Which foods do you feel comfortable ingesting past the use-by date?

...and for how long?

Question asked because I just put like three drops of Tabasco sauce on a little before-bed snack even though it said "12-2007" on the bottle.

To give examples: I feel pretty safe with salted/cured/smoked meat like salami or bacon at least a couple of weeks after the UBD, if it's been protected from air and doesn't smell positively bad (nb my sense of smell is poor). We're generally privileged with hypersafe eggs (and conservative date marking) in Norway, so here I'll stretch it to at least a couple of weeks as well when needed. Fish + other seastuffs: forget it. Milk: eeeh get a certified milk sniffer to give a nod and maybe.

You?

http://web.ift.uib.no/~asle/mat/vaerball1.jpg

Marge: Selma! You're back from your date already?

Selma: Yeah. I was so upset I ate a jar of expired olives. [sighs] I
guess I'll never have a baby.

Apu: Nickel off on expired baby food.

Homer: Sold!

om nom fields of chicken! I'm cautious there as well, yeah.

tabasco sauce will like never go bad because bacteria and fungi don't like the hotness

same for horseradish

i am always catching shit from people (well, one in particular) for eating things that are expired or have been left out. but i've never gotten food poisoning or anything so i say fuck em. also i live alone and drink oj out of the jug. my mom said don't do that but i am brave.

this is one of the main things me and my gf argue about

Raw meat or milk - nah, although UHT milk seems to last a bit beyond the useby.

I've had years-old coffee and herbs before, they just taste like dust but theyre not bad.

I'm never sure with things like sour cream, cuz isnt it already off?

yogurt can go a while past the date.

I pretty much go by sight/smell on everything except milk and raw meat--my family firmly believes sell-by dates are a ruse to get you to buy more. to date, mr. monster has refused to let me consume expired (1) cranberry juice and (2) hot dogs.

well isn't yogurt active bacteria cultures anyway? that and cheese confuse me.

apparently the cultures are less effective after a certain date?

I'd rather trust my own senses than some date printed on a package by the manufacturer. Sight and smell can tell you a lot. A date is just one piece of info to consider.

There is a big difference between product dates marked "Do not use after:" and those marked "Best if used by:". One indicates genuine hazard, the other just a possible falling off of quality.

Unless a can is bulging or leaking, I am willing to open it and consider eating the contents. (Botulism, unfortunately, has nothing to do with age, everything to do with food acidity and the temperature when the can was sealed - so a past due date won't clue you in on that hazard. Luckily, it is all but unknown in commmercial canned products.)

Protein products are trickier, but only slightly more so. Dairy products tell you when they are spoiled through olfactory messages more than visual. Spoiled meat smells bad and looks bad, too. Rotten eggs are unmistakeable.

Whole grains will give a rancid smell when they are past eating. Same with oils.

some spices & herbs have been in the cupboard for years (decades?)usually don't have exp. dates but a few times i used the ones that did 2-3 years after the date. if it still smells like it is supposed to i figure it's ok

Buttermilk is surprisingly durable.

I cant say I've ever noticed grains smell off, they tend to go mouldy or get weevils well before that happens (rice and flour especially).

I found a can of Nesquik from the 1970s in a pantry in our beach house in the 90s. It was a bit solid and clumped but it looked ok otherwise.

I dont think I had any, though :)

if it was from the 70s it wouldn't be nesquik!

i was v cross when they changed the name from quik >:(

Yeah I knew that but thought no one would know what Quik was :(

it was always akta-vite in the beach houses i stayed at ;_;

Hahah oh that stuff was gross as >_<

past its use by date, not that it was edible otherwise

xposr

"best before date"

I still haven't eaten those 'mackerel fillets in spicy tomato sauce' (Best Before Dec 2003) yet.

Anything that might essentially be a preservative itself doesn't bother me (dried herbs, spices, etc), or that's full of the above (chorizo, etc). Tinned stuff I think of as lasting forever. Em stopped me eating too much of something that was past it's Best Before date recently but I can't remember what it was, just that I wasn't arsed.

