
So should the Government insist on labelling changes? Not according to Stephen Robertson of the British Retail Consortium, who said “Scrapping best-before dates won’t reduce food waste. Customer education will.”
via Sell-by dates past their sell-by date? by VegBox Recipes – ooffoo.com .
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