Just a single gone-off meal can kill you, so you can't try all that many times and hope to find the limit of survivability. Damp gain and rice based things are particularly hazardous in that regard - sure it's unlikely to be bad, but when it is bad, it can be very bad.

A single crossing of the road can kill you. A single car drive can kill you, hell you could go to sleep one night and never wake up for many many reasons.

You can't avoid things just because they could kill you.

You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses, and it doesn't really correlate with best before dates, cooked reheated rice is the main risk.

> You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses,

There's not "one" exception. You can't smell the toxin caused by bacillus cerius; you can't smell campylobacter; you can't smell listeria; you can't smell samonella; you can't smell e coli; you can't smell C. perfringens etc etc etc.

It's about the statistics, same reason we have seatbelts and helmet laws. If a less aggressive sell-by date means one in a million loaves of bread gets moldy, that might kill a handful of people a year. If nothing else, allowing people to die from preventable sales of expired food is bad politics.

How many people a year die from moldy bread?

Best before and sell by is a guarantee. Its the company saying this product will last until X date. Just like your car doesn't become unusable when the warranty runs out, neither does bread, especially when you make some attempt to store it properly, because best before dates are based on the opposite.

Each year about 3000 people in the US die from food poisoning. About 100,000 people are hospitalised, and some of them will have been caused permanent harm.

To add: even if we throw out a few hundred million dollars worth of food, that's more than a fair trade for a few thousand lives and 40x that in hospitalizations.

> Best before and sell by is a guarantee. Its the company saying this product will last until X date.

As I mention elsewhere in the thread, these dates do not have any legal meaning at all for the manufacturer. They do have meaning for the vendor (the grocery store), but that's not what people generally imagine is going on.

Even the phrasing "best before" explicitly doesn't guarantee anything; a manufacturer would be crazy to make such a guarantee.

A guarantee, as in we will stand behind this product until X date. You wouldn't necessarily expect to have no problems with a car in the warranty period, you would expect any problems that arise within the warranty period to be sorted.

I would expect bread consumed before the best before date not to be stale, if it was I would expect to be able to get my money back, I wouldn't expect the same after the best before.

> I would expect bread consumed before the best before date not to be stale, if it was I would expect to be able to get my money back, I wouldn't expect the same after the best before.

One problem with food is that there are too many variables about how it's stored after it leaves the store. For example, bread can go stale if it's not stored in an airtight container.

And that's why I use my own judgement when deciding if its ok to eat.

The best before probably takes into account the worst case and is set low accordingly. I go to the effort to store bread appropriately so that lower bound is no longer particularly relevant to me.

> The best before probably takes into account the worst case and is set low accordingly.

Absolutely not, if you think bread going stale is relevant to the expiration date. (Which it isn't.)

If you leave bread exposed to the air, it will go stale almost immediately, long before a one-week expiration period has elapsed. The expiration date is obsolete as soon as you open the product.

Having a lot of other risks is not reason to take on more risk, it's reason to reduce risk.

When you cross the road you look around, evaluate the risk, then cross. You don't close your eyes and hope, neither do you just never cross the road.

The same should apply to food, there have been multiple food poisoning cases in the US stemming from salad, so following best before labels isn't going to avoid all risk. The best option therefore is to evaluate risks for yourself. I don't blindly drink milk based on the date. If it stinks and is lumpy, I don't drink it, regardless of whether it's in date or not.

The Use By date is one method people canuse to evaluate the risk.

Your salad example doesn't support your point, it counters it. We can't smell food poisoning, so suggesting that people just sniff the food to see if it's safe to eat is, by your own example something that isn't going to work.

My point is you cant blindly rely on labels to decide whether food is safe, you have to use common sense.

In most cases that extends to using my senses, but if I'd left a bottle of milk outside for a week in summer, I wouldn't sniff it to 'check'.

Also the original comment mentioned best before, not use by. But use by dates are a useful tool, I'm saying you shouldn't just blindly rely on that.

You keep saying "use common sense" and "using my senses", but you cannot use your senses because you cannot smell most food poisoning bacteria.

When you sniff food and it smells bad you know that food can't be eaten, so you throw it out. When you sniff food and it doesn't smell bad can that food be eaten? You don't know.

That's why they have the dates: the dates take into account the most common food poisoning bacteria, and best practice storage in the home, and make a balancing act.

What you do with your own body is obviously up to you, but please don't use "I can smell if it's bad" if you're feeding children or old people because they are at risk of death or permanent harm.

And a date will help you there?

Is that a “best by”, “sell by”, or “use by” on the bread? Usually I’ll see one of the first two on bread. Shortly after that, it starts to get stale.

I wouldn't eat bread that doesn't start to harden within a week. What the hell do they put into it?

> Even Walmart’s “Great Value 100% Whole Wheat Bread” contains seven ingredients that Whole Foods considers “unacceptable”: high fructose corn syrup, sodium stearoyl lactylate, ethoxylated diglycerides, DATEM, azodicarbonamide, ammonium chloride, and calcium propionate.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_...

> I think generally trusting you nose,

You can't smell food poisoning!

You may well not come to lasting harm, but you could kill children or older people.

> I think generally trusting you nose, eyes and instincts does you fine.

This tells you if the food is rotting. It doesn't tell you if the food is safe to eat.

If the food is not rotting, why would it not be safe to eat ?

The organisms that cause the decay and that make you sick aren’t the same. Unspoiled food is _not_ necessarily safe food. https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul...

Most of these people probably got sick eating unspoiled food: https://www.fda.gov/food/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm103263...

Because it has bacteria. The commonly found bacteria are factored into Use By dates.

A date won't tell you that either.

There was nothing wrong with the smell or taste of the cheesecake that left me lying on the bathroom floor and vomitting.

Sometimes the food itself its perfectly fine but the container is the issue. Plastic and aluminium can leak into the food after time passes. Especially true for sauces and liquids.

here is how i test if food is edible:

method 1: take the food out, stare at it for a few minutes. if it doesn't move, it's still good.

method 2: open the fridge and yell "BOOO!!!". anything that doesn't run away in fear is still good.

more seriously: keeping food edible requires proper storage conditions. as long as the bread is kept dry, it is good. if it starts to harden that is a good indicator that it was dry enough. even hard bread is still edible if soaked in liquid.

but beware of humidity. mold is treacherous and initially invisible. once i see any bit of mold on a bread, then the whole loaf is lost.

on the other hand, on jam or cheese i'll just cut the mold away generously and eat the rest. with cheese especially i expect that most of the mold is edible anyways. i still cut it away though, just to be safe.

also, to help food keep fresh longer i don't buy sliced bread or cheese for example. the slices have more attack-surface and go bad faster. it's less of a difference for bread because mold can get through anyways, and slices will only dry up faster. with cheese and meat however, the smaller surface really helps to protect the inside.