99% Invisible - 195- Best Enjoyed By

Episode Date: January 13, 2016

Date labels (e.g. “use-by”, “sell-by”, “best-by”, “best if used by,” “expires on”, etc.) are on a lot of products. Forty-one states require a date label on at least some food product, but there are huge inconsistencies, not just in the … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Every day, workers at grocery stores and convenience stores in Montana carry out a sad ritual. The first thing I do when I come on in is I go check the rotation on my milk and check my dates of course. That's Ken Carson. He's a dairy manager at a grocery store in Montana. And every day when he gets in, he checks the sell-by date on his milk. If it's past the date, the milk must be thrown out. These are all 20s that I'm pulling off. This one is dated the 18th and I will have to pour this one down the drain.

I have probably six of them. Ken is originally from Washington State, where he also worked in the grocery business. When I came here four years ago, I had no idea that they were pouring down as much milk down the drain as they have been. In fact, it was repulsive and sickening the first couple of weeks here. I was hundreds of gallons. There's nothing wrong with it. Pouring out milk happens, to some extent, in grocery stores all over the country. That's reporter Meredith Hodnott. But Montana throws much more of it down the drain than most places, because the cell

by date on the milk is required by state law to be just 12 days after pasteurization. The industry standard is 21 days. After these 12 days, Montana law requires that the milk be thrown away. It can't be sold or donated. It seems such a waste. I've got families that earn need. And we're doing this. Montana is throwing out so much milk in fact.

The price of milk there is about two dollars per gallon higher than it is in surrounding states. And it's all because of the state label. In theory, Montana's strict state label law is about food safety and protecting the consumer. But it hasn't been updated since the 80s. of course aren't just on milk. They're on a lot of products. Used by, sell by, best by, best if used by, but then some products I expires on or have an EXP which is a shorthand for expires. This is Emily Broadleab, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. She did a tally of all the different kinds of date labeling. What we found was that 41 states required a date label on at least some food product. She says there are huge inconsistencies, not just in the wording, but in the meaning of these labels.

Some states require them only on dairy, some on shellfish, some on any perishable foods. And then 20 of those states actually restrict the sale or donation of food after the date. Some of them are quite strict. Some of them like flat out ban the sale or donation of food after the date. And some of them just say, we're going to make it complicated. The powers that be have definitely succeeded in making it complicated to decipher these dates, or to know how to act on them for large retailers and individual consumers alike. This is a bad system, it's not making people safer, it's leading to food waste and the dates really aren't safety-based. That's right, the date labels on our food are not about food safety and they were never actually meant to be.

But let's back up. It all began in the 1970s. Americans had moved farther away from their food sources. They were eating more packaged foods and getting more of their food in supermarkets. And they wanted a way to measure how fresh their food was. Most manufacturers already put encrypted dates on their products to help retailers rotate stock. And consumers craved access to this information. In 1977, the New York State Consumer Protection Board published a booklet called Blind Dates. How to Break the Codes on the Foods You Buy. The booklet told consumers how to decipher the encrypted date codes on their favorite products. The board distributed more than 10,000 copies and posted the booklet in supermarkets.

Eventually, consumers started to demand that these dates be put clearly on packages, that they shouldn't have to get a special book and decipher a code. And that seems pretty reasonable. Consumers asked for date labels, so retailers and growth resource responded, but at that time everyone acknowledged this is really about quality and about freshness No one said I want a label because I'm afraid it won't be safe So a few states began to regulate these state labels Massachusetts was the first state that actually required date labels on food

But there was no federal level regulation even though there were a number of attempts and one congress I think from 1973 to 75 there were 10 number of attempts. In one Congress, I think from 1973 to 1975, there were 10 bills on date labeling standardization. None of them passed. Lawmakers disagreed about what the system should look like and who should oversee it. The Food and Drug Administration has actually said, we could do this, we have the power to do it

for the foods we oversee. But since these labels were about freshness and not about safety, ultimately, the FDA said, it's not something we want to spend the time and energy on. Still, consumers wanted freshness dates, so all kinds of different ones popped up. Some were stamped on, some printed on the label. There was no consistency in how this information was displayed or the language that was used. Some companies even tried to promote these dates to sell their

products. Like, hey, buy Pepsi because it's going to give you that date to tell you it's fresher than all the other soft drinks. Some things just don't need a date stand on them to tell you how fresh they are. Not so with Diacolus, until now. Now, dipepsy introduces freshness dating from dipepsy. Some date labels were meant for consumers, while others were just meant for retailers. And as is still true now, there were no clear definitions for any of the phrases. No consistency, even within the same brand or product.

Dates could differ from state to state, manufacturer to manufacturer, or store to store. And over the years, we've lost track of what these labels meant in the first place. As time goes on and on, and more and more people grow up just being used to having labels on their food. No one's ever said to them what they mean and what they don't.

So we've made some false connections. So people in their head have made this link and thought, well, I heard about someone getting salmonella or E. coli, and I see this label on my food, and these two things are somehow connected to one another. But Emily says, as much as we might want them to, these dates are not going to tell us if our food will make us sick. People keep saying, well, but I just want to know when it will be safe until.

