There is something about the simple act of writing a date on an item of food that causes perfectly normal people to lose all semblance of perspective and common sense.
Is it an actual fear of becoming ill? A sense of satisfaction at getting one over on the shop? A desire to maximise time between shops? Whatever it is, the quest to find an item with a full 24 hours extra lifespan becomes all-consuming for some customers. They will ignore their eyes and skip past a perfectly good bag of apples for one that has a different date on it. They’ll light up their phone’s torch and practically go spelunking to the back of the shelf in search of a mythical item that lasts forever (or at least until the weekend when the family are visiting).
But rarely is the long date quest logical.
| Fun Fact: If you’re in the USA you don’t even need to legally date anything! | 
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You’ll get someone on a Saturday afternoon clutching a bag of Doritos and a bottle of wine, looking for a longer date on a dip. That humus isn’t going to last the evening, let alone reach it’s best before! Just grab the first one you come to and move on.
If they’re thinking they’re somehow winning or getting one over on the shop because they’ve uncovered the secret that the longer dates are at the back of the shelf, they should think again. It should be like that, but half the time no one bothers to rotate the stock properly and they’ll actually find a super out of date product right at the back.
To really maximise the time between shops, you can always freeze stuff and then the date becomes irrelevant. And when you do defrost your pasta bake six months later, you won’t even remember how long it had before it went off.
Then of course they’ll ask if you have any longer dates out back, so you go look, even though they were out of stock yesterday and the entire display all came in last night.
Look, if someone came along and wrote on different date in sharpie, would it change the state of the food itself? No. Trust your common sense and instincts rather than blindly following the writing on the packet. It will save time, stress and waste. After all, there will be no date on display when you empty your bag of oranges into a fruit bowl in the middle of the kitchen table.
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Going to be fine to eat if they're out of date |
 Do not eat out of date prawns! |
A quick guide to dates for the UK and EU:
Use By
- This is the safety warning. The actual important one. If it says consume it by tomorrow, do so or you might actually get ill. Don’t even it it for a bet.
Best Before
- This date is the time a product will start dropping in quality. It’s nothing to do with safety and so as long as it looks alright to eat, it almost certainly is. Have a quick check for mould and crack on. Your packet of biscuits might be a bit softer than normal, but other than that you’ll be totally fine. If your item is a comically past the best before, you could even make a youtube video out of it.
Display Until/Sell By
- Literally a date that shops put on so they know how long it’s been on the shelf for. Nothing to do with quality or safety, purely for stock management. And no, they don’t have to sell you it reduced if it’s today’s date.
