Minimum Use by date??

Frank the tank

There's a guy at work and soon as anything goes a second out of date he bins it (what a tw@t) otherwise he's a sound bloke.

Drysuitdiver

Ben6899 wrote:

beverick wrote:

The wife threw away a yoghurt a couple of weeks ago because it was one day over its best before date. She said "it would have been full of bacteria".

I lost the will to live shortly afterwards......

Bob

Ye, but good or bad bacteria!? Eh? Eh?

i have a dara obriein skit in my head now

rolf_f

neilo23 wrote:

They found honey in the pyramids and by tasting it found that it was still good after a couple of thousand years. Apparently the week old jar of honey in my cupboard will go off in March 2013.

Not as bad as the mineral water that has spent 20,000 years filtering through the rocks before being bottled and therefore due to 'go off' in 6 months (even in glass bottles).......

As for yoghurts - just open them and look at them. They last for ages.

Coach H wrote:

Having shared an office (in a past job) in a food factory with the food technologists who ran the in-house mircobiological lab I will never again consume stuff past the 'Use by'. It cost money to throw things away early so the food industry runs these dates as late as they possibly can. I've seen the culture dishes and its not pretty. Worst in my experience is washed, bagged salad. Even the food techs who taste mouldy stuff for a living steer away from bagged salad!!!

Fair enough but anything you know about the food industry puts you off. If you know about the kitchens of restaurants, you would never eat out, if you've been in a slaughterhouse, you probably won't eat meat. All knowledge does is make you squeamish about things that are unlikely to do you any harm.

Coach H

Rolf F wrote:

Coach H wrote:

Having shared an office (in a past job) in a food factory with the food technologists who ran the in-house mircobiological lab I will never again consume stuff past the 'Use by'. It cost money to throw things away early so the food industry runs these dates as late as they possibly can. I've seen the culture dishes and its not pretty. Worst in my experience is washed, bagged salad. Even the food techs who taste mouldy stuff for a living steer away from bagged salad!!!

Fair enough but anything you know about the food industry puts you off. If you know about the kitchens of restaurants, you would never eat out, if you've been in a slaughterhouse, you probably won't eat meat. All knowledge does is make you squeamish about things that are unlikely to do you any harm.

Not so sure. I've worked for a multi-national food producer, commercial kitchens and a duck slaughterhouse. If anything working with people who really know their bacteria enboldens you to eat stuff the scare stories warn you off from.
I gererally take no notice of 'Best Before' dates but there is an awful lot of expertise, research and testing that goes into pushing the boundaries of 'Use By' dates to get maximum versatility out of the supply chain. There is big money here and it is not thrown away on a whim.

We really need a food technologist on here to talk definitively with facts but I suspect some will still pass it off as bunkum. My Gran used to regularly scrape the mold off stuff (and I mean proper hairy mold) and had rusty open cans in the fridge (which she thought was a magical device that could store food indefinately) and never had a stomach upset in her life, but I would suggest she is the exception rather than the rule