Study highlights:
> Institutional signals of food quality drive consumer food waste behaviors.
> Food-related routines affect whether refrigerated food gets eaten.
> Ambiguous date labeling decreases the odds that refrigerated food will be eaten.
> Respondents are systematically over-optimistic that refrigerated food will be eaten.
Honestly this is part of why I throw food out maybe more frequently than others do. The plethora of dates is extremely confusing. Pair that with the fact that I’ve had awful food poisoning a few times in my life and I end up tossing food out that’s probably still fine to eat, but I just don’t want to risk it.
Find the pattern and avoid those situations. There's no need to be wasteful by blindly following those arbitrary dates.
It's usually easy to tell when most food has spoiled by smelling or examining it. Another important aspect is making sure the food is cooked thoroughly.
Buy 100 fresh chickens from the supermarket. Then tell me which ones are contaminated with campylobacter just by smelling them. You can't.
You can't.
All smell tells you is when the food is rotting, but no-one eats rotting food because it smells foul and because it tastes foul.
People get food poisoning because pathogens often are not detectable by smell or taste.
Cook rice. Chill the rice. Store it correctly. Reheat it thoroughly.
Sniff it at every stage.
Can you smell the bacillus cereus, can you smell the toxins they produce? The toxins are not destroyed by heat from cooking, and this is a very common form of food poisoning.
Stop telling people they can smell food poisoning. They can't.
> It disingenuous to ignore the parent's very next sentence,
No, because parent poster is talking about ignoring the "arbitrary" food safety dates. If you ignore the date you significantly increase the risk of food poisoning, and not all of those are fixed by thorough cooking.
For many people food poisoning might be a few days of unpleasant illness, but we need to remember that it can also be a life-changing illness.
Most of what I buy has a 'best before end' (BBE) date, not a 'use by', which is not a 'food safety date'.
Many supermarkets in the UK are removing BBE dates from vegetables because of exactly this issue (and as discussed in the article) - people blindly chucking food that's fine because the date is yesterday's.