I always believe in "When in doubt, try it out"

So far so good.

dcarch

Yes, plllog, my pet peeve was the egg "expiration date". Now the USDA website actually says:

"What does it mean when an egg floats in water?
An egg can float in water when its air cell has enlarged sufficiently to keep it buoyant. This means the egg is old, but it may be perfectly safe to use. Crack the egg into a bowl and examine it for an off-odor or unusual appearance before deciding to use or discard it. A spoiled egg will have an unpleasant odor when you break open the shell, either when raw or cooked. "

Wow, use common sense and crack the egg into a bowl to see how it looks and smells? What a concept, LOL.

At any rate, I think the "app" will be helpful for many people who rely on their phones for information.

Annie

Well, to be fair about the egg date, it's supposed to be there so they know how long to stock it on the store shelves so that people will have a good chance to keep them awhile at home, and so the newer eggs don't all get bought while the lonely old carton rots forgotten in the back. It also helps me remember which carton I should use first. I do occasionally, keep eggs a very long time, but I've never had one rot in the fridge.

I always suspected the use by dates were just a way of mnfctrs getting us to trash their product so you'll buy more...esp when they put them on coke cans. I mean they found goods in Egyptian tombs that were still edible. And we all know that a twinkie never dies. ;)

You're right, grainlady, and that's what I've been preaching for a long time. We have to use our own judgment, not some arbitrary date on a package. I have a box of raisin bran cereal with a "use by" date of December, 2014. I just had a bowl for breakfast and it's fine, not stale, not spoiled, even the raisins aren't too hard. A lot of people I know would just throw the box out, and use no good judgment of their own at all.

My point has always been that a person should not rely on arbitrary dates on packages, we need to use our own senses and judgment in deciding. The USDA can say that you should only keep strawberries for 4 days, but if they aren't moldy or mushy or spoiled, they're going to make some fine shortcake or jam. I'm far more careful with chicken than I am with raisin bran, of course, but I still use my own judgment. And I don't even need an app!

Annie

I found a butt half of smoked ham at the bottom of my freezer this winter. I baked it and cut off all the outer pieces and proceeded to make ham salad, scrambled ham and eggs, ham and cabbage, and pea soup. The texture and flavor were not optimum but not offputting either, I just could not bear to throw all that meat away. It was exactly 3 years old.

I have a dear dear friend whom I shall call "Delicate Little Flower". I love her dearly, but I have never seen anyone with such a delicate constitution. Seems that about once a month she manages to get hold of something "old" or bad and be terribly ill for days. Last month it was a carton of yogurt that was "out of date", according to her.
The mind is an amazing thing.

Some people also have infections that remit then flare up. Could be a trigger in the food, or just enough time for the infection to grow and become acute, but the mind goes to "something I ate" first.

Grainlady, excellent point about being aware of spoilage beforethe use by date. You make me want to cry, though, for those seniors who unplug the fridge. Our utilities have programs for discounts for those who are on the edge. Do you have anything like that where you live?

There was a program last night title "Just Eat It" that dealt with food waste in North America. Over 40% of all food grown here is wasted, either in the fields (not perfect enough for the stores) at the store (tossed 3 days before a best by/sell by date) or in the home. Wholesalers try to donate it, but it can be so much the soup kitchens can't take it all. Grocers won't donate it for fear of a law suit. They either ignore or are ignorant of the Good Samaritan law that absolves them of any suit if something were to be off. A Canadian couple went on a six month odessy of dumpster diving for food. They were able to garner so much they couldn't keep up. The estimated cost of the food was around $121,000 (yup) and they only spent $33 for some items at the store.

There are no federal laws for best by/sell by/expiration date on any food item other than infant formulas. The dates are made up by the stores and the manufacturer.

If you can catch the show again, it was well worth watching. It was on MSNBC, and Tom Colichio was the host as the food editor for them. Here is a link to watch it. Just Eat It

Thanks for all the input on this topic. I've been making it i.e. best by/use/by dates a project for awhile and I keep wondering how my family of seven survived when we couldn't afford to throw anything away.

Peppi, thank for posting the link.

*My siblings and I remind my brother of his desperation for candy...he ate chocolate Exlax.

My pet peeve is someone leaving the refrigerator or freezer door open longer than necessary, and I see it a lot on TV shows. I have thermometers in my freezers and fridges, and so I know how fast the temperature can drop with the door open - especially the freezer. I also never leave anything like milk out any longer than necessary, but since I don't buy milk (except for powdered), that is not much of an issue.

I have been throwing out eggs that float, but now I will break them and see if they smell okay. As a child, I used to gather chicken eggs, and I do remember finding rotten ones. I also ate chocolate ExLax as a small child - but only once, and only because I thought it was candy - I was not desperate for candy, I just was too young to read - about four, I think.

My sister is one of the worst shoppers and she will never bother to look at an expiration date when shopping. If I am with her, I will go through items in her cart and put the expired ones back on the shelf and replace them. For this reason, she attempts to lose me in the store, or will try to send me off in a different direction looking for something else. Normally, she just won't shop with me, but I have other friends who will. I've taught Kevin to compare expiration dates, and he's usually good at that, but not always. The last eggs he bought were three days from the expiration date, and so I made a point of using them up quickly and made a frittata.

Lars

I am glad to see this and generally use a common sense approach to most expiration dates. While buttermilk I will allow to go past the use by date, regular milk, no way. I do not like waste but find It is soooo much better to waste a bit of milk than to deal with potential stomach issues with 4 kids in the house. I try to keep an eye on the milk and if it is getting close to time, that is my excuse to make pudding.