It's scientifically impossible to sort of say there's a date after which it will become unsafe. Milk is actually a good example of this. If you run a few errands on a hot day before getting your milk home, your milk will spoil faster. And once it's in the fridge, it'll last longer at, say, 35 degrees than at 40 degrees. There's just too many variables. But here's the thing about spoiled milk. Spoiled milk doesn't mean it has pathogens in it. That's because the harmful pathogens in milk are removed during the pasturization process,

along with most other bacteria. The big misconception around date labels is that people think that old food will make them sick, but for the most part, old food doesn't make you sick, contaminated food does. A longer a carton of milk exists, the more chance it has to come into contact with contaminants that could grow and flourish inside that milk and hurt you. But as long as it's properly pastorized,

there's nothing about the age specifically that makes milk dangerous to drink. There is, however, a small handful of foods that can become unsafe with age. Deli meets unpasserized cheeses, smoked seafood, stuff in the deli section of the grocery store, basically. These foods have a high risk for Listeria, a bacteria that can be life-threatening. And in these cases, Listeria risk does increase with time. But our current date labeling system doesn't treat this small subset of foods any differently than any other date labeled item.

Most date labels are arrived at by conducting taste tests. They sit people around a table and then they have everyone eat their product. Say it's yogurt. They taste a batch made that day. And then they taste some from the day before. And the day before that. And they say, well, what did you think? Was it good?

Was it tasty? Did it have the properties you expect from yogurt or whatever the product is? And when the manufacturer comes to a batch, the people say, I don't really like the way this tastes. They say, okay, well, after that many days, our product's not going to be at its peak. And that's where the date really comes from.

So the dates in our food are arrived at through a taste test or sometimes, especially with smaller companies, they just guess. They've said, you know, I feel awful about it, but we don't have money to bring in and do this whole taste test. We just, you know, we look online for an estimate of how long this food will be fresh or we just kind of say, like, well, you know, I only keep it in my refrigerator for three days, so I'll put three days on it. There's some of them are very unscientific about where that date actually comes from. And yet today according to a report that Emily Broadleab co-authored,

a majority of consumers believe that eating food past its sell-by or used-by date is risked to their health. And as many as 90% of Americans throw out food based on day labels, at least occasionally. We're throwing out billions of pounds of food here in America, simply because of misunderstanding of those code dates. This is Doug Rau, former president of Trader Joe's. He's been in the grocery business for more than 40 years. In 2015, he founded Daily Table, a non-profit retail store that sells pre-made meals sourced from food that would otherwise be wasted.

We waste a staggering amount of food. The average American waste somewhere between 20 and 25% of the food they acquire. And it's not just wasting the food, it's wasting the water to grow it, the transportation to get it to the supermarket, everything that goes into getting food to your plate. Doug and Emily both say that to make date labels serve us better and to waste less food, we need to consider the language we're using. Sell by, use by, enjoy by.

Like, what does that mean, you know? And the idea of an expiration date is problematic, too. If something's expired, it's dead. If your credit card's expired, it's dead. You can't use it. Heaven forbid, your dog expired. You know, there's no more life. Well, no one's interested in expired food.

No one's interested in eating dead food. I actually prefer most of my food dead. But the point is this, when food is perceived as an edible, you can't do anything with it. Nobody wants to eat it, and you can't give it to a food pantry. And a lot of states have laws that actually forbid the donation of so-called expired food. Emily suggests only using the term expired for foods that actually do become unsafe at the time. Those unpasturized cheeses and deli meats. For everything else, she would go with best if used by.

So there would be two labels, expires on and best if used by. And this would be a standardized system used all across the country. Creating standardized, easy to understand date labels is a design problem that must have a design solution. Maybe Emily suggested labels or maybe something else entirely. The fix doesn't seem like it should be that hard. And yet. Most of the time when we say this is an issue that needs to change people say I agree it's a terrible issue.

But then people really get stuck up on which phrase should we use and how do we decide which foods have which one. These are the very same questions that tied up regulation the first time around in the 1970s, but the stakes are different this time, because food waste is now a part of a national conversation. The EPA and USDA announced a goal to cut food waste in the U.S. in half by 2030, and having a better date labeling system is one way to get there. But for now, Emily is happy to help settle your more micro level disputes.

Basically, the answer is, trust your taste, not the date. So the story that I heard most from friends, from family, from colleagues, and I continue to hear now is that, you know, there's someone that says, I'm so glad you put this report at it because I've been telling my wife for years that the dates don't matter, and now I'm really vindicated or you know vice versa. So instead of arguing over date labels you should take part in that other ritual that happens between spouses and front of the refrigerator where you open up a dodgy carton of something rather and ask does this smell okay to you?

99% invisible was produced this week by Meredith Hotnaught and Katie Mingle, with a reach of men Sam Green's fan Kurt Colstead and me Roman Mars. The tape you heard at the beginning of the story with the Montana Grocer was collected by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and racing horse productions for a short film they produced about date labels, special thanks to Rebecca Richmond Cohen and Daniel Hansen. We are a project of 91.7K ALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, an architecture and interiors firm, in out more about this story, including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% invisible. You must go to 99pi.org.

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