The Date That Means Nothing

It's Monday, March twenty third, and welcome to HigherIQ. When was the last time you threw out food because of the date on the package? And what if that date was basically made up? There is exactly one food product in the United States that is required by federal law to carry an expiration date. One. Infant formula. Everything else, every "sell by" on your milk, every "best before" on your yogurt, every "use by" on your deli meat, is voluntary. There is no federal regulation telling manufacturers what date to print, how to calculate it, or what the words next to it should mean. The dates on your food are, in the most literal sense, suggestions. And yet ninety percent of Americans throw out food based on those suggestions. According to a joint study by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School, confusion over date labels is one of the leading drivers of food waste in the country. The USDA estimates that Americans waste somewhere between thirty and forty percent of the food supply every year. That translates to roughly a hundred and sixty billion pounds of food, making food waste the single largest component of solid waste in American landfills. For a family of four, the math works out to something like fifteen hundred dollars a year in groceries that go straight from the fridge to the trash. The problem starts with language. "Sell by" was never meant for consumers at all. It's a stock rotation tool for retailers, telling them when to pull a product from the shelf to ensure it still has reasonable life left after someone buys it. "Best before" or "best if used by" is a quality indicator. The manufacturer is saying this is when the product tastes best, not when it becomes dangerous. "Use by" is the closest thing to a safety warning, but even that phrase has no standardized legal definition at the federal level. Manufacturers pick their own dates using their own methods. Two brands of the same product sitting on the same shelf can have completely different dates, calculated completely differently, meaning completely different things. It gets worse. Each state enforces its own rules. Eggs sold in California have to carry a "sell by" date. Eggs in Arizona require an "expiration" date. Some states ban the sale of food past certain dates. Others don't. Some states require dates on dairy. Others leave it entirely to the manufacturer. A Harvard Law analysis found over fifty different date labeling terms in use across the country. The result is a patchwork that confuses consumers, confuses retailers, and doesn't actually protect anyone. So how did we end up here? For most of human history, food dates didn't exist because they didn't need to. If you lived near a farm or kept your own animals, you knew when the food was produced because you watched it happen. The disconnect came in the mid twentieth century, when Americans moved to cities and suburbs and lost direct contact with where their food came from. By the 1970s, the processed food boom had put thousands of new products on grocery shelves, and consumers wanted some kind of assurance that what they were buying was fresh. Manufacturers responded by printing dates, but nobody, not the FDA, not the USDA, not Congress, told them how to do it or what the words should mean. The system we live with today was built by default, not by design. The most popular origin story for expiration dates involves Al Capone. Yes, that Al Capone. According to his grandniece, Deirdre Marie Capone, the gangster got into the dairy business in the early 1930s after a family member got sick from drinking milk that had gone bad. Capone's outfit bought Meadowmoor Dairies in Chicago in 1932. His brother Ralph, who earned the nickname "Bottles" from the milk business rather than bootlegging, reportedly lobbied the state legislature in Springfield to require bottling dates on milk so consumers could judge freshness for themselves. Fair warning: Snopes has rated the Capone story "unproven." There's no government record confirming the lobbying, and most food labeling legislation came decades after his death. But the Capones genuinely owned Meadowmoor Dairies, Ralph really was nicknamed "Bottles," and the Chicago milk industry in the 1930s was genuinely unregulated. Whether or not Capone personally pushed for dates on milk, the timeline is real. The idea that consumers should be able to see when their food was produced didn't become mainstream until the 1970s, and it never got standardized. The UK solved this problem years ago. British food law requires only two types of date labels. "Use by" means safety. It is illegal for retailers to sell food past its "use by" date, and the Food Standards Agency advises consumers never to eat food after that date, even if it looks and smells fine. "Best before" means quality. Food is safe to eat after its "best before" date, it just might not taste as good. Retailers can legally sell food past its "best before" date. The UK explicitly recommends against "sell by" and "display until" dates on consumer-facing packaging. Two labels, clearly defined, legally enforced. That's it. The US has been trying to get there. The Food Date Labeling Act was first introduced in Congress in 2021. It's been reintroduced in every session since, most recently in July 2025 with bipartisan sponsors. The bill would create a dual label system similar to the UK's: "best if used by" for quality and a separate phrase for safety. It would eliminate the patchwork of state laws, allow food to be sold or donated past its quality date, and fund consumer education. Over thirty major food companies, including Walmart, Amazon, and Unilever, signed an open letter in February 2026 supporting the bill. It has bipartisan sponsors in both chambers. And it still hasn't passed. Meanwhile, your nose already knows what the label can't tell you. Date labels are a manufacturer's guess about peak quality under ideal storage conditions. But your fridge temperature, how long the milk sat on the counter after breakfast, whether the package was sealed properly, all of those variables matter more than the printed date. The NRDC recommends the sniff test for dairy, the visual check for bread, and the taste test for most dry goods. If it smells fine, looks fine, and tastes fine, it almost certainly is fine. The printed date is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. The cost of getting this wrong runs in both directions. Throw out food too early and you waste money, resources, and the roughly twenty percent of freshwater used to produce food that never gets eaten. Food waste in landfills produces methane as it decomposes, and the EPA estimates that landfill food waste accounts for fifty eight percent of total landfill methane emissions, equivalent to the annual output of fifteen coal-fired power plants. Ignore actual safety signals and you risk genuine foodborne illness, which the CDC estimates affects forty eight million Americans a year. There's a less obvious cost too. Date label confusion discourages food donations. Grocery stores and food banks often won't distribute food past its printed date, even when the date refers to quality rather than safety. The Food Date Labeling Act would explicitly allow food to be sold or donated after its quality date, which alone could redirect millions of pounds of perfectly edible food toward the forty four million Americans who experience food insecurity. The current system, with its fifty different phrases and zero federal standards, doesn't help anyone navigate the tradeoff between waste and safety. It just creates an illusion of precision where none exists. A date printed in a factory, weeks or months before the food reaches your kitchen, under assumptions about storage conditions that may have nothing to do with your fridge, is not science. It's a guess. And we've built an entire system of consumer behavior around trusting it. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. There is no federal expiration date law in the US outside of infant formula. "Sell by" is for retailers, not you. "Best before" is about taste, not safety. The dates are set by manufacturers with no government oversight and no consistent methodology. A hundred and sixty billion pounds of food goes to waste every year, and date label confusion is one of the biggest reasons. Congress has a fix sitting on the table with corporate backing from both sides of the aisle, and it's been sitting there since 2021. In the meantime, trust your nose. It's been working longer than any label. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.