I was told in our project that warm socks were top of the list, and as said- cans with a “best by” date are not “expired”.
Relevant to this thread, the local public radio station here interviewed representatives from three food banks in Northern California. When asked the best way to help, they all stated:
- Monetary donations have the biggest impact.
- Volunteer your time
- Donations of food – on this they were all like “Well, we’ll take them, but that’s really the least impactful way to help”
The takeaway I got was that if you really don’t want to or can’t make a monetary donation, a better way to help would be to donate your time and go volunteer at the food bank rather than donating food items.
Sorry, there’s no transcript, but if you want to hear that part of the discussion scroll down to the second segment “Checking in with NorCal Food Banks” and fast forward to around the 10:30 mark.
When I was in college, waaaaaay back in the Neolithic, my roommate and I hit the Chicago Food Depository a couple times. We were required to donate some of our time in return for the food and anything else we got. No big deal, not hard labor, it was a couple hours of sorting and packing stuff.
The food was all eaten long ago, but I still have and use the bright orange knitted watch cap I picked up along with a food box back then. I’ve had it 40 years now and I’m not even the original owner. It’s still in one piece, juuuuust beginning to fade a bit where the sun has hit it for decades. The darn thing might outlive me.
Sometimes I’m asked why I still have the thing. Well, it’s useful. Aside from being warm my late spouse said it was very useful for finding me in a crowd. But it also reminds me that I’ve survived hard times and trouble and climbed out of the hole, which at times I have found encouraging.
Donations in kind are, at least sometimes, well received and the kindness they represent remembered for a lifetime. You may not see it yourself, I never knew the person who donated that hat (probably thinking it was ugly and orange) but every time I see it or wear it I feel a bit of gratitude for their gift at a time when I was poor, hungry, and facing a Chicago winter.
I think you’re attaching too much weight to your own personal definition of “expired” here. There is no official standard definition of an “expiration date” for food safety purposes with packaged nonperishable foods, and there is no hard and fast rule about when any particular type of packaged nonperishable food becomes actually unsafe or unwholesome to consume, which is how most of us would intuitively interpret “expired”.
AIUI, when an organization requests “no expired food”, they mean “no food bearing any best-by, use-before, etc. date that has already passed”. In my book, anybody deliberately donating such food to them with the mental reservation “well an expired best-by date doesn’t mean the food has actually gone bad, so I’ll put it in their bag anyway and let them deal with it” is being kind of a persnickety asshole.
Sure, many of us voluntarily consume packaged foods after the printed date with no ill effects. And in general, food-pantry volunteers understand that basic reality of food safety just as well as you (generic “you”) do. But charitable organizations have more important things to do than try to suss out exactly which post-dated packaged foods they estimate to be still usable. Just deal with your own unwanted old food yourself, and donate to the food pantry things that meet the criteria they’ve explicitly stated for what they actually want.
Thanks @Broomstick, that’s a really nice story, and inspires me to keep going on my charity knitting and quilting with the thought that people facing hard times deserve to have at least some useful stuff that is actually nice and good quality! I would be very honored and touched if I thought that the “welcome blanket” I made for a refugees’ organization using the afghan squares knitted by my late mother in the last project she worked on was being cherished in that way. (Full disclosure: it was pink and purple and probably pretty ugly but I put love into it!)
Checking expiration dates is second nature for many consumers, a routine part of deciding what’s safe to eat. But those dates often indicate peak quality rather than actual safety, leading people to throw away perfectly good food out of caution — wasting both meals and money in the process.
Between 30% and 40% of the food supply in the United States is wasted, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A portion of that stems from consumer misunderstanding of food labels, said Carla Schwan, a food safety specialist with University of Georgia Cooperative Extension.
“The ‘use by’ date is for consumers, indicating when the manufacturer believes the product will be at its best,” said Schwan, an assistant professor in UGA’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “That doesn’t mean if you eat it a day or two later, you’ll get sick — you might just notice changes in texture, taste or freshness.”
Sell-By
This label is usually printed on perishable items like meat, dairy products, and bakery items. It indicates the date by which the store should sell the product to ensure it remains fresh and safe to eat for a reasonable period of time afterward. If you see a product with a sell-by date that has already passed, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s no longer safe to eat. But inspect the product carefully to make sure it hasn’t spoiled.
Use-By or Best-By
These labels indicate the date by which the manufacturer recommends using the product for optimal quality and freshness. Unlike expiration dates, use-by or best-by dates are not safety dates, and products can often be consumed safely after these dates have passed, as long as they’ve been stored properly.
“Best by/before: This indicates that a product will have the best flavor or quality if consumed before a given date. It’s not necessarily dangerous if you eat it after that; it just won’t taste as fresh.”
This is NOT my “own personal definition of “expired””. This is the definition generally used. Some products do have an ‘expiration date”- do not donate those and I would say dont use unless you are sure and the date is like yesterday.
They do?
Yes, you can donate food items even after they’ve passed their best before date. If the label says “best before”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the food will spoil on that date. It just means that the food is best consumed before that date.
