If you're throwing away food based on the date on it, you're not alone.

It is a common practice.

Alyssa Wilkinson, in her report published by the American "Vox" website, said that she usually checks her refrigerator and checks the labels on various products and throws away anything that exceeds the date listed on the label by a month, a week, or perhaps a few days.

This habit is so ingrained in it that when you think about eating food that has passed the specified date for its consumption, you feel a bit nauseous.

The writer added that throwing food in the garbage is a wrong behavior, and the statistics are frightening, as 40% of the food produced in the United States ends up in landfills or is wasted in another way.

It is a huge economic loss for food growers and retailers who often have to throw away oddly shaped produce or surplus stocks of unsold food.

It's also bad from an environmental standpoint, as the study found that 25% of fresh water in the United States goes to producing uneaten food, and 21% of waste comes from food.

In the same country that throws away a lot of food, about 42 million people suffer from food insecurity and hunger.

However, donating past-dated food to food banks and other services is often difficult due to regulations in each state.

But researchers have found that "expiration" dates are often set in good faith, and are actually random and confusing.

In other words, they are not expiration dates at all.

Misunderstanding by the wider public is a major contributor to each of the factors mentioned above, from wasted food, wasted revenue and food insecurity.

"In the absence of culinary information, people assume that whatever information is given to them is the most important," explains chef, journalist and cookbook author Tamar Adler.

A big part of the problem is that most of us don't really believe that we can determine if food is good for us.

It won't be hard to solve the problem, and the bad part is that solving the broader system around it takes time, education, and a shift in consumer habits.

But the best way to start is to learn what these stickers actually mean and how to interact with them.

Researchers have found that "expiration" dates are often set in good faith but are random and confusing (Al Jazeera)

misleading stickers

The author points out two vital facts to know about date labels on foods in the United States: They are not standardized, and they have almost nothing to do with food safety.

Date labels first began appearing in the decades after World War II, as American consumers increasingly moved away from shopping at small grocery stores and farms and toward supermarkets.

Initially, manufacturers printed a date code on cans and packages for the grocer, and the label was not designed for consumers.

But as shoppers wanted to buy fresh food, smart people started publishing brochures offering a guide to decoding labels.

Eventually, producers began to include more legible dates on cans, along with the month, day, and year.

They saw it as a marketing boon, as it was a way to attract consumers and signal that your food was fresh and delicious.

Consumers loved it, and "open date" labels became popular.

However, the labels are also inconsistent.

What the label actually indicates varies from product to product.

So you might have a "best by date" label on one product, a "show until" label on another, and a "best before" label on a third.

They have different meanings, but the average consumer may not immediately realize this and may not notice a difference.

Furthermore, these dates may not be consistent across brands of the same food product.

This is partly because they are not really intended to indicate when food is safer.

Most packaged foods remain perfectly fine for weeks or months after the date.

Canned and frozen goods last for years.

But many people, in good faith, read what the label says and discard what is outdated.

Is it a scam?

Customers do not benefit from eliminating foods that are past their consumption date, grocers lose money and farmers lose potential sources of income.

The only people who can benefit from this process are the producers, as you can imagine a factory shortening the consumption date displayed on its food so that people get rid of the "expired" half-eaten package and buy more.

Manufacturers will say “there is a legitimate reason on their part, which is that they want you to eat food when it is at its best,” said Emily Brod-Lieb, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School.

The ways in which they specify that date can vary, and a large manufacturer may use a focus team of consumers to determine the date, while a small producer may only risk guesswork.

But more importantly, the history of consumption never corresponds to the safety of the food, and with whether or not it can make you sick.

Many of us understand the label "best date to consume" as actually saying "bad to consume yet" partly as a general education problem that manufacturers haven't worked hard to solve. Adler notes that our tendency to buy more than we need and then throw out slightly outdated food is rooted in the consumer mindset. She explained, "The only logical way to have your cultural value is through unrestrained growth and profit at any cost. There is no other way that food elimination makes sense."

This is in direct contrast to how most cultures around the world treat food, Adler says. “The whole idea that mold and bacteria should be avoided at all costs is not only antithetical to good cooking, but it is literally not practiced in most cultures. In most kitchens of the world, no There is a big difference between new and old food, it's just ingredients that you will use differently."

But in fact, we've become dependent on companies to tell us what food is good for us and when to get rid of it.

She adds that part of the problem may also lie in the popular "food show" culture, where social media pushes us to keep buying new ingredients to make food we saw in a picture or on "Tik Tok" without using them.

What we can do is try to educate ourselves and change the way we shop and buy food (dpa)

Wrong shopping culture

The problem goes beyond consumers.

Some states prohibit grocery stores from donating or selling old foods to food banks, and other services designed to help those who are food insecure.

But what explains giving expired food to the "poor"?

If the consumer destroys "expired" food, why does he give it to others?

Distributors fear legal threats if someone eats stale food and becomes ill.

This has been exacerbated by the way Americans shop.

For example, supermarkets stock more food than they can intentionally sell.

Broad Leap says supermarkets are used to planning how much food they expect to waste.

The consumer evaluates the quality of food through its availability in stores.

We may not realize it, but we are used to seeing boxes of beetroots full and all the other produce fully stacked as proof that the shop is good, and therefore the food they provide is good.

But this mentality naturally and inevitably leads to food waste.

And in many places, if you can't sell all the milk by the expiration date, you have to throw it away.

Consumers do not want to buy a box of cookies that have one week left before their expiration date.

Can we change this?

Follow-up data from a 2013 Harvard study found that standardizing the label system across the country would be good for the economy and consumers.

It estimates that enacting standardized legislation could add about $1.8 billion in economic value to the United States, while diverting an estimated 398,000 tons of food scraps to feed people, rather than sending them to landfills.

Supermarkets stock more food than they can intentionally sell (pixels)

The culture needs to change

The best thing we can do, she says, is to try to educate ourselves, and change the way we shop for food.

Lieb says system optimization consists of 3 big steps:

First- Approval of standard labels that indicate either the fresh date or the safety date.

Second - we need a public health program to educate people about what is safe to eat.

The UK, for example, has implemented a series of campaigns to this end under the slogan "See, smell, taste, don't waste" in cooperation with manufacturers to help people understand when to keep their food and when to throw it away.

The third step depends on changing the way we allow food to be donated and distributed through food banks and others.

This requires a shift in the way we think.

If everyone eats food after the "freshness" date, there will be less hesitation in serving that food, and less fear of facing legal action if some side effects occur.

This could have a significant impact on famine and food insecurity in the United States.

But it does mean that we need to rethink how we interact with food.

We need to start trusting our senses to tell us if food is edible.

For her part, Adler advised to use your sense organs, because they help in knowing the things that threaten our lives, because feeling the response of your body is very reassuring.