Nobody who sees me in person would ever accuse me of throwing food away.

Outstanding!

Doug--

I've been fretting about climate change lately, albeit not enough to turn off my A/C in Oklahoma. That's the biggest part of my carbon footprint, along with airplane travel when there's not a pandemic on.

It's not possible to fully mitigate the footprint of my air conditioner and my trips to see my grandchildren, although it does help that we have really outstanding insulation and we drive our cars, which are hybrids, very little.

Lately, I've been thinking about the food part of my footprint. (Yay! I'm back to the thread topic!) Between the CSA bag of eggs and veggies and the garden, my meat consumption is down significantly and a large proportion of my intake is local, which makes the environmental costs of processing and shipping go away.

On the flip side, I waste food practically every week and I was brought up to feel that wasting food is a terrible thing to do. The garden output ebbs and flows. Sometimes it's more than I can eat and not suitable for freezing. Sometimes I just don't like what the CSA sends. During the pandemic, I can't give it away at work. (We don't really know our neighbors.) I have a compost pile, but was having trouble with smell and insects and such.

The upshot of all this is that Quirt got me a countertop composter. I put the smelly stuff in that and throw things like corn shucks and yard waste on the traditional compost pile. There's a small energy cost--a couple of cents a cycle--but it's doing the job and I have the best garden ever, without the smell and bugs.

Unfortunately, this means that I have grown waaayyyyy more squash than I can eat. Does anybody want me to mail them some?

I have two large jars of marinated artichoke hearts from Costco. I have been using them as weights to press tofu.

They are dated “best by Feb 2017.” Any guess whether the contents are still good?

(EDIT). I suspect I’ll taste it anyway.

It’s OK to respond. If I die from food poisoning, I won’t hold you responsible.

Things to consider:

1) Was it stored in a cool dark place?
2) Do you have any clue when you bought it? That is, how far away from original manufacture date is it?
3) Have you checked whether the seal is good by pushing on the little button in the center of the lid?

We store most of our food products in the basement, so it's a cool dark place that I think helps prolong shelf life.

For canned products, or marinated/pickled stuff in jars, I feel pretty comfortable eating it a couple of years past the sell by/best by date. At four and a half years past that date, I'm a little less confident.

edit: Having said that, I know we've eaten five year old currant jelly that we put up ourselves. We're still here, so clearly it was a successful experiment.

I shop for food fairly frequently at Asian food markets. I typically avoid buying anything that does not have a human readable expiration or "best by" date stamped or printed on the packaging. Lots of Asian food exports are not labeled with legible expiration date. Overall, I still think requiring expiration dates does more good than harm.

quote:

Originally posted by Axtremus:
I shop for food fairly frequently at Asian food markets. I typically avoid buying anything that does not have a human readable expiration or "best by" date stamped or printed on the packaging. Lots of Asian food exports are not labeled with legible expiration date. Overall, I still think requiring expiration dates does more good than harm.

Me, too. I especially love the foil packs of “pickled vegetable” that say they’re good for a year past the date…that isn’t printed on the package.

I have a ceramic crock of something called “preserved vegetable” that I used only once for some forgotten Asian recipe. No expiration date. If it’s “preserved,” it must be good forever, right?