About one-third of the food Americans buy is wasted, hurting the climate and consumers’ wallets

  You saw it at Thanksgiving, and you’ll likely see it at your next holiday feast: piles of unwanted food – unfinished second helpings, underwhelming kitchen experiments, and the like – all dressed up with no place to go except the back of the refrigerator. With luck, hungry relatives will discover some of it before the inevitable green mold renders it inedible.

  U.S. consumers waste a lot of food year-round – about one-third of all purchased food. That’s equivalent to 1,250 calories per person per day, or US$1,500 worth of groceries for a four-person household each year, an estimate that doesn’t include recent food price inflation. And when food goes bad, the land, labor, water, chemicals, and energy that went into producing, processing, transporting, storing, and preparing it are wasted too.

Food expiration dates don’t have much science behind them – a food safety researcher explains another way to know what’s too old to eat

  Florida’s outbreak of listeria has so far led to at least one death, 22 hospitalizations, and an ice cream recall since January. Humans get sick with listeria infections, or listeriosis, from eating soil-contaminated food, undercooked meat or dairy products that are raw, or unpasteurized. Listeria can cause convulsions, coma, miscarriage, and birth defects. And it’s the third leading cause of food poisoning deaths in the U.S.

  Avoiding unseen food hazards is the reason people often check the dates on food packaging. And printed with the month and year is often one of a dizzying array of phrases: “best by,” “use by,” “best if used before,” “best if used by,” “guaranteed fresh until,” “freeze by” and even a “born on” label applied to some beer.