Expiration Dates

Expiration Dates

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Dr. Scott Colby of Pennsylvania State University Is trying to measure the amount of food waste food waste in this country and he brought up a couple of interesting points. "Food waste is the number seven greenhouse gas emitter in the US because when you throw that type of material in a landfill, it turns into methane which is 20 times worse than CO2. Here's an interesting story. Those expiration dates that are on food are meaningless. They don't mean things are going bad. What food manufacturers do is sit people down at a table and they give them the product after it is aged different amounts of time and then have them evaluate the qualities of the food. As soon as the quality starts to drop off, that's where they put their expiration date. The food industry has recently recognized that this is not the most efficient way to go about it and Congress now has an expiration date act. Even if you want to create some sort of policy to incentivize the accurate labeling of expiration dates, you would probably want to make sure it was a problem first. So that's another reason why I like figuring out how much is actually wasted at different levels."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates 38 billion tons of food went to waste in 2014. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) puts the amount of food wasted in the U.S. alone between 30 to 40 percent of the country's food supply.

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