WHEN I were a lass, we were so poor we used to scrape the mould off the top of the strawberry jam and tuck into the preserve below.
And if the last slice of a loaf of bread was so solid it could be thrown across the room like a Frisbee, we simply left them to toast a little bit longer. They tasted all right, too, once you scraped the burned bits off.
Actually, we weren't poor
at all. We didn't lack for anything much. But, like most families back then, we didn't do waste. To toss out a banana because it had a couple of brown bits, or a lettuce because its leaves were beginning to droop, would have been considered profligate by a generation which remembered rationing.
In the absence of written guidelines, you had to rely on your senses to as to tell you if food was safe for consumption – and it wasn't really so difficult. Obviously, if meat had turned green it was a no-no. But if the smell of your milk didn't make you retch, and it hadn't formed into clumps in the bottle, then the chances were it would taste all right in your tea.
These days, however, I am ashamed to say, I have become squeamish to the point of neuroticism, so I'm no longer able to countenance the thought of popping a squishy tomato in my mouth or cutting the eyes off a potato and using it regardless.
It's not that I don't know sell-by dates are a supermarket scam to confuse shoppers into buying more than they need; and that use-by dates are a back-covering exercise designed to head off potential litigation from those who get gastroenteritis. Nor am I, on the whole, a great respecter of authority. But there is something about supermarket labels – with their subtle threat of potential botulism – that seems to rob me of my capacity to think for myself.
Now, if I pick up an egg which is so much as an hour over its use-by date, a little OCD demon whispers in my ear: if you feed your children this, you will poison them and they will die and all for the sake of 25p. And into the bin it goes.
No matter how often I tell myself that even the most prescient of labellers cannot pinpoint the precise moment an egg will change from good to bad; no matter how aware I am that I'm in a better position to judge its freshness than the people who packed it, eating it seems to be tempting fate. Even if I were to dish it up, I know my subconscious would set to work convincing my brain it tasted substandard.
And it's not just me. I believe this issue divides families up and down the country. Some households operate an equivalent of the five-second rule (it's OK to eat the food so long as it spends less than five seconds on the floor/is only 48 hours over its date). Others may "kiss (the product] up to God"to guard themselves against sickness.
But there are also households which reach a complete impasse: the eaters and the chuckers-out at war over every single past its sell-by date product.The good news for them is that Environment Minister Hilary Benn last week announced an overhaul of the current confusing system. Speaking to the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management's Futuresource conference, he suggested phasing out the sell-by and best before dates, which lead, it is claimed, to £10 billion of edible food being chucked away every year.
This means consumers would be forced to rely on the "use before date" – which is, in fact, the only relevant one – to guide them. This move is in tune with the cultural shift against waste which has seen hundreds of thousands of us getting involved with recycling and ditching our plastic bags.
In 2007, an undercover BBC reporter discovered some Sainsbury and Tesco staff were changing the sell-by dates on food to extend its shelf life of a couple of days – a dangerous practice for which the they were fined.
But Freegans – people who believe in using as few of the world's resources as possible – have long plundered supermarket bins for healthy food.And the signs are that a large number of ordinary people are beginning to realise that most things have a longer shelf life than the shops would have us believe.
Hence there is now no stigma in hovering round a shop assistant in the hopes that he or she may be about to mark older stock down, nor in logging on to websites where past its sell-by date foods can be bought more cheaply.
It's the recession that's made the difference, of course. As people begin to struggle financially, they are not so keen to throw out good food at the behest of a company that is making money out of encouraging them to spend unnecessarily. Benn's proposals would capitalise on this shift. If we are really to make inroads into our wasteful habits, however, we need to go back to basics, learning how to store different foods, how long they will last and how to cook those which have perhaps been around a little longer than is ideal.
For example, though some foods – such as cooked meat and rice – need very careful handling, others will last almost indefinitely so long as they are kept in an air-tight box. Many fruits and vegetables will last longer if they are kept in a fridge, and, while eggs which are being used raw – to make mayonnaise for instance – need to be as fresh as possible, older ones may be perfectly safe to consume if they've been hard boiled.
Over the years, we have lost our connection with food, our understanding of where it comes from and our knowledge of how to get the best out of it. Scrapping sell-by dates will not solve the problem completely, but it might encourage us to think twice about what we throw away and why.
