Old Food

Leading a rebellion against 'expiration' dates

A typical food rescue load. All of this would be tossed without the program.

My life is awash in old food. Two days a week, I work at a food pantry here in St Paul, stocking shelves and delivering “expired” food from my local supermarket to those shelves. Some days there’s so much “waste” from the market that after I’ve stuffed my car full, there’s still enough for a second run. It’s astonishing.

Dairy, produce, dry goods, deli items — even frozen meat, which boggles my mind. The supermarket can no longer sell it, either by law or because they just know their customers will turn up their noses at the notion of a frozen piece of meat past its “expiration date.”

In most cases, the market is shedding the imperfect. A huge bag of oranges with one rotten one inside: I get it, they can’t open the mesh bag and grab that one orange out, then reseal it. But couldn’t they open it and dump it out with the other loose oranges?

I’ve written about food waste before, but here I’m talking about our collective phobia against “old food,” things that our grandparents or their grandparents knew to be perfectly safe — even better, in some cases.

Some of the market cases are hilarious. I once plucked a hunk of aged gouda cheese out of a trash bin. (It was still wrapped tight.) Why on earth was this tossed? No mold, looked great. Oh. The expiration date had passed. By a week. Apparently they didn’t know that an aged cheese like that, well, um, doesn’t really have an expiration date. It will keep on aging and maturing and just getting better.

I just finished making my sauerkraut for the year. I let it ferment several weeks on my countertop, then pack it into jars and pop it in the fridge, where it will last… well, kinda forever. My record is almost three years.

I have on my shelf a batch of fish sauce I made in the first Trump administration, and a jar of pontack, an elderberry-and-vinegar based concoction that tastes a bit like A1 Steak Sauce, so old it’s from Obama’s first term. It’s perfectly fine. Better, even.

Moments ago, I tossed a handful of two-year-old dried lingonberries into my breakfast porridge. I eat months’ old eggs on the regular. And let’s not even talk about frozen products. Chances are you’ve heard about the scientists who thawed and ate some preserved bison from the Ice Age. A fun game to play with fellow hunters is: What’s the oldest hunk of meat you’ve ever fished out of your own personal Sibera and eaten? Six years is my record: An antelope roast, vacuum sealed, and perfectly fine.

Expiration dates and fear are one of a piece.

They originated almost a century ago after too many unscrupulous merchants sold genuinely tainted products that did in fact sicken, or even kill, unsuspecting consumers. They perfected the art of hiding the smell or look of a rotten thing to sell it at a profit.

And that’s an important note: Hiding the smell or look. We are animals. We have stronger senses of smell and taste and sight than we give ourselves credit for. If I had a dollar for every time I counseled a reader worried about the safety of this or that, noting that their nose will not betray them, I could buy a whole lot of soon-to-expire aged gouda.

I talked with a friend the other day about all this, and he brought up tainted ground beef. No one should eat that. But that beef was bad from the get-go, not because it was old and moldy.

Moldy. Gah. Our fear of this stuff knows no bounds! Fortunately I was raised by a thrifty, Yankee, cheese-loving mom who simply sliced the moldy bits off and carried on. Yes, black mold is bad. Very bad. But white and even green or pink mold isn’t really going to hurt you unless you happen to be allergic to penicillin, which that compact white mold usually is. Pink molds are usually salt-loving wee beasties.

A thing to remember is that our many salted, dried or fermented foods are designed for long, even indefinite, storage. Going back to sauerkraut for a moment, I’ve seen expiration dates on packages of them. Boggling. Same with jellies and jams. I even saw an expiration date on salt cod!!! Uh, hello? Salt fish is literally designed to keep for a decade or more. I once made some from California halibut and deliberately kept it in the fridge for eight years before eating it. Was perfectly fine.

Herbs and spices lose flavor over time, but don’t get toxic. Everyone has seen the straw-colored thyme and the brown paprika. I toss those into the compost not because they’re bad for me, but because they’re no longer giving me what I got them for. And yes, I feel bad for wasting, but hey, the compost likes them. Some spices don’t lose their luster, though: I’ve grated decade-old nutmegs and the aroma was just as good as fresh.

A fun one is vinegar. Stabilized vinegar never goes bad. Ever. I’ve tasted century-old balsamic. Live vinegar, however, will die eventually, but your nose knows: The aroma goes from vinegar to nail polish remover. Pretty easy to tell the difference, no?

An insidious effect of the expiration date is classism.

I happen to also shop in the supermarket where I pick up the old foods. I see customers checking expiration dates every time I’m in there. Hell, I even do it with milk, because I don’t drink a lot of it and have limited use for sour milk in my life.

Is it past or even near its “expiration” date? Well, the customer will put it back, and that’s when I get it for the food pantry. The customers at the pantry never bat an eye at dates — except, again, for milk — but they are almost all aware of why they have the foods available to them on the shelf. I’ve heard them converse about the idiocy of expiration dates in several languages. They know.

That feeling that we all possess a sort of secret food knowledge that maybe the rich do not serves as a balm against the fact that they are at a food pantry. Maybe more like a band-aid, really.

I don’t know what the answer is. I mean I do: It’s generalizing knowledge of what does and does not have a real expiration date. But that seems to be a pipedream in modern society. The market has decided to cater to the lowest denominator, and in so doing has, in some misguided sense of food safety, exponentially increased the amount of food waste in this world.

Without this food rescue system that my local pantry uses, all that food — hundreds and hundreds of pounds per day, at just one supermarket — would go to the landfill, along with all its associated packaging, most of it plastic.

To me that’s a whole lot worse than a stale donut or a spot of mold on a piece of cheese.