THERE ARE certain jobs that, in a mixed gender household, will always devolve to the senior male. These include taking out the bins, opening vacuum-sealed jars, and of course investigating strange noises downstairs in the middle of the night. But in my house at least, the list also includes another task considered unfit for women or children: namely, eating all the food that has passed its use-by date.
The job is not written down anywhere, nor it is even formally acknowledged. My wife needs to retain deniability should the worst ever come to the worst and she faces complications claiming the life insurance. So, in the meantime, my responsibilities in this area are based on a tacit understanding.
When food enters that uncertain phase where it still looks edible but the use-by suggests otherwise, it acquires a certain stigma in the eyes of female and junior members of the household, among whom a reluctance to throw it out is now only exceeded by a reluctance to eat it.
Thereafter it migrates to the remoter corners of the fridge, where it carries an invisible label: “Daddy might still have this.” The arrangement works well and has been a win-win situation (so far). Daddy gets fed, while the rest of the family is absolved from any guilt it might feel at wasting perfectly good food. And it’s not like there is any real risk involved. Much as I might enjoy wearing the mantle of heroism to which cutting the mouldy bits off cheese or eating sausages three days after the use-by date entitles me, I don’t feel particularly brave.
Use-by dates are notoriously conservative. The British government’s chief food adviser claimed a few years ago that, because of the levels of caution involved, almost 70 per cent of all food produced in that country was wasted. And much of this does not even reach homes. A book on the subject last year claimed that some British supermarkets throw out enough good food daily to feed 100 people.
But in general, my thinking on the subject is that, in an age of litigation, food manufacturers and retailers will assume the worst when calculating how long their produce is likely to last; so that their use-by dates will be based on the possibility that you left the sausages in a overheated car for several hours after purchase, that they were later transferred to a faulty fridge, and that somewhere in between, your cat licked them.
If none of those things happened, I reason, then the consumer probably has several days to play with, vis-a-vis the use-by date. Yes, it’s a game of bluff. But I haven’t lost yet. And anyway, some food advisory labelling can be complete bluff.
Take the use-by date’s more laid-back cousin, the “best before” date. There is less at stake in this designation, admittedly. Even so, a friend gave me a jar of home-made honey recently with the legend “best before 2011” on the label. This was, as he said, entirely arbitrary. The honey would never go off: it was as indestructible as that stone-age butter that is occasionally dug up in bogs. But in order to be sold anywhere, he explained, the labels had to have a date, even if it was meaningless.
MY DISREGARDfor use-by dates does not, I have to admit, extend to buying food. Like everybody else, I have long ago copped on to the supermarkets' pathetic strategy of putting the older produce near the front of the shelf and the newer stuff at the back. So like most people, unless in a rush, I reach in, check the dates, and pick the product with the maximum viability.
With some things, such as bread, you don’t even have to check. You can tell at a glance which sliced pan has been squeezed for two days, and which for only one.
But such pickiness arises partly because most shops do not incentivise the customer to be less picky.
Special offers are usually confined to food that is on its last day or two of shelf life and is about to be condemned. Whereas if shops automatically depreciated the week-old sausages when a new batch came in, they would cut wastage as well subterfuge and in the process save us all time.
There could be a sliding scale of discounts as the use-by date approached: say 20 per cent when there was three days left, 30 per cent for two; 50 per cent on the last day; and after that maybe 95 per cent (provided the customer signed a legal disclaimer and promised to eat the stuff himself).
That aside, I think the protective labelling system could do with a few more layers. It certainly shouldn’t be limited to “best before” and “use by” dates, as at present.
Maybe the latter could be superimposed in its turn by an “it-probably-won’t-kill-you” date. Or maybe we could opt for something more radical and replace the whole system with a colour-coded one. I’m thinking of a scheme similar to the US homeland security department’s terror alerts: ranging from “code green”, meaning that a food product is fresh, to “code red” indicating high risk of an imminent attack of gastroenteritis.