"best before date"

That's a good result.

i have never had a potato go bad.
and i have a bad habit of forgetting i even have them sometimes!

We get this Cravendale milk, it keeps for about 2 weeks. It costs more but means we buy less milk in the long run.

I'm pretty free and easy with Best Before dates though. Generally if it doesn't smell bad I'll eat it. Or with bread I just pick the green bits off.

ugh.

then again - i've cut the white fluff off cheese before and munched away.

Some scientist on telly said it was OK to eat mouldy bread anyway. BTW I only do this if it's like 1 day mouldy on the crusts, and the rest of the bread is OK.

hmm i thought i read that mold permeates like the entire loaf even though only a little is showing. could be making that up though. it's probably safe but doesn't it taste moldy? like that weird sharp taste.

i hope that's not true for cheese.

Yeah I expect that's true, but I don't notice it, I'm only talking about when it first starts getting those little green spots on the crust. Not full on patches of white & green yuck all over it, I'm not completely disgusting, just British.

What about frozen food?

I have some things from last christmas that I'm wondering whether I can eat this year...

They are actual meat & fish but have been undisturbed in my freezer for the last 12 months. Will I die if I cook myself up a feast tomorrow?

You'll live. Freezer burn is worst case scenario, I think.

My mum is very strongly saying "go for it" too. I am defrosting it slowly in the fridge for now (thinking gradual defrost would be better) and will make sure to cook it all properly tomorrow and then we'll see if things smell right/wrong/good/bad...

my dad reckons its all a con in terms of tins, like *all* of it. no canned / tinned food really goes off he says. not sure about the truth of this.

isn't there a guide inside fridge/freezer doors that says which meats can last which lenngth etc? usually with pitures of animals and whatnot?

From http://www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/focus_on_freezing/index.asp:

Freezer Storage Time
Because freezing keeps food safe almost indefinitely, recommended storage times are for quality only. Refer to the freezer storage chart at the end of this document, which lists optimum freezing times for best quality.

If a food is not listed on the chart, you may determine its quality after thawing. First check the odor. Some foods will develop a rancid or off odor when frozen too long and should be discarded. Some may not look picture perfect or be of high enough quality to serve alone but may be edible; use them to make soups or stews.

This time of year always get me thinking baout my crazy thrifty mom:

I discovered my mom (when I was a kid) would buy 75% off Xmas clearance candy and save it until the next xmas. Same w/Easter. So now, sad to say, fresh marshmallow peeps and licorice just taste weird and wrong to me.

― Abbott (Abbott), Friday, January 5, 2007 2:40 PM (3 years ago

don't do it. meat deteriorates even if it's frozen. freezer burn def isn't the worst case scenario.

Whatever, don't be a sissy. Eat it.

It'll have gone off. The problem is that meat/fish that's been kept in the freezer for that long won't smell off in the same way fresh meat/fish smells when it goes off. The frozen stuff will just smell weird - but there'll be the same food poisoning risks.

Friend of mine (ex housemate) got some fish that had been in the freezer for 9+ months, made it into a fish curry. He was crapping himself for the next 24 hours. I remember that he got through most of a 9 pack of supermarket value bogroll.

If anything is "wrong" with it, it's because it's not well wrapped and air has gotten to it, or an automatic defrosting freezer has put the outer surface through several freeze cycles and water crystals have burst the muscle cells, making the texture a little weird, which happens to some degree whenever you freeze food. If the meat was fresh and clean when it went in the freezer, there are no food poisoning risks.

People who crap themselves might not have the most sanitary kitchen habits.

I might save myself all the worrying and take a trip to Tesco this afternoon, pick up some last-minute christmas foodstuff bargains instead...

A whole fresh pheasant for the win!

No definitely debatable frozen foodstuffs for me!

Whether or not there are any concrete health risks, meat (and poultry and fish) you should toss after 9 months to a year, if only because if it hasn't been consumed by that point, it may as well be in the bin. I do know that whole chicken keep longer than chicken parts, but even then, it's only for another 3 months or so.

Butter keeps in the freezer for half a year, I think, but again I believe that may be more a flavor issue than a health issue.

One product that literally never goes bad: honey!

I don't know - I found two jars of honey in my cupboard just last month that must have been open for several years and had to chuck them as they didn't look at all good.

This time of year always get me thinking baout my crazy thrifty mom:

I discovered my mom (when I was a kid) would buy 75% off Xmas clearance candy and save it until the next xmas. Same w/Easter. So now, sad to say, fresh marshmallow peeps and licorice just taste weird and wrong to me.

― Abbott (Abbott), Friday, January 5, 2007 2:40 PM (3 years ago

― Stop Non-Erotic Cabaret (Abbbottt), Friday, December 24, 2010 7:22 AM

this is awesome

We still have a turkey in the bottom of our freezer that my wife got from her work in 2002.

I worked through my accumulation of cider in the last few summer weeks and it turns out that my long-standing distaste for Magners has left me with two cans of the stuff with a Best Before date of 27/11/10, while my sudden turn away from the sweetness of Kopparberg a couple of years ago has left me with a bottle of that with a Best Before date of 13/6/11.

I have no desire to drink the Magners (takers for it are welcome!), but will probably go for the Kopparberg, running on the assumption that it is safe.

Best not to eat eel if it's six months past its expire date. Tasted funny and boy oh boy was I nauseous

beer sell by dates are a relatively new concept iirc? they didn't have them on beer cans/bottles until what.. the 90s?

I did look it up for cider alongside posting here and consensus seems to be that if it smells & tastes about normal then it should be fine.

Braving the Kopparberg with Best Before: 13 June 11!

It was actually pretty tasty. As a bonus, I'm still alive.

i ate some pre-9/11 pudding about a year or so ago. it tasted like freedom. stale, stale freedom.

I think the only difference in these couple of out of date ciders that I've noticed is a bit of extra fizziness.

Without being aware ahead of time, I would not have know that they were old from taste/smell/etc.

I still have the mackerel fillets in spicy tomato sauce with a best before date of December 2003, by the way.

I have a couple cans of sardines that are at least that old. The last time I opened one it was fine. Maybe two-three years ago.

I drank some beer from the 1950s at a party in 2005

Just opened some canned diced tomatoes that had a best before date from earlier this year. Bah.

I always assumed cans were sort of guidelines. I mean what would be the point of all those bomb shelters in nuclear fearing America filled with canned goods?

They were supposed to rotate their stock, so nothing was more than a few months old when they had to go in.

how long until a nuclear winter blows over though?

I think back then it was only a matter of weeks. When were Hiroshima and Nagasaki re-settled? I always wondered about the toilet facilities down there, did they use buckets? Or were they built with pumps to bring it back to sewer level?

dumbwaiter

Last Saturday I tweeted about whether or not I should eat some cheesecake that was a day past it's "use by" date (note: not "best before"). Twitter unanimously told me to eat it, so I did. It was delicious.

I always ignore best before dates. They're loose guidelines at best.

When I moved to the US I thought, what with everyone suing everyone all the time, that they would have tons of use-by dates on everything. They don't! And when they do they're really lax! I had some fresh pasta that had a far-off use-by date and it started growing mould weeks before it. I was a little unsettled but we do kind of go crazy with use-by dates in the UK.

I've never not seen a use-by date in the US. It could be that you weren't looking hard enough though. They're frequently a barely legible computerized smear in some unobtrusive place on the packaging. Are UK dates very prominent?

i refuse to eat food past its use-by date and adhere strictly to them at all times