Keep it or toss it? Date label confusion causing people to waste ‘perfectly good food,’ expert says

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Buying groceries takes a big bite -- a really big bite -- out of a family’s budget today.

What’s worse is that Americans throw away more than a third of the food they buy, according to the federal government.

Much of that can be attributed to confusion with food date labels that indicate when to best use a product.

There are many versions of all kinds of products today.

For example, a bottle of salad dressing indicates it’s “best by” next December.

Hummus is marked to “sell by” a specific day in May.

A package of shredded cheese says it’s “best if used by” August.

This type of information is meant to clarify quality, but it ends up confusing many consumers.

Emily Broad Leib, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of their Food Law and Policy Clinic, isn’t surprised this is happening.

“Walmart, a couple of years ago, did a study of the different labels used on their private label products, and they found that there were 47 different date labels being used.”

She believes “people are being misled and they deserve to have accurate, clear information that at the very least gives them the ability to have a choice.”

The labels became popular after World War II.

“You have this era where people are getting refrigerators and buying food for a longer time, and they want information about how long the food is going to stay fresh,” explained Broad Leib.

The food manufacturers started putting labels on items, generally to outline a period of peak flavor, not when a product should be discarded.

Broad Leib says people today are wasting perfectly good food, “even in this time where people are concerned about food inflation.”

She said there is also a huge environmental impact when good food goes to landfills. It is a major emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas.

It’s important to note that health officials say the chances of getting sick because of not obeying food labels are slim.

Katie Friberg, a clinical dietitian at U-Mass Memorial-Milford Regional Medical Center, said, “It’s not safety. It’s not when the food’s safe until. It is more when the food is of the best quality.”

Broad Leib would like to see the system overhauled so that there are just two types of food labels.

“The phrase that we’ve really advocated has been ‘best if used by’ based on consumer surveys we did.”

Ready-to-eat foods, deli meats, and unpasteurized cheeses, for example, would be labeled “use by”.

California just adopted a program similar to the one Broad Leib is proposing.

Because California is such a large market, advocates think that it could give momentum for other states to simplify their codes.

The first food safety labels were actually developed here in Massachusetts.

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