My household contains 5 people, and we reliably consume at least a gallon of milk per week. When I go shooping every week, most of the gallon milk containers have an expiration date between one and a half and two and a half weeks into the future. I habitually grab the one with the longest shelf-life, and I’m certainly entitled to do so, but is that really the right thing to do, morally, ethically, or otherwise? If I take one that expires sooner, knowing that I will consume it all before its pull date, I am leaving a longer-lived gallon for someone who may take longer to consume it; certainly no-one is worse off. On the other hand, by grabbing a fresher gallon I may be leaving behind one which wil never be purchased and will then go to waste. So by tailoring my purchasing to my consumption I am encouraging a more efficient use of resources. Does my ethical obligation to my fellow man outweigh my right to the freshest product available, especially since it involves no sacrifice on my part?
I think most folks take a gallon of milk at random without checking the expiration date at all. Consequently, your single action of taking a gallon with a late expiration date has no effect in the grand scheme of things. Let’s say there are two gallons on the shelf, one expires Aug 22 and the other Aug 25. You take Aug 25, and Jane comes after you and picks the remaining one. It’s fairly safe to assume that both of you will drink the entire gallon before expiration, so two gallons are consumed, none wasted. Real life is more complicated and features more players, but the final conclusion is that the store throws away a certain amount of milk, and that amount doesn’t change as a result of you picking a late-date gallon. So I wouldn’t sweat it.
ITR: and in the end we all die miserably, so why bother?
I think those are kick-ass ethics! Everyone should put more consideration into their actions, not too be moral and just, but because it builds character.
Seriously, though. It IS fun to consider things wisely.
Yet more serious. Why not? If everyone did it, maybe some gallons could be spared. If we thought it wouldn’t help because everyone would have to do something, we’d never achieve anything.
If someone’s household takes so long to consume a gallon of milk that it may expire before being all consumed, then they should consider buying milk in quarts instead.
You know, I am glad to see I am not the only one who has worried about this! Thanks for bringing it up, I never would have dared.
Depends, IMO, on how many people do check expiration dates. If few people do, then the chance that the older one will be picked up by someone – and if it is less healthful for them, then it’s really up to them to check expiration dates. Plus, it’s somewhat more healthful for you to pick the newer ones, as it doesn’t just magically become bad milk after the expiration date, being a more gradual process.
OTOH if there is a good chance that many people will reject the old milk due to their needing milk that will not go bad, then it would be true that you’d be wasting resources on a macroeconomic scale.
I believe most of those dates are not “expiration dates” but “sell by dates”. The stores must pull them from the shelves if they’re not sold by that date. They’re still good for a while.
I go through milk pretty quickly and I get a distant expiration date if I can. I don’t know if the milk was properly chilled at all stages of its transport and I can taste the beginning of a turn pretty early on.
This isn’t an ethical issue; you’re being offered a variety of objects, why not pick the one that best meets your personal standard? Not doing so wouldn’t be ethical - it’d be a foolish abandonment of your own perfectly valid interests for some vague social goal you aren’t likely to attain anyway.
Let’s look at the chain of consequences if you do optimize resources:
Grocery store throws away less
Due to lower costs, grocery store passes a % of savings on to consumer, keeping a % (typically you don’t get it all)
Demand from dairy suppliers is reduced
Dairy farmer Joe can’t make payments on milking machine so it gets repossessed
Now he’s out of work and goes on welfare
Taxes are increased to support increase in welfare
Your taxes increase which offsets your savings from the grocery store
So basically it evens out and either way works the same
Seriously though, seems like you would be helping the grocery store and to some degree yourself due to the slight reduction in cost (if you got enough people to follow this method).
I dunno, all the gallon-jugs I’ve ever bought start to smell a day after the date stamped on 'em.
If the grocery store is consistently throwing away milk, they will adjust down the amount of milk they purchase. It doesn’t matter. Any problems are self-correcting. (Though I do think the exercise of examining the problem worthwhile.)
Also:
If grocery stores really had a problem with throwing milk away, they’d just discount the milk about to expire, and people would buy it.
I know that the grocery store near me does this with meat that’s about to expire. People buy it. I buy it. The only difference to me is that I save a few bucks, and I use it that night instead of having it sit in the fridge for a few days awaiting culinary inspiration.
My grocery also discounts the milk if it is getting close to the sell by date. For me, it really depends on how much I’m going to be using as to how closely I look at the expiry date. If I think it will be used quickly, the sell by date isn’t a big deal.
Ooh, I really like this quesition. I’m a single guy who rarely eats at home, so I do need to go for the long expiration date. I hate it when I get to the shelf and all that’s left is milk dated to expire in two days.
What’s important here is the fact that the OP is being considerate of the possible needs of others. I would say it is not an ethical issue (i.e. right or wrong), but it is a moral issue (this is a decision which may make things slightly better for others in my community). Whether this will make a big difference or not is irrelevant.
I wish the OP shopped at MY grocery store.
The guy who owned the corner store that I lived near as a child would yell at people if he caught them taking the newer milk; consequently I still feel rather naughty when I choose the milk with the latest expiration date.
The guy who owned the corner store that I lived near as a child still owns it, I still live near it and he’s still a jerk but he seems to lurk near the fridges rarely these days, and I’m no longer afraid of him anyway.
Again, this thread rules.
You make a wonderful economic point (with today’s economy, whenever there’s winners, there’s losers), but think of the wasted resources! If someone’s got to lose money, I’d rather it was because the earth was used less than more.
The answer to your problem is Long-Life (UHT) milk, which is good for up to 9 months or so from purchase. Keep it in the fridge like normal milk, and it tastes the same but lasts 18 times as long.
As someone who actually works in a supermarket, I can tell you that we rotate the stock to ensure that the stuff that will go off soonest is at the front- and the date on the bottle here is the USE BY date- if you don’t drink it by that date, turf it out because it will be off by the day after. Trust me on this one.
FWIW, if we’ve got milk that’s going to go off in a week or a few days, we discount it something fierce (up to 60% off the normal price), and you can guarantee it will be gone within a few hours. Certainly, in the six months I’ve been at the supermarket I’ve never once seen a bottle of milk stay on the shelf long enough to hit the use-by date… it’s generally all gone in a couple of days!
In short, it doesn’t matter which bottle you grab because it’s going to get sold one way or another, just at a different price…
UHT does not taste the same, unless you’ve only been drinking UHT for quite some time. Trust me on this. Back in my struggling, unemployed, poverty-stricken days we only used UHT milk and I couldn’t understand why my father complained when he visited and I made him a cup of tea with it - I thought he was just being fussy and that he wouldn’t even know the difference if he didn’t see the packaging it was poured from.
Fast forward a couple of years to more prosperous times and we’re using “real” milk all the time. One day we run out of regular milk and I open a carton of UHT and find… it doesn’t taste anything like what we’re used to. In fact… ugh! I still keep UHT in the cupboard because I use it for cooking or (in a pinch) in a cup of tea, but I’m no longer convinced that it tastes like regular milk.
It is truly a sign of a prosperous age when we can debate the ethics of purchasing a carton of milk that is farther from its expiration date then the next carton of milk.
Marc
I agree, it’s not an ethical question, it’s just smart consumer behavior. I always check the shelf for the gallon with the most distant expiry date. If there was a concrete situation where I could help somebody out by letting them have it instead, I probably would, but why deprive myself for the sake of some tortured hypothetical?