I rarely toss anything. We keep a pretty tight rotation and only buy what we will use. I've never shopped with a recipe list for one meal except maybe a holiday...but find uses for any extras the following weeks. I even stick the celery root end in water, it sprouts new shoots, then it goes in the kitchen/deck herb bed. The compost pile gets anything really gone off. The pups get that last odd scoop of yogurt etc.

Always surprised when a recipe says something freezes nicely up to two months. I ignore that advice. Properly sealed i find not much harm in flavor for quite a bit longer. But i keep that in rotation and most is used up by the next harvest season. Or i make stock with elder frozen meats.

It is the excess in garbage that baffles me. We have one tiny bag once a week but it is picked up twice and neighbors have two overflowing bins both days. That falls into the same issue of throwing out good and edible food. None that i can see compost or garden near me. When i pick pints and pints of raspberries that i let grow wild by the road, the neighbor stopped and asked if i really eat that. "they are a nuisance! We pull those out!" I've taught another neighbors young children how to pick the ripe ones. I see them out on walks with buckets when ripening. Let them feed the worm bin...

It is a start.

In England a lot of food is wasted too. It's terrible really.

Thanks Annie - I'll be looking for that app. My phone is smart. ;)

Grainlady - Thanks to you I reference stilltasty.com a lot, and it's definitely spared things from the garbage. I smiled and thought it fitting that the app has an "ask Karen" feature!

Re eggs - Note that the julian packed-on date is a better indicator of eggs' age than the sell-by date is. Not perfect, but better.

Lars - Don't sweat the temp drop too much. It's the air not the food and that recovers quickly, esp if you've got a lot in the fridge and freezer.

Growing up in Germany my parents owned a small mom & pop grocery store. I can't even begin to tell you how many "expired" items we ate. My mother would bring home fresh fruit that was bruised or overripe, limp veggies, meat and dairy products past the expiration date.

Never once did we get sick from eating it. I now shudder when I remember her washing of a slightly slimy piece of meat with salt water and cooking it. That might have taken it a bit too far.

Oh, and eggs had their own little house on the wall. They never got refrigerated.

I still go by smell and looks and not by dates in most cases.

But then there's the sour cream I just looked it. I had been opened but looked and smelled just fine. Until I turned the carton and saw an ugly dark mold spot. Even though it wasn't actually in the sour cream, you never know, and I threw it away, happily.

I'm NOT one to be concerned about dates on food. Canned stuff & other non-perishables... most times don't even look. Used to have supermarket that had rather big section of "reduced" stuff, especially produce. If there was a bag of say 6 avocados for next to n $$ and only ONE felt slightly over-ripe... no-brainer to me. If big head of cauliflower was $.50 cuz those outside leaves were wilted and there were 2-3 dime-sized brownish spots... it was coming home with me. This market would also have meat reduced from $1-2 off to 50% off when it was at least TWO days before sell-by date... can you say freezer?!?

On eggs especially... makes me crazy when someone ON TV says floating eggs are BAD?!? I have ALWAYS cracked eggs individually into a small bowl before incorporating in a recipe. That's what my grandmother said you HAD to do. Makes me wonder what FINALLY happens to eggs when market says just TOO old?? Do they end up somewhere and become part of baked goods that come back to supermarket?? HMMM??

I thought the other thing with eggs was not just the refrigeration but the washing of them. When laid, they have a protective coating but when washed, the coating is removed and it is easier for the bacteria to get in. I will say that I have not bothered to verify this. When we collect eggs, we put them in the fridge as that is what we have always done. I wonder how producers in Europe handle the eggs that inevitably have stuff (poo) on the shell

When I worked at a restaurant in San Francisco, the eggs were stored in flats at room temperature, but then the restaurant sold a lot of omelets at breakfast. I used the eggs for baking pastries and coffee cakes and knew that they had never sat around for as much as two days at room temperature, which in SF was quite cool anyway, especially in the drafty kitchen where I worked on a graveyard shift. I don't know if they were handled differently from grocery store eggs, but they might have been.

Lars

Part of the reason eggs are refrigerated in the United States is because they keep better for a longer period of time if refrigerated. If I keep freshly gathered eggs on my counter, they are still safe and delicious for days, even weeks after being laid. But if those same eggs are refrigerated, they are still usable for months. In fact, Amanda just pulled out a dozen of last fall's eggs, stuck in the back of her refrigerator. I figure she had them since probably late October. We're going on 6 months now, and she cracked a couple for muffins and they were still fine, although the whites were runny and the yolks broke easily. She hasn't found any that were actually spoiled, and my extension service contact once told me that eggs usually don't get "rotten", they dry up. When you purchase commercial eggs at the store, they are already weeks old, so longer storage times are critical to stores.

I often leave freshly gathered eggs on the counter for use, and I do not wash them until I'm ready to use them. If they are very dirty, I can't help myself, I wash them and put those in the refrigerator. Right now I have 7 dozen eggs in the fridge and a couple dozen more on the counter.

Annie

So my eggs that expired on Jan 27 are still okay?

Should be.

They might be a bit past the fluffiest meringue but should be fine in general and safe to eat. Crack them and inspect as above.

I agree with plllog, they are probably fine. Crack one into a bowl and see. They might not be the best for a sunny side up breakfast (the white might spread and the yolk easily broken) , but you'll never know the difference in a batch of muffins or other baked goods.

Annie

Okay, thanks.

If I have too many eggs, I brine some in salt water.

40 days later, I will have salted eggs which can be kept forever. Salted eggs are used in many recipes.

dcarch