Cheap, delicious - and only three years out of date: my week of eating food past its best-before
My lunch is some one-year-out-of-date Marmite peanut butter spread over cracked black pepper Nairn’s oatcakes (best before December 2021). It follows a breakfast of old pink Coco Pops and a mid-morning snack of crisps that the manufacturer suggests I should have eaten when Theresa May was still in Downing Street.
Many people are quite relaxed about food dates, sniffing their milk or inspecting their salad bag rather than relying on what the manufacturer has printed on the packaging. But there is a new breed of bargain hunter: one who actively seeks out food that is not just two days or two weeks out of date, but sometimes two prime ministers beyond its best before. Many do it purely to save money, others to help the planet, quite a few for the strange thrill of hunting down obscure jars of fish paste that would otherwise end up being thrown away. I have decided to join them, if only for a week, to discover why so much food destined for our supermarket shelves never makes it that far – and how retailers specialising in selling “recovered” or “rescued” food are booming. Crucially, I want to find out if any of it tastes OK.
The rules about food labelling are not simple. “Before we started seven or eight years ago, people were scared about best-before dates. To be honest, initially I didn’t really understand the difference: best before, use by, sell by. It’s crazy, really,” says Dan Parslow, 42, who runs Best Before it’s Gone, a website based in Daventry, Northamptonshire.
By law, nearly all food – with the exception of uncut fruit and veg, alcohol, salt, sugar and chewing gum – needs to have a date of some sort. Dairy, meat, fish and ready meals invariably require a “use by” date – if you eat it after this date, there is a
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