I Ate Expired Food For A Week And Didn't Die

I wasn’t sure about the peach. Purplish, squishy and days past its prime, the peach, I have to say, did not taste good. But it also didn’t make me sick. Nor did anything else I ate during my weeklong attempt to consume only foods that had “expired” or were destined for the trash ― not the past-date chicken, not the wilted collard greens, not the aging bacon. Most of what I ate that week was not terrible, with the exception of the peach, but the bulk of it was old or had passed the “sell by,” “use by” or “best before” date on the label. Sure, I tasted some unpleasant tastes once or twice and possibly lost some friends who were grossed out by the whole thing, but some of that food was downright delicious. Overall, the experiment basically confirmed what food waste experts had been telling me for weeks: As long as you avoid obvious hazards like rancid meat, eating food that’s past date probably won’t hurt you. That’s because date labels ― which are set by food manufacturers, not government regulators ― tell shoppers when food is going to lose its freshness, not when it’s going to become unsafe to eat, according to Marianne Gravely, technical information specialist at the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. “There is a lot of variety in food labeling, but very few products have a date that indicates the product is unsafe,” Gravely told The H...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news