Society's adherence to "best before" labels is symptomatic of our over-sanitised attitudes to food today and a culprit in creating Britain's 5.3 million tonnes of food waste each year. The government's plan to look again at the "best before" labelling on packaged foods is a positive move, hopefully leading to the abolition of a gratuitous system that encourages unprecedented levels of waste.
Distinct from mandatory "use by" labels, the best-before term refers not to the relative safety of eating a food, but to its predicted quality by a certain date. Having today cooked some delicious green beans and courgettes, dated three and five days ago respectively, these predictions seem as unhelpful as they are wasteful.
Just like the supermarkets and multinational food producers packaging and printing best-before dates on each item, the level of waste we produce in the UK today is a relatively new development. There's doubtless a relationship between waste on this scale and a society that's grown to use dated food packaging as a rule rather than a guideline. We've become too reliant on labels dictating what we eat and when, in stark contrast to preceding generations.
If you'll pardon the pun, it was better before. The produce that consumers bought at independent butchers, grocers and the like, wasn't bound in wrappers dictating its lifespan or a time bracket for optimal quality. Instead, consumers used their common sense to judge the edibility of food. It was instinctive. To this day my parents pay little attention to any kind of date. Inheriting their parents' wartime "waste not, want not" approach to food, the suitability of milk is gauged by smell, fruit by hand, mince by colour.
A lot of the food my mother makes is enhanced by food deemed "past it". I'm sure my friends, who take such delight in scoffing her banana bread, would be horrified to see the black and festering fruit that adds to its texture and flavour. Compare your fruit bowl to how the careers of Paul Newman or Sophia Loren ripened and you've got the right idea.
We've been raised in an environment of increasing caution. The flipside to heightened awareness of issues surrounding our health and safety is a paranoia about what bad food might do to us. In addition, longer working hours, increased stress levels and a media that iare aggressively prescriptive about how we should look and feel, have seen eating disorders sky rocket in my generation. Our relationship with food is erratic and wary, both greedy and guilt-ridden. This goes some way to explain but not excuse our liberal attitude to chucking food away. Date-labelling food essentially amounts to a government-endorsed validation of our food anxieties.
Worse still, best-before labels not only feed off our anxiety, they add to it, too. The unique crime of the best-before label is not just that the food is often still fine but that it is easily mistaken for "use by". Consumers are fooled into throwing perfectly good produce away simply because there are too many dates on the packaging.
"Sell-by dates" were introduced for consumers by Marks & Spencer in 1970 – then a far simpler label than what they face today. In addition to best-before and use-by dates – both aimed at the consumer – there's now a "display until" date for the retailer's records. Am I alone in thinking this makes it all far too confusing? We should scrap the best-before label and write vendor-targeted dates into the bar codes. Consumer safety should be the key concern in food labelling, with freshness and quality left to the individual consumer's judgment.
The British Retail Consortium advocates educating consumers in how better to store their food purchases, while Lambeth (my London borough) has made a food waste bin compulsory. Both these strategies are constructive but longer-term propositions. Binning the best-before label is a subversive first step toward creating less waste, and a subtle attack on society's complex and profligate attitude to food.
