'Best By' Dates Are Confusing AF. Here's How To Decode Them

Picture this: You reach for your trusty jar of nut butter only to realize that the "best by" date has come and gone. Do you give it a sniff and proceed as normal, or throw it away assuming it has gone bad?

If you fall into the latter camp, you're not alone: According to a 2016 survey, up to 37 percent of Americans will always throw food away if it the date on its label has passed, and 84 percent of them will do so sometimes. Taking best by labels literally may seem like a healthy habit, but it actually could end up doing more harm than good.

"These date labels are set by manufacturers, and often set rather arbitrarily," Jackie Suggitt, a director at ReFED, a non-profit working to reduce food waste, told mbg. "With the exception of infant formula, there is no federal regulation for date labels on food products."

Let that sink in for a minute! While certain states have set up certain regulations on labelling perishable items such as milk and eggs, there are zero nation-wide laws governing the dates that we see on labels. The language that appears in front of those dates—"sell by", "best by", "most delicious before", etc.—is also unregulated.

More often that not, dates are meant to indicate when a product stops tasting its best, not when it becomes unsafe to eat. Mistaking food quality for safety becomes a problem when it dictates how often you reach for your trash (or compost) bin.

"Those expiration dates are completely meaningless, and yet people really use them as guides," Rhea Suh, the President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the crowd of the Food Tank Summit, which galvanized hundreds of thought leaders around the topic of food waste in NYC this week. "It's mostly up to manufacturers," she added, explaining that it's in their best interest to label thier product in a way that gets it off the shelf quickly.

According to the NRDC's Save The Food database (which, by the way, is an amazing resource if you're looking to reduce food waste in your own kitchen), 50 percent of seafood, 48 percent of fruits and vegetables, and 38 percent of grains in the U.S. are tossed. By reducing the amount of food we throw away in this country, we could save up to 2.34 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions. If you ask Suggitt, she'll tell you that simply changing these date labels is one of the quickest ways we can do so.

Until a more consistent system is in place, it really falls on the consumer to decide when something is past its prime. "We've evolved the ability to know when something is safe to eat," said Suh. "Trust yourself. Use the basic senses of smell, and taste, and look."

Start by looking over your food for mold and smell them for any funky odors. "Overall, it is wise to observe your food—the color and the smell—before cooking or consuming it," nutritionist Abigail Cannon, J.D., R.D. told mbg. "Those observations, along with the dates, can help you determine whether the food is safe."

With highly perishable items like poultry, meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, dairy, and cheese, you're going to want to use a bit more caution and employ preventative measures to keep them fresher for longer. "Keeping these perishable items out of the danger zone, which is between 41°F to 135°F, for more than two hours is essential to prevent disease causing bacteria to multiply," Cannon said.