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Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - Veggie - 05-11-2022
You may remember the suggestion that removing Best before dates from fresh produce would reduce food waste. Today I was given some bagged fruit and veg - some of which say in big writing " No date, helps reduce waste". To my inexpert eye, there seems to be nothing wrong with these things, so why are they giving them away? Shouldn't they be keeping them on the shelf until they're unsaleable - or is it the customer who is blamed for the food waste by chucking them once they reach their Best before date?
Out of interest (maybe) I was given 2 net bags of 4 lemons.
Sainsburys Organic unwaxed £1.50, reduced to 75p, then to 39p then given away "No date helps reduce waste". Origin Spain
Co-op unwaxed £1.75, reduced to 96p, then to 63p, then given away "Best before 3 November". Origin South Africa
The Coop ones are yellower than the Sainsburys which have a greenish tinge but are organic and cheaper. If you need lemons you know where to shop now.
I looked for dates on the other veg I picked up - Waitrose carrots are dated, Sainsburys aren't. They're all in plastic wrappers though.
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - Vinny - 06-11-2022
I buy a lot of lemons and it sometimes surpries me how quickly they go mouldy.
One day they are fine, the next day covered in mould. A hard fruit to put a date on methinks?
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - Small chilli - 06-11-2022
Well obviously the co-op lemons will be more expensive. The food miles are greater
( FYI that was sarcasm ).Joking aside. I find it all madness. When I used to work in the zoo. We used to collect 6 to 8 big bags ( slightly bigger than a black dustbin bag ) of fruit, veg, breads & cakes twice a week. From Asda. For feeding to the animals. All of it destined for the skip. It was usually the stuff at the bottom of the bags that wasn’t great. Only because of the weight of the stuff on top of it. As for the cakes none of the keepers ever died from eating a cake with yesterday’s date on it . Some of the cakes were kept for the chimps. They’re enjoyed cake
. Before I left that zoo Asda stop us having it. Worries it was getting re sold or some **it! They rather it went in the skip. And it did from then on. Animals didn’t have such a varied diet because of ridiculous legislation. Very sad, disappointing and wasteful.
I hope Asda has reassessed it’s policies and is sharing its “past it best” produce.
To be fair to Asda I’m talking about things that happened a very long time ago.
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - Proserpina - 06-11-2022
From what I've seen, selling food without best before dates is just an excuse for supermarkets to sell past-its-best food at full price, when it would previously have been reduced. I agree with trying to reduce food waste, but this strategy by the supermarkets is greenwashing designed to increase their profits, nothing more. It's like when they started selling wonky vegetables. Yes, I'm very happy to buy them, but I in no way believe that they are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts! It's purely motivated by seeing an opportunity to make money out of something they would previously have had no use for.
If I know I'm going to eat the food I buy within a day then I'm happy to buy it at the end of its shelf life. Or if I have a plan and the time to process/preserve it in some way, that's fine as well. But that needs to be my choice, or I end up buying fruit that I think will last me for the week ahead only to find it is mouldy the day after I buy it. At least I can feed it to my worms, but not everyone has the option to use food waste in that way (I wouldn't put most food waste in a small suburban garden compost bin due to the risk of attracting rats or foxes) so it just ends up in the bin.
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - Veggie - 06-11-2022
(06-11-2022, 09:35 AM)Vinny Wrote: I buy a lot of lemons and it sometimes surpries me how quickly they go mouldy.I told one of the church ladies that, if you coated a lemon with Vaseline they would keep longer. Then I got a bit carried away, putting on a silly voice saying" Its all right, dear, I'm just vaselining my lemons".
Maybe it wasn't the time or the place.............
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - JJB - 06-11-2022
Oh to be a fly on the wall.
P says his nan used to keep lemons embedded in box of sand to make them last. I've never heard of that before.
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - JJB - 06-11-2022
Whilst I can see the reasoning behind the removal of best before dates, personally as someone who only shops once a week and needs produce to last at least a week if not longer, I find any date useful for comparison purposes. In Lidl they code their packaged produce with week and day numbers, so you can at least choose the most recent delivery. Lidl's produce can be suspect at the best of times so their coding is quite useful.
As an aside I picked up a pkt of YS bbe the day of my shopping, GOSH vegan cocktail sausages for 70p, just to give them a try. The blighters at the checkout charged me full price and to add insult to injury, the bladdy things were mouldy underneath the covering. My fault for not checking I suppose. I will have a conversation with Lidl next week.
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - SarrissUK - 06-11-2022
Our village has a new co-op that clearly overstocks, because they always have lots of yellow stickered items. They even sell potatoes dirt cheap, even though they'll keep in the fridge for weeks and weeks after the dates! We buy all our bread from there now, and most of our veg, and quite a lot of cake (that we really shouldn't be eating, but... it's YS!!). We just don't need to go anywhere else! In fact, I'm hoping Jay will go later on today, whilst I'm working on my essay - it's brilliant on a Sunday afternoon!
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - Veggie - 06-11-2022
On OLIO yesterday, one of the members that I collect from had 42 packs of organic, freerange chicken breast fillets (Tesco) and another 12 packs of not-organic chicken breasts - all Use by yesterday. When you work out how many chickens were sacrificed to, potentially, end up in landfill, its criminal.
I completely understand that you shouldn't eat meat past its use by date but there must be a better way of dealing with BB food. Maybe a supermarket freezer that could be used to hold the unsold stuff, then sold at highly discounted prices to shoppers. Probably wouldn't satisfy Health & Safety and all that though.
RE: Removing best before dates from fruit & veg - Vinny - 06-11-2022
(06-11-2022, 11:18 AM)Veggie Wrote:I remember a thread about 'Greasing your leek shaft with vaseline to combat leek rust on another forum caused quite a stir!(06-11-2022, 09:35 AM)Vinny Wrote: I buy a lot of lemons and it sometimes surpries me how quickly they go mouldy.I told one of the church ladies that, if you coated a lemon with Vaseline they would keep longer. Then I got a bit carried away, putting on a silly voice saying" Its all right, dear, I'm just vaselining my lemons".
Maybe it wasn't the time or the place.............
When I buy calabrese (sold as broccoli) i usually buy two small heads that are wrapped together rather than one. One head is enough for my meal so I put the other one in a small glass of water (after cutting a small amount off the bottom.) and put it in the fridge. I need to keep filling the glass up as it seems to soak it up like a sponge, but it does make them last a lot longer.
