So this is Christmas?
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The following is an excerpt from a company email sent today, the day after Christmas. I no longer work for this company, partly for reasons like this, but was forwarded the email by a former coworker who wrote, "Hope you guys had a better holiday than the people at the homeless shelter mentioned below."
From: R___, N____
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 3:02 PM
To: _____________
Subject: FridgeThis is late notification to tell you the Kitchen Duty Girls have completed their job (coffee was requested to be left on), but fridge has been cleaned out. They want you to know all out of date frozen food was taken to food shelter by Scott Miller. Yes, there were frozen foods with '05 & '06 dates.
(snip)
Let us strive for a cleaner kitchen in '08
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Dunno how it is in the US, but in my country (The netherlands) this is fairly normal practice. (Supermarkets give expired foods to "food banks" which distribute it under low-income families) Date norms are very strict here, so food can be safely eaten 20-30% past the date. (ie, milk is about 2 weeks while the date is 10 days). I don't know what kind of food was in the frigde, but as long as everything is kept frozen it can be kept good very long. From first hand experience I can tell btw: I once did a test for biology on meat kept frozen for two years. I found no pathogens, so my family just ate it and we didn't get sick (it was cooked well however).
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My mom is a manager at Quiznos and regularly brings home big bags of little bags of expired potato chips. I can safely say there's nothing wrong with these. :D
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Ah, for the holiday season. The time where panhandlers earn extra income and food banks get replenished because it's the only time of year when people think about these things.
@dtech said:
so food can be safely eaten 20-30% past the date.
I'm eating "expired" eggs as we speak. But two years past the expiration date seems a little much.
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Expiration dates are also very much on the side of caution here (in Germany). Almost anything except fresh milk and some varieties of cheese can be used days or even weeks after they expire.
As for dry, sealed or frozen stuff, I've found it to be basically forever (but the expiration date reflects this). I still have several cans of soup I bought two years ago; they're due in 2008 or 2009.
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@Liquid Egg Product said:
Ah, for the holiday season. The time where panhandlers earn extra
income and food banks get replenished because it's the only time of
year when people think about these things.@dtech said:
so food can be safely eaten 20-30% past the date.
I'm eating "expired" eggs as we speak. But two years past the expiration date seems a little much.
You haven't really lived until you've tried gum from a pack of 20-year old baseball cards.
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With frozen foods, it is more a question of product quality than safety. Provided it has never defrosted, the main issue is that it dries out (i.e. 'Freezer Burn'). Perfectly safe, but looks, tastes and feels horrid.
No biological agent is going to do all that much at -18deg.
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@robbak said:
No biological agent is going to do all that much at -18deg.
Yes, and that's the difference between fridge and freezer. There are things that live at fridge temperatures, and even though they're not all infectious to humans, they leave toxic poo in the food.
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@jdpalmer said:
This is late notification to tell you the Kitchen Duty Girls have completed their job (coffee was requested to be left on), but fridge has been cleaned out. They want you to know all out of date frozen food was taken to food shelter by Scott Miller. Yes, there were frozen foods with '05 & '06 dates.
I saw an article in the local newspaper recently about this very topic! It was written by a lady who works in some foodbank and she said that they get quite a large quantity of donated food that they have to immediately throw away. Cereals full of weevils and other such rot that people donate. Sure, some foods are still good past their "good until" dates. But people really should check the food before they donate it. Not even homeless want to eat weevils and maggots. Sheesh.
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And some foods are actually BETTER past their expiration date.
I enjoy my twizzlers so hard they shatter when you drop them. I can't imagine ANYTHING going bad with a 100% non-natural flavoured plastic stick. ;)
I'm also fond of stale marshmallow peeps. Can't stand them fresh, but open the pack and wait a month. Mmmm....
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@r3jjs said:
And some foods are actually BETTER past their expiration date.
I enjoy my twizzlers so hard they shatter when you drop them. I can't imagine ANYTHING going bad with a 100% non-natural flavoured plastic stick. ;)
I'm also fond of stale marshmallow peeps. Can't stand them fresh, but open the pack and wait a month. Mmmm....
Whenever I go to a movie, I'll get a bag of popcorn, eat almost none of it, then leave it in the car for a week.
