You walk into the grocery store for a carton (*) of milk.
It’s January 7th. You’re pretty sure the carton you buy will be empty in a week.
At the grocery store, there are cartons with various Best Before dates: January 15th, January 17th, January 23rd, January 31st.
The cartons are arranged in the usual way: the closest date is in the front of the shelf. The fridge seems to be cold enough for the dates to be reliable.
Which carton do you buy? Why?
(* It could be a plastic bottle if that’s how milk is sold in your area.)
The earliest, on the principle that (if everyone did this) the very least amount of food would get thrown away. It’s a sin to waste good food; there are children in Lower Slobbovia who are starving; I don’t mind drinking milk that has just begun to turn (and you can mix it into pancake batter.)
Nowadays, if I’m buying a carton of milk, chances are I’m planning to use it in a casserole or some other recipe, or to make yogurt, so I’d just buy a quart with the shortest expiration time.
If the situation is exactly as you describe, then I take the one that’s up front, and, generally, we pound through 2 gallons of milk a week, no problem.
The food that has me searching for the latest “sell by” date is usually produce. For some reason, salad mixes never last as long as their sell by. I will always look for the latest date on the shelf for those.
I buy the one with the ‘best by’ date furthest out because it will be the freshest. It is immoral to encourage the sale of inferior products for the same price as the best available.
I don’t care. Everything is good for weeks, months or years after the best by date. I actually prefer to buy the oldest milk, because I like it when mine clabbers before I finish it.
It’s not a moral issue. Consumers are the bottom feeders, and are forced to play by rules that are made unilaterally and non-negotiably by the owners of capital. If their imposed rules say you can search through the stock for the freshest product, then you can search through the stock for the freshest product.
The moral aspect, in my view, isn’t so much what will happen to other customers, but what will happen to the milk. If, in the next few days, there are still some cartons of milk that expires on the 15th, the merchant will end up throwing them away.
That doesn’t just mean it’s old, it means it’s unpasteurized, and can carry dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. That’s what you like?
I don’t think I’ve ever checked a “best before” date in my life ; except when the item was explicitly on sale for being on or close to its due date. Which in most cases I still buy because, hey, savings. In 99% of cases, the “best before” date is ridiculously pessimistic, anyway ; and any food poisoning has a lot more to do with “how long did it sat open in the fridge” than “how long was it airtight-sealed in a supermarket freezer”.
I’ll grab what I perceive to be the freshest available. Morality isn’t an issue - as a consumer, I want what I think is the best available to me at the price. I know there are people who grab what’s in front - my husband used to do that. I know our milk is usually just fine up to 2 weeks after the sell-by date, but why not get the advantage of extra time?
Yesterday, I broke out the breadmaker for the first time in ages. I found the yeast in the back of the fridge - its Best By date was 5 years ago. It still worked - the bread was delicious. So I’m not tossing stuff out of my stash based on the date, but I will make purchases accordingly.
Most grocery stores will have a shelf for items that are nearing their best-before dates, and sold at a discount. Someone will buy them and use them right away. It doesn’t matter if you buy the freshest milk, the older stuff won’t go to waste.
I don’t usually check the best before date, on the assumption that if it’s on the normal shelf it’s good.
I’ll use the milk up anyway before any of those dates. If I was buying something I use more rarely, I’d pick the later date. No reason I should pay for it and then throw it out.
I buy milk by the gallon because I drink a lot of it; I always buy the date with the longest lead time. IF the store discounted the price for a short term use by date I’d probably buy it. But they don’t so I don’t either.
I drink soy milk, so I wouldn’t bother looking at the date.
If I’m buying cow milk for a recipe, I buy a pint/quart for the recipe and don’t bother looking since I’ll be using it in a few minutes/hours and pouring out any excess.
I wasn’t being serious about that but there really isn’t a difference between charging more for old milk or charging the same as new milk for the old. It’s not a question of morality though, but the store has no reasonable expectation that people will take the older product at the the same price as the freshest. If there’s any great benefit to the store or to society they can drop the price on the milk as days go by. There’s enough poverty and plain old cheap bastards in this world that they’ll cut heavily into loss from spoilage, if that exists at all, which I kind of doubt.
Milk clabbers because of perfectly harmless lactococci, not pathogenic bacteria. Pasteurized milk will clabber, too, it just takes longer because it doesn’t start until the smaller number of natural colonies in it grow or it catches a lactobacillus from the air when you have it open.
