Quote:
Originally Posted by aberkok
This touches on a larger problem which we all deal with: we should be eating more fruits and vegetables. It is clear when these go bad. The fact that we have a hard time telling what goes bad when just by using our noses... doesn't that tell you something about the nutrition level in our food?
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Wut?
This doesn't address the issue of how we should be handling things other than fruits or vegetables.
Besides, I'm not sure the ability to detect freshness with our noses is affected by the nutritional level of foods. i.e. I don't think it tells us much about the nutrition level in our food.
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As far as other food items are concerned, best before dates are more or less guidelines. I used to be strict about them, but then I realized that the dates printed on the packages are usually done so with a bit of a buffer in mind. It's not that they know exactly the day the food will turn "bad." It's "best by" / "best before," not "bad by" or "rotten thereafter."
Use good sense. Did you buy it well before the date, or did you buy it short-dated? If you know you've kept it well yourself, you can trust something a day or two past the date with things such as eggs and dairy. I'd be more careful with fresh meat. In most cases, meat should be consumed within a day or two after packaging to ensure freshness. And some things such as fish should be within the day.
Eggs I think are pretty resilient. I'd not be so concerned about eating them up to a week after the date.
Bread and grains? Hm... maybe a few weeks or so? (I freeze bread.) Probably not more than a month for most things before I get concerned about mold and other invisible things. Plus you should refrigerate whole grain items such as whole wheat flour and brown rice. The germ included in these products causes them to spoil faster.
The bottom line: don't mess around with dairy and raw meat. Try to be sure that stuff is fresh.