[collyw]

Best before dates are a waste of time. I noticed this travelling in less devloped countries where they don't usually have them. And plenty of times I have had chicken that smells off despite being before the date on the packet. I had one cheese that got way better after being a month past the date.

[adrianN]

Best before dates are a really good idea if you want to reduce the number of food poisonings in a large population. Food is (statistically) very safe before the best before date, assuming proper storage. Most of the time it's still safe well past that date, but you would dramatically increase the number of people who get sick.

It's the same with pasteurized milk. Unpasteurized milk is mostly safe to drink, but occasionally you get really sick. In a large population the difference is noticeable.

Again the same with the much stricter cleanliness rules for restaurants and the like. Usually it's safe to store prepared food without refrigeration for a day, restaurants mustn't. It's also mostly safe to cook on a dirty stove, restaurants mustn't. The difference between your home kitchen and the restaurant is the number of people served.

[nommm-nommm]

Best before dates have nothing to do with safety, they are about quality. They are (mostly) voluntary and set by the manufacturer.

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/do-food-expirati...

[newjersey]

I think somebody should extend this metaphor to demonstrate why garbage collection is rubbish.

[nippoo]

Side-note: a lot of fresh chicken will smell bad for about 5 minutes when you remove it from a vacuum-sealed package, but the smell quickly dissipates and the chicken is good to eat. In the UK there's a label on some brands of fresh chicken to that effect. I must have thrown away a fair bit of good chicken before first realising this...

[Turing_Machine]

Well, with something like cheese it's a roll of the dice (except in a cheese production facility run by experts). It might well be the case that the random mold and bacteria hanging around your location make the cheese taste better. It also might taste terrible. It also might kill you or at least make you very sick. Listeria has about a 20% case fatality rate even with medical treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listeria