I'm a bit creeped out by people who will just throw food out because of what it says on the label, not that I'm gonna drink sour milk, but if it's fine then I will regardless. It's like my mother's friend who won't read second hand books or go to the library because you never know who touched the books (?) though obviously not as mental.

How do you know who has touched the books in the first-hand bookshop?

dairy products and meat, i eat so long as they smell ok. Sauces like tabasco or mustard that don't have something in them that might go bad (e.g. shrimp paste) i would eat pretty much forever no matter what the use by date is. I don't think I've ever poisoned myself so my strategy seems to work ok.

Tabasco, Worcestershire, etc only get better with age. There was a good interview with the manager of the Lee and Perrins plant on the radio a while back basically saying they only put a date on the bottle because they have to but it is essentially meaningless as it is that well preserved. I would say the same applies for all kinds of pickles and sauces.

so true! i love worcestershire that comes out of some bottle that's been languishing at the back of the cupboard

Yeah, a vinegar base should be enough of a clue for anybody.

More on the subject of freshness than safety, it does seem like Tabasco loses its heat as it gets older.

Alright, I have a glass bottle of Olive Oil with chili essence, UseBy date of Jun 2003.

Good? or not good.

(should add:) half empty. Or, half full. depending on yr viewpoint.

I thought olive oil goes a bit wrong if it's too old? Like lumpy bits that make whatever you're cooking taste horrible.

i did have a bottle of hot sauce once where the sauce turned a strange brown color (instead of red). i accounted it to really hot weather and threw it out since it was the end of the bottle anyway.

Cloudy olive oil is more to do with the temperature it's kept, no? Still tastes alright I think.

I've had a can of corned beef two years after the date on the can but they were fine. I always assumed things on cans would be fine for ever really.

Tabasco, Worcestershire, etc only get better with age.

Part of the process of making Worcestershre Sauce involves rotting down anchovies so this doesn't surprise me.

I've never had lumpy bits in olive oil though - that does sound a bit odd.

my dad worked in the food industry most of his life. he also recently got married. "surprise" married. like we all showed up thinking we were having a family dinner and then my old man springs a wedding on us. anyways - their vows were something else. his wife promised to make sure to check expiry dates before cooking with anything - my dad says he will try to honour her family food storage system - then he turns to everyone and goes "remember; expiry dates usually refer to how long something will keep in it's packaging and does not relate to how long at will last once opened." (or something to that effect - i was taking in a lot that day).
just some food for thought for you guys.

oh ya - eggs, carrots & OJ (although it rarely makes it to that point) are my main "expiry shmexpiry" food items.
i've yet to roll the dice with bacon.

Heheh, brilliant!

There was a nice little programme on a few months ago where some fellow ate various foods getting further and further away from their sell by date. Started with a bit of ham one day "off" etc. Ended up with moudly bread which WAS green when it went in the toaster, ate it with marmalade, said it tasted slightly cheesy but no ill affects. Most of the stuff was obviously OK, dried pasta, tin of beans, but he did also eat "off" chicken with I've never attempted. They had a scientist saying that once you cook this kind of thing whatver is lurking on it will be killed (as long as it's properly cooked obviously), but then they had a chap from Sainsburys saying "no, don't eat it you will die!".

I've eaten bacon past it's sell by - damn stuff is too expensive to waste - but then I cook it to a frazzle to make extra sure.

I find that when OJ goes fizzy though, that's the end of it.

but then they had a chap from Sainsburys saying "no, don't eat it you will die!".

Buy something from our shop instead. I'll eat virtually anything that's past the use-by date, sometimes I eat nothing but.

this is extra-confusing on things that have sell-by rather than use-by dates, because then you start thinking "well okay, how long does the company expect the average consumer will leave this item on their shelf before eating it?"

Oil can go rancid, when exposed to air, as can butter and margarine. Probably wouldnt fo any harm, but rancidity is a horrid taste.

