Date labels on food let you plan ahead. For half of the stuff in my kitchen, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head whether it'll go bad in a month or in a year. Sure, once it goes bad, I might be able to spot it - but labels let me look at an unopened bag of $foodstuffs and decide whether I have to build a dinner around it this week, or whether it can wait another month.

I was taught to sort items by date, so you don't have to look through them all to determine which ones are the closest to expiry.

That's a neat trick. However, I've never seen anyone doing it around me. I wonder how one would make it work with fridge and storage space regularly filled to capacity?

My wife and I do something else instead. We know we can eat all foodstuffs before their printed expiry date, but we got tripped regularly by products with have short expiry time after being opened - in particular, through not remembering how long such a product has been sitting in the fridge. I eventually glued some magnets to a permanent marker and put it on the fridge, and now we write current date whenever opening a fridge-stored product. This made it much easier to avoid accidental food waste due to uncertainty around spoilage.

I guess. I think it depends a lot on what you buy.

I pretty much have fresh stuff that would go stale within weeks, and stable stuff that has effectively infinite lifespan. I don't find it hard to track the fresh stuff.

It's quite possible that my shelf stable items build up forever and so will eventually get wasted in 10 years or something though :P