Treating Expiration Dates as Hard Deadlines
Picture this: you’re about to use some milk for your coffee, but you spot that it’s one day past its “sell by” date. Without even opening the carton, you pour it down the drain. More than 80 percent of Americans discard perfectly good, consumable food simply because they misunderstand expiration labels. Labels like “sell by”, “use by”, “expires on”, “best before” or “best by” are confusing to people — and in an effort to not risk the potential of a foodborne illness, they’ll toss it in the garbage. The truth is, the dates applied to food are for quality and not for safety. Food products are safe to consume past the date on the label, and regardless of the date, consumers should evaluate the quality of the food product prior to its consumption.
Here’s what might shock you: Many Americans wrongly believed that food product dates—often prefaced by “best by” or “sell by”—are federally regulated and indicate the point after which the food is no longer safe to eat. (Neither is true: labeling decisions are made voluntarily by food companies and are meant to help consumers determine how fresh a food is, according to the USDA.) As a result, 84% of people throw out food when it’s close to the package date at least occasionally, the researchers found. Your nose, eyes, and taste buds are actually far better judges of food safety than any arbitrary date on a package.
Buying In Bulk Without a Plan
Those warehouse stores can be tempting with their giant containers of everything from strawberries to pasta sauce. But here’s the rub: Sales on unusual products and promotions that encourage impulse and bulk food purchases at retail stores often lead consumers to purchase items that do not fit into their regular meal plans and, therefore, spoil before they can be used. When you’re shopping bulk, your brain often plays tricks on you, making you think you’ll magically consume twice as much yogurt just because you bought the super-sized container.
The reality is that buying in large quantities (e.g., buy one, get one free deals) only saves money if you use all the food before it spoils. Researchers have a few specific theories that could help explain pieces of the problem; for example, when shoppers buy food in bulk to save money they might overbuy, and when they switch to cheaper brands they might not like what they buy. That twenty-pound bag of apples might seem like a great deal, but if half of them end up brown and mushy in your crisper drawer, you’ve actually spent more money per apple than if you’d bought a smaller quantity.
Storing Produce in the Wrong Places
Your refrigerator isn’t a magical food preservation chamber where everything stays fresh longer. In fact, many fruits and vegetables actually deteriorate faster when stored incorrectly. Take tomatoes, for instance—they should never go in the fridge unless they’re already cut open. The cold breaks down their cell walls, turning them into mushy, flavorless disappointments. Same goes for potatoes, which develop an unpleasant sweet taste when refrigerated.
The problem is that most people treat their crisper drawers like a general dumping ground for anything green. But those drawers have humidity controls for a reason. Properly store fruits and vegetables for maximum freshness; they’ll taste better and last longer, helping you to eat more of them before they go bad. Leafy greens need high humidity, while fruits like apples prefer lower humidity. When you mix everything together, you create the perfect storm for accelerated spoilage.
Shopping Without a List or Meal Plan
Walking into a grocery store without a plan is like going to a casino with your rent money. You might get lucky, but odds are you’ll make some regrettable decisions. Without meal plans and shopping lists, consumers often make inaccurate estimates of what and how many ingredients they will use during the week. Unplanned restaurant meals or food delivery can also lead to food at home going bad before it can be used. That impulse buy of fresh herbs might seem like a good idea until you realize you have no use for a entire bunch of cilantro.
The statistics are pretty damning when it comes to poor planning. Consumer habits, such as overbuying, improper storage, and discarding leftovers, play a significant role in food waste. Lack of meal planning, impulse buying, and changing lifestyles can result in food being wasted at the household level. When you shop without a clear vision of what you’re actually going to cook, you end up with a refrigerator full of random ingredients that never quite come together into actual meals.
Ignoring Your Leftovers
There’s something about leftovers that makes them invisible to the human eye. You carefully pack them in containers, store them in the fridge, and then somehow completely forget they exist until they’ve transformed into science experiments. You should generally throw out leftovers after about four days. “Spoilage bacteria does grow in the refrigerator,” she says, so even properly stored leftovers won’t last forever. But most leftovers never even make it to the four-day mark—they get pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten.