Just to be clear- I personally do not donate canned food past their “best by” dates, I donate time or money. I have no issue with those donations, and yes, tossing canned food a little past it’s “best by” date is a major cause of food waste. There is no issue with asking the food back, but make sure you arent saying ‘expired’- which no one wants.
Um, your own cites contradict that claim: specifically, the first source is treating “expiration date” as a general category including “peak quality” dates, although it also describes it as a separate category legally required only for infant formula.
That widespread inconsistency in usage is why it’s unhelpful for food donors to try to second-guess exactly what an organization means by “no expired food”. The best procedure is precisely the one that you acknowledge in your own practice: namely, don’t donate any food after any kind of cutoff date printed on the package.
I dont see that anywhere there.
No, the best procedure is to check with them.
Nope. The best procedure is to ask the specific organization you’re donating to.
I can say from 20+ years of working in the food business, 13 years volunteering at food banks and pantries, and several years coordinating donations from retailers to food banks and pantries, that you are absolutely, positively, 100%, without a whisker of a doubt, completely and totally wrong, wrong, wrong on this issue.
I have NEVER worked with a food pantry that did NOT expect all their packaged food donations to be before the whatever-the-fuck-it-is date on the package.
People who donate products past that date are more trouble than they are worth. Especially when they want to argue about it.
ETA: replying to DrDeth, not Thorny_Locust.
I just gave the link to Second harvest, (one of the largest food banks) which says-
Second Harvest often distributes food items after the date on the package. This food is still safe to eat. Food manufacturers use different date codes to ensure that consumers receive their product at peak quality. Once a product is past code date, many manufacturers donate it to food banks. Food Bank staff monitors this food to ensure that the good past code date. The food bank aims at distributing food prior to exceeding the shelf-life referenced in this guide, dates. Produce should be checked for quality and assessed for best distribution.
But if you ASK (or check) and they say “Okay, please do”, and you donate- are you still-
??
and
Because my main point is that canned food past their sell by date are not ‘expired”. I have given cite after cite that agrees with that. Do not throw out just because of that.
And, this is important, because you and many others miss it- I did NOT say that I donate canned goods past their “best by” date, in fact i said I dont. Nor did I say anywhere that you SHOULD- unless of course that particular food bank says “Okay”.
So check first.
My municipality has forbidden disposing of clothing in the trash unless it’s contaminated (bloody, oily). So all my worn out and useless clothing is now “donated” to one of the clothing boxes at the town dump. I give them a final “goodbye” spin through the washer, but i sure as hell don’t try to mend anything. I usually put good stuff in the box of an organization i vaguely care about, and the rags in the box of one i don’t care about.
Mandatory textile recycling
Sucks to be Goodwill in my town, i suspect.
Pretty much. Even conscientiously checking with a representative of the organization to clarify their individual policy is giving them (a small amount of) unnecessary extra work.
Just give the people what they want (whether that’s non-outdated food products, money, and/or volunteer time). The Latin proverb says “Bis dat qui cito dat” (“giving promptly is [as good as] giving twice”), but I think “Bis dat qui bene dat”, substituting “giving well” for “giving promptly”, is also apposite.
That seems fine to me, especially if you can’t throw it away: there’s absolutely zero point in mending a garment that really isn’t wearable anymore, and if it is wearable then having some mendable flaws will get it priced super cheap for the eventual purchaser.
AIUI, most major thrift stores undertake to recycle unwearable items as “shoddy” or other textile-scrap material. I personally don’t donate unwearables since, as noted, I rip them up for household rags; because why the hell should I give away raggable clothing and then purchase rag-equivalent household supplies for money?
But as long as people aren’t donating literal garbage that’s unsanitary and unrecyclable, it makes total sense for the thrift store to serve as the central clearinghouse for rag production and other textile recycling.
Moderating:
You’ve made this point numerous times in this thread. Time to drop it. It’s become a hijack to the discussion. You’re not going to force everyone to use your system of rating “best-by” v. “expired”. Just accept that.
My experience is almost all with one. But I have routinely at that one been offered, and sometimes taken, items past their date. They tell you that items at that table may be past date.
To answer this question from my experience with food pantries, but from a “next-level thinking” perspective. Donations of in-kind product drive more engagement than writing checks (or I guess Venmoing and Zelleing these days). Volunteers who collect and sort donations grow into volunteers who fundraise. Conversations like we have had here also break out, which gives comfortable middle class people insight into the lives and needs of food bank patrons.
Thank you!
And that gives the answer to the OP’s question. If people give food and not money, then yes giving food is more effective than nothing.
Again for at least the third time, different food banks have different needs. I’m not sure how that’s not obvious. The little food bank where I make my donations tells me what they are lacking on the day that I plan to go shopping and I buy it for them. That’s their specific preference. They are of course thrilled to take cash as well but they are too small to get much of a discount by buying in bulk and they have a very small staff. Someone making a trip for them is helpful.
I think that is pretty obvious. The food banks i sometimes contribute to are huge, and my understanding is that they prefer cash. That’s also a lot easier for me, so i give them cash.