End of The Sell-By Date

“Under Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) plans, the terms "sell by" and "display until" will be phased out. These are only relevant to the shops for stock control and can be confusing to customers. Instead, packaging will only carry one of two phrases - "use by" or "best before".

Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State for the Environment said: "We want to tackle the confusion around food labelling that contributes to the amount of good food that gets wasted.

"We want to simplify this so that you can see when a food should be 'used by' for food safety reasons - if it's perishable.

"Then we want 'best before' as an alternative for foods that simply deteriorate in quality."

The changes aim to reduce the amount of food thrown away unnecessarily. According to the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), households in the UK throw away 8.3m tons of food and drink every year - 60% of that could be avoided. The campaign has claimed families are wasting up to £50 every month throwing out food that is still in good condition and edible. Foods likely to require a "use-by" date include soft cheese, ready-prepared meals and smoked fish. However, items such as biscuits, jams, pickles, crisps and tinned food are likely only to require labels that read "best before".

Edited and Adapted from Sky News here.

Another example of the madness of the profits system. So for years this idea of 'sell by' has been used to push sales of food items and has encouraged the wastage highlighted by inferring that many foods are 'off' after the date stamped on them, when in fact they are perfectly okay to eat. Despite the patronising demeanour of government 'experts' telling us thing like this, we have worked it out ourselves what a scam it is. So why the sudden change? My money is on the idea that this is a ruse by the big supermarkets to end the 'reduce shelf' bargains that many of the poorest rely on in their weekly shops. With no dates stamped on goods, they can be left on shelves for longer at higher prices and increase the profits they make. The only real thing past its best is the system and its high time it got recycled into Socialism for the benefit of all!

SussexSocialist