The psychology behind leftover neglect is fascinating. We often view leftovers as somehow less appealing than fresh food, even when they’re exactly the same meal we enjoyed just yesterday. This mentality costs us dearly. Vegetables form 30% and fruits 15% of the household food waste. Leftovers account for 13%, bread, and bakery products for 9%, dairy, and eggs for 7%, meat, fish, and poultry for 6%, and other food items, such as crisps, snacks, and desserts, for 20% of household food waste.
Preparing Too Much Food
Your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and unfortunately, they’re also bigger than your family’s collective appetite. Many home cooks consistently overestimate how much food their household will actually consume. This isn’t just about cooking too much pasta—it’s about a fundamental disconnect between our perception of hunger and the reality of our eating habits.
The restaurant industry has figured this out through careful portion control and menu engineering, but at home, we’re flying blind. We cook like we’re feeding a small army, then wonder why we’re constantly throwing away food. Kitchen food prep impacts food waste. If ingredients aren’t prepared before they spoil, or if too much food is prepared, it spoils and is unsold. The key is learning to cook for the people you actually have, not the crowd you imagine might show up.
First In, Last Out Storage
Most people organize their food storage like a game of Tetris—wherever something fits, that’s where it goes. But this creates a system where older items get buried behind newer ones, creating a perfect recipe for waste. Practice the “first in, first out” rule by organising your fridge and pantry. Professional kitchens have been using this principle for decades because it actually works.
When you don’t rotate your stock, you end up with archaeological layers of food in your pantry. That can of tomatoes from 2022 gets pushed further back each time you add new groceries. Meanwhile, you keep buying more tomatoes because you can’t see what you already have. It’s like having a black hole in your kitchen that swallows both food and money.
Throwing Away Perfectly Good “Imperfect” Produce
We’ve been conditioned to expect our fruits and vegetables to look like they’ve been airbrushed for a magazine cover. That apple with a small blemish? Straight to the trash. The carrot that’s slightly bent? Not making it to the shopping cart. About 750,000 tonnes of potatoes are wasted annually, often due to overbuying, spoilage, or aesthetic imperfections. This obsession with produce perfection is costing us enormous amounts of food.
Here’s what’s ridiculous: Imperfect produce may have physical imperfections but is just as safe and nutritious and can sometimes be found at discounted prices. A bruised banana is actually perfect for banana bread. A slightly wrinkled pepper still has all its flavor and nutrients. We’re essentially throwing away food because it doesn’t meet our unrealistic beauty standards.
Misunderstanding Food Safety
Food safety is important, but many people take it to paranoid extremes that result in massive waste. Food waste occurs when we trust expiration dates and distrust our bodily powers of deduction. In The Food Shift Kitchen, instead of blindly adhering to expiration dates, we engage our senses to check freshness, assessing appearance, smell, feel, and taste. Your ancestors survived for thousands of years without expiration dates by using their senses to determine food safety.
The irony is that this overly cautious approach to food safety actually makes us less safe with food. When we rely entirely on dates and ignore our senses, we lose the ability to actually assess food quality. Use your senses when judging if food has gone bad. You will know when food has started to spoil by the unpleasant odor, flavor or texture from bacteria. Always look for signs of spoilage before eating food that’s beyond the quality date listed on the packaging.
Forgetting About Frozen Food
Your freezer is like a time machine for food, but most people treat it like a food graveyard. Items go in and never come out, eventually succumbing to freezer burn or simply being forgotten entirely. Freezing excess food, like meat and bread, is a great way to cut down on waste. If you know you likely won’t use all of something, freeze it sooner rather than later, Goodwin recommends. The key word here is “sooner”—don’t wait until food is on the verge of spoiling.
Anything that’s frozen will not spoil, no matter when you freeze it. But “the longer you wait to freeze an item, the less the freshness and quality will be” when you defrost it. Frozen food should stay safe indefinitely, but its quality may degrade over time. Yet most people only think about freezing as a last resort, when they should be thinking about it as a first line of defense against food waste.