One thing I'm dubious about when it's turned is tomato sauce - it seems to get this horrid fizzy/tangy almost boozy smell and taste, fermentation I assume?

I'll eat pretty much anything if it still looks and smells all right, glad to see I'm not the only one (I'm usually the one to say "oh no, it's fiiiiiine" to doubtful roommates). I'm reluctant to cook with old spices though, health doesn't worry me but flavor does.

In re: cooking kills the bacteria in food. This is true, but not always relevant. While the bacteria was alive, it was eating and shitting in that food (or what passes for shitting in a bacterium).

The metabolic byproducts of many bacteria are toxic, some more so, some less so. Cooking food will not always neutralize these toxins. So, the dead bacteria you killed by cooking can still make you sick when you eat their shit.

if you stick a loaf of bread in the fridge tightly wrapped up, you usually get another 4 or 5 days out of it. things last longer generally if you keep your fridge on a higher (colder?) setting.

bread. jam.

Spices never seem fresh enough to me - especialy things like cumin, I can have a packet of it for a week and it smells and tastes like dust instead of cumin. Is it already years old when it gets to the supermarket or something?

I cooked up a cubed steak yesterday that had been in the freezer since 2003. It was perfectly fine, though the recommendation is something like 6-8 months frozen storage for beef.

Yeah Ive eaten at least 12 month old frozen meat and stews before. The only real prob seems to be freezer burn.

That's true - if it's really well wrapped and kept solidly frozen, I don't know why it couldn't be kept for even longer.

I wouldn't trust my freezer for that kind of thing.

Following this thread's resurgence I hunted around in the cupboard containing the tinned Mackerel and also found some macaroni and lasagna sheets from 2003. Looks like I'm building up for a whole 5 year old meal.

We still have a turkey down in the depths of our freezer from 2001. I doubt we'll ever eat it.

Maybe I'm spoiled, maybe I'm oversensitive, or maybe it's all psychological, but most things that are even approaching being a bit old are unpleasant for me to eat.

(Part of it might stem from milk, which I'm not hugely fond of in the first place -- with every passing hour from the moment it winds up in my fridge, it smells less and less desirable to me, to the point where it'll be days away from expiration and I don't even want it on my cereal.)

I have total irrational recoiling horror reaction to even the thought of milk that's gone bad (this stems from a college-era incident of pouring out gross lumps of milk), so I'm a bit careful with it.

Like I'm feeling a bit sick right now after typing the above post.

i'm in the use-the-dates-as-only-a-guideline camp. If something is way past the date, I'll chuck it even if it looks/smells fine. If it's close to the date and looks/smells fine, I'll eat it. I used to be scared of milk, too, also due to a traumatic incident with dairy rancidity, but I've found that the dates on milk are very conservative. I've had a-ok milk that was 2 weeks "expired."

well the tricky thing about milk is if you buy milk well before it's sell-by date, opening it kind of makes that date null and void. milk has about a week and a half after it's been opened before it goes rank no matter what the sell-by date is, in my experience. so that sentiment isn't really that weird.

I had no idea carrots supposedly go bad.

oh oh so I had this horrible roommate once whose parents bought her a ton of groceries when she first moved in, and then she proceeded to eat nothing but take-out and mirowave digiornio pizzas for the rest of the year. so once I stole her fried onion rings for a recipe and after I mixed them in I realized they were over a year past sell-by. they were just stale. and then I fed it to people!

"a-ok" might function here as a medical term meaning "I did not get sick," but the question of whether a foodstuff is 100% non-revolting to all involved is highly subjective

(I am really non-picky about the types of food I will eat, but for some reason all that spare choosiness has directed itself at how old the food is. Except with cheddar cheese; I will spend 10 minutes slicing mold colonies off the outside of a hunk and agonizing before deciding to throw it out anyway.)

i was all excited about my carrot-dill soup, maybe with some dogfish head, and just took it out to see "Use By 11/19"

One day past "use by": the knell of doom.

what is that thing in the first answer?

