Best If Used Before the End of Time
In the matter of expiration dates stamped on items intended to end up inside you, fine people bring a variety of attitudes.
Many feel that a broad approach is called for.
“So this date references a time of expiration that pre-dates the invention of the fax machine and perhaps the establishment of the Federal Reserve. What of it? Where is your pioneer spirit? Is that the kind of people we are now?”
Others view aged items as wine enthusiasts view a vintage bottle of wine, valuing the item originally for its rarity, but upon further consideration prizing the chemical and biological effects that may have taken place within the confines of the container since it was packaged.
It is first a token of a world gone by, like artifacts from Scott's Polar Expedition of 1910, and second an opportunity to get acquainted with second-string team members of The Periodic Table of the Elements.
“They stopped making chocolate peanut butter refried bean dip there in the mid-70s in response to the second energy crisis. This is one of the last known specimens. Can you imagine what has been going on inside this jar in the meantime? Why, the very lid has been rusted shut as though soldered in place! How much better can it get?”
Still others are alarmed to see that an item is due to expire late-ish in a year in the middle of the next decade.
If you are of an archaeological bent and your frame of reference spans one or two geologic eras, this is more or less early next week.
They say, “Better to be safe. Best to toss this out now so as to avoid any confusion seven years from now.”
The pantry shelves of these cautionary individuals are uniquely tidy, not to say sparse, not to say unoccupied, their owners feeling as they do that anything that you didn’t buy and eat today is likely the source of the next global pandemic. Who wants that on their resume?
Others take a middle road and give the foodstuff in question a wide but not infinite area of latitude. By their point of view, this is what dogs were invented for.
A sampling slipped to a willing canine and the subsequent survival of that eager mammal carries the day. Or not.
It is hard to know just what they make of this back at the factory where these materials are mashed, ground, grouped, mixed, shifted, brewed, sifted, and subdivided.
We may picture these individuals as Titans of Business, standing on the factory floor as bushels of carrots fly by on one conveyor belt and squawking hens on another, destined to meet further down the line for assembly into Aunt Martha’s Country Chicken Soup.
These fine people achieved their degrees in agronomy, animal husbandry, industrial engineering, or mass production. They have not given a lot of time to thinking about the calendar.
Counting days down into the future? They are building the future, my friend! "Leave such simple operations of arithmetic to schoolchildren," one of them might say. "We have an entire economy to feed!"
Required however by the numbers police to stamp something on the lids of their cans, they take on the air of young men of the old days stocking canned goods on the grocery store shelves.
That process is similar to that of the village librarian, only her target was the 'due date' slip at the front of the book, while the stockboys' target was the flat metal top of canned goods.
The tools are simple but effective.
There is a pad of ink and a stamper with every number up to three digits in the Arabic numbering system achieved by rolling one, two, or three bands, each with ten digits, into place until the desired final number sits at the top of the device. It is then a simple if showy task to stamp the lids of the cans with the price of the item.
It was considered the height of hilarity by these young comedians to assign the numbers at random, so that a simple can of peas could run you $9.99, and a pricey item, say a jar of caviar, could be had for 3 cents.
Where has all the good old fashioned humor gone?
It is with a like spirit that we can imagine our Titans of Business rolling their eyes and simply making stuff up to put on the cans and jars.
There is no other explanation for the shopper who arrives home with a sackful of items from the same aisle to find that half of them expired yesterday and the other half are deemed good well into the era of flying cars and robot dogs.
This brief investigation so far of course only covers materials in the pantry, larder, cabinets, or storage shelves stacked up in the utility room.
The dates stamped on them are noted for being somewhat insane, but they are least readable. Or legible.
Once you get inside the refrigerator however, the whole concept of written communication may as well never have been invented.
The dates stamped along the crinkled rims and edges of cheese sealed in cellophane, the fragile styrofoam underside of cartons of eggs, the sides, bottoms, tops, or inner folds of the containers of chocolate, white, almond, coconut, or skim milk, and in particular the scant imprint of mysterious symbols upon the thin metal caps and bottoms of ready-to-bake biscuits and orange rolls seem to be in another language, from another time.
It may be Phoenician, this language, it may Babylonian. It may predate an agreed-to universal system of numbering altogether.
The only thing that is clear from these smudged hieroglyphics is that from the get-go you have no idea when they expire.
It is inconceivable as well that anyone in the entire chain of suppliers, sellers, buyers, wholesalers, and retailers, knows when these damned things are out of date either.
It is to be assumed that everyone along the line is operating in the same theater of uncertainty and is just winging it.
Like the child’s game of Hot Potato, the trick is to get the object out of your hands and into the next fellow’s as soon as you can.
The product, let us call it cream cheese so that we can picture it in our minds, may have come to market yesterday fresh from the dairy.
Or it may have been making the rounds since that Paris World Fair, the one where the Eiffel Tower went up.
All possibilities have to be considered and all have to be presumed to have the same chance of occurrence.
Well, the physicists have been telling us for some time now that all phenomena is random, and the simple act of observing an experiment -- say that carton of yogurt you have in your hand right now whose contents are colored a pleasing yellow as you are used to seeing in this brand's Lemon Surprise, but which unaccountably advertises itself as Very Berry Medley -- changes it.
In the case of this carton of yogurt you can only hope. Indeed, you will be happy if it can still be classified as yogurt at all. You have always been easy to please in these matters.
The consumer is cautioned however not to over-find fault with the system, nor to be too particular.
The danger of ‘best by’ dates migrating from the grocery industry to other small but important areas of the economy, such as husbands, cannot be exaggerated and the prospect must be avoided at all costs.
