Almost everything we eat has some kind of date on it, but how much attention do we really pay to the expiry?
"Yeah, sell-by date or use-by date, those are the only two that I gotta buy.."
"Going with your gut on something and using even if they've passed their dates."
"If it's rotten, it's rotten, you throw it away. For some if you look that's okay, it’s not molded, then I ate it."
"But it says use-by, I will use it. Then if it's, you know, the smell is funny, I throw it away."
The government is trying to stop people wasting so much food by making the labels on packaging less confusing. So, out with the words sell-by and display until, instead, the new guidelines will suggest manufacturers stick with use-by or best before. It's estimated that UK households throw away 8.3 million tons of food and drink every year. And campaigners say that 60% of that could be avoided, saving families up to 50 pounds a month.
So we want to simplify this. So that you can see, when a food should be used by for food safety reasons if it's perishable, something like soft cheese or smoked fish, and then we want best before as alternative for foods start simply deteriorating quality.
The People's Supermarket in Central London was founded on the belief that many shops waste too much food. It even has its own kitchen to cook anything that's getting old to make sure it's not wasted and they try where possible to avoid showing any dates on food.
Now we are so conditioned as consumers to think about dates, numbers and so on. To take out display-by dates and sell-by dates which are there only for the supermarket's benefits, it's gonna do one thing, as I think, for the amount of food that gets chopped away.
And as the cost of living keeps on rising, the savings too, might be incentive enough to look beyond the date on the packaging.
Harriet Prest , Sky News, Central London.