I KNOW, xp

Of course carrots go off, they go all floppy and end up giving off binjuice, as do most veggies. You ever smelled a rotten potato? Worst smell EVER.

I just use common sense. If a food has an odor, texture, appearance, feel, or god forbid, taste, that would render it unappetizing, I toss. Slimy spinach? Git! Spaghetti sauce with mold floating on top? Vamoose! Soymilk that smells like soyogurt? Away with thee!

Things that can be rescued: Non-cheese mold on cheese can be cut off. Questionable veggies can be made into stew if they're not disgusting.

There's never animal milk in my house, eggs are rare, and meat isn't here for long, so I don't encounter the more serious issues.

Yeah I've picked the mould off bread and cheese, ain't no big thang.

what is that thing in the first answer?

maybe some kind of beet dumpling? Or wide rice noodle something?

Cheese mold is one thing (most of it is edible and harmless, some isn't but it invariably a slimy surface mold - either way the surface mold on cheese doesn't get much more than 1/4" under the surface), but bread mold is another thing all together - the fruiting body of bread mold doesn't show up until it's fairly well established through the porous structure of the bread.

You ever smelled a rotten potato? Worst smell EVER.

OTM -- like the worst bad breath you've ever smelled, mingled with an open sewer. Plus they're likely to attract flies/maggots.

Most of the advice in this thread seems sound. Usually use-by dates are only guidelines, to be superseded by one's own nose, eyes, and tastebuds. The expiration date on eggs is especially conservative, at least in the U.S.; you can usually get an additional three or four weeks out of them.

Don't mess around with mold, though -- on anything but cheese, it's a bad scene and best avoided. And Aimless is totally correct, cooking doesn't do jack against most bacterial toxins, and none of this applies to poorly-cooled leftovers which can taste and smell fine but make you violently ill. Apparently white rice is particularly vulnerable to this, as it often carries a spore that's immune to cooking, though I've never had a problem myself. Some of the worst food poisoning I've ever seen (thankfully not experienced) was caused by cooked vegetables that were way too old to eat.

Another thing to be wary of is old nuts; the raw ones can develop some very nasty molds (especially peanuts), and the roasted ones can go unpleasantly rancid. Best kept in the fridge (or freezer), and don't wait too long to use them.

Oh, also, watch out for really old dry mixes, flours, etc. They can get moldy without you realizing it, and the results can be very unpleasant.

On the bright side, bad yogurt can be kind of amazing. When I ran into it, it tasted like bad champagne mixed with sour cream, and made the tip of my tongue sizzle in a really weird way.

In the interests of scientific research and this thread, last week I ate a bag of boil in the bag rice with a best before date of October 2003.

Apart from being sublimely bland, even with copious amounts of pepper and herbs, tinned tomatoes and red wine, there were no ill effects.

The other bag from the same box can now safely sit in my cupboard for another 5 years, as an apocalypse survival stand-by.

If it's not tinned or vacuum packed, then I look at the date, or check to make sure it's not rancid.

Perishables, I'm cautious about - fruit, veg, dairy, meat etc, but if it looks and smells fine, hang the date!

Tinned stuff lasts for ages and unless it's 15/20 years out of date, I probably would eat it.

When I ran into it, it tasted like bad champagne mixed with sour cream, and made the tip of my tongue sizzle in a really weird way.

I got this from a batch of semidried tomatoes from the local deli. I am guessing they make them locally and might have been a bit turned, they didnt tasted off at all but they zinged as if they had citric acid in them... very disconcerting. I turfed them.

whatever doesnt move

OATMEAL

PEANUT BUTTRE

BANANANAS

Oil can go rancid, when exposed to air, as can butter and margarine.

margerine will never spoil. it's basically a flavoured chemical.

"a-ok" might function here as a medical term meaning "I did not get sick," but the question of whether a foodstuff is 100% non-revolting to all involved is highly subjective

A-ok means it looks, smells, and tastes exactly how non-spoiled milk does. The only subjectiveness in the equation is the psychological skeeved out people vs not skeeved out people when it comes to use-by dates.