Open your refrigerator and look at the yogurt. There is a date on the lid, and you have probably treated it for your whole adult life as an instruction from someone who knows something you do not.
Researchers have measured how far that assumption runs. A nationally representative survey of 1,029 American adults, published in the journal Waste Management in 2019 by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, found that 84 percent of consumers throw out food near the package date at least occasionally. More than a third believed the federal government regulates those dates. Another 26 percent were not sure.
It does not. With exactly one exception, no federal law requires a date on a food package at all, and the agency that inspects the nation’s meat, poultry and egg supply says plainly that those dates are not safety information.
What follows: what each phrase signals, how much food the confusion moves, why manufacturers handle their own leftovers nothing like you handle yours, and where judging food yourself is the wrong call.
Federal law requires a date on exactly one food
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, known as FSIS, publishes a page on food product dating. Two sentences on that page carry the whole subject.
The first: FSIS states that “Except for infant formula, product dating is not required by Federal regulations.” The second: FSIS states that “Except for infant formula, dates are not an indicator of the product’s safety …”
Read the exception, because it is the whole exception. The Food and Drug Administration requires a Use-By date on infant formula, and it works as a nutrition guarantee rather than a bacteria warning: formula must contain the nutrient quantities listed on the label up to that date, and after it the manufacturer no longer stands behind those amounts. FSIS says not to buy or use formula past it. Treat that one as binding.
Everything else carries a date because a manufacturer chose to put it there, or a state told it to, or a retailer asked. FSIS recommends that companies applying a date use the phrase Best if Used By, on the reasoning that it communicates quality rather than danger. That is advice to industry, not a rule.
One detail about the source, since this article leans on it heavily: the FSIS page shows no publication date and no last-updated date anywhere on it. The position is clear, but you cannot tell when it was last reviewed.
What each phrase on the package signals
Four phrases turn up most often, and the useful way to sort them is by who each message is addressed to.
The one that was never written for you
Sell-By is a note to the store, telling a grocery manager how long to display the item so stock keeps rotating. FSIS calls it inventory management. You are not the intended reader, and milk with a Sell-By date of the 14th is the same milk on the 15th.
The two about quality
Best if used by is the manufacturer’s estimate of when its product still tastes and performs as intended. Crackers go soft. Oil goes stale. FSIS is explicit that it is neither a purchase date nor a safety date.
Use-By sounds stricter and usually is not. On almost every product carrying it, it marks the last day the manufacturer vouches for peak quality. On infant formula, and only there, it is a real deadline.
The one that is an instruction, not a deadline
Freeze-By tells you when to freeze something if you want it to come out well. Miss it and the food is not unsafe, just a slightly worse version of itself after thawing.
Three of the four phrases describe flavor and texture. One is a federal requirement, on one product, for a reason about nutrient content rather than contamination. That is the entire system.
Where the 66 million tons comes from, and where it goes
The best current federal measurement is EPA’s 2019 Wasted Food Report, published in April 2023 as document EPA 530-R-23-005. Its data year is 2019.
Across food retail, food service and residential sources, the report counts 66.2 million tons of wasted food in a single year. Households account for 40.0 percent, food service for 40.4 percent, and food retail for the remaining 19.6 percent.
Where it ends up matters more than how much was generated. Of that 66.2 million tons, 59.84 percent went to landfill. Controlled combustion took 14.57 percent, donation 7.76 percent, composting 4.99 percent, and anaerobic digestion, the breakdown of organic material in a sealed vessel to make gas and a soil amendment, just 0.81 percent.
One caution about comparing numbers across EPA documents, because this subject is full of figures that look comparable and are not. EPA separates wasted food, its umbrella term for food that missed its intended purpose and may have been donated, fed to animals, digested or discarded, from food waste, the narrower idea of food thrown out or recycled. Municipal waste accounting measures one thing and the wasted food reports measure another across more pathways, so numbers built on different accountings cannot be lined up as a trend.
EPA’s basics page tells a narrower version of the same story from 2018 municipal waste data: food was 24 percent of what went to landfill and 22 percent of what was combusted with energy recovery, more than any other single material in ordinary trash.
Manufacturers send 2 percent to a landfill, and households and restaurants send 60
This is the most revealing comparison in the federal data, and almost nobody reports it.
The same EPA report counts a second, separate stream. Food manufacturing and processing generated 40.05 million tons of residuals in 2019, roughly three fifths of the retail, food service and household figure.
Look at what happened to it. Anaerobic digestion handled 42.58 percent. Animal feed took 34.23 percent. Land application, meaning spreading material on fields, took 12.94 percent. Donation took 5.51 percent. Landfill took 2.29 percent.
Two sectors, one country, the same year. One sends roughly six tons in ten to a hole in the ground. The other sends two in a hundred.
The reason is logistics rather than virtue, and the mechanism is what makes the comparison useful rather than scolding.
A food plant produces one kind of residual, in one place, in predictable quantity, every day. Whey from a cheese operation is whey. That material is uniform, free of napkins and coffee grounds, and generated at a volume where a digester, a feed buyer or a tanker route pencils out. A plant manager can sign a contract for it.
Your kitchen produces half a cup of mixed material a day, at unpredictable times, blended with things no digester will take, at the end of a driveway rather than a loading dock. There is no contract to sign. The collection economics that make industrial diversion routine do not exist at household scale, which is why the household answer has to be prevention rather than disposal.
What works in a kitchen
EPA’s household guidance and the postharvest research out of the University of California converge, and the useful order is the order you would act in.
Before you shop. Look in the refrigerator first and build the week around what is there and closest to turning. Count the meals you will genuinely eat at home, which for most households is fewer than they plan for. EPA puts the bulk-buying point bluntly: a bulk deal only saves money if you finish it.
When you put things away. The biggest and least known gains sit here, and they come down to one invisible gas.
Ripening fruit releases ethylene, a plant hormone that tells neighboring produce to ripen and then to rot. Apples, bananas, pears, stone fruits and avocados are strong emitters. Put them beside lettuce or broccoli and you are running an accelerated aging program on your vegetables. EPA’s guidance is to keep ethylene producers away from other produce, and the University of California’s postharvest guide, written by Adel Kader, Jim Thompson, Kathi Sylva and Linda Harris, goes further: separate drawers, one for fruit and one for vegetables.
That guide also corrects a bigger mistake. A large share of produce does not belong in a refrigerator at all. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, basil, melons and winter squash hold up better at room temperature, potatoes, onions and garlic want a cool dark ventilated spot, and stone fruits, pears and avocados ripen on the counter before they go in. Chilling the wrong item does not extend its life, it damages it, which is why a refrigerated tomato tastes like nothing. One more fix is free: do not wash berries or grapes until you are about to eat them, because surface moisture is what mold needs.
When something is about to turn. The freezer is a pause button, and a more absolute one than most people realize. FoodSafety.gov, the federal consumer food safety site, states that food held continuously at 0 degrees Fahrenheit or below stays safe indefinitely. The published frozen times are quality windows rather than safety ones: raw ground meat holds quality for 3 to 4 months, whole chicken for about a year, cooked leftovers for 2 to 6 months.
The refrigerator numbers are the safety ones, and they are shorter than people assume. FSIS puts cooked leftovers at 3 to 4 days, opened deli-sliced luncheon meat at 3 to 5 days, raw ground meat at 1 to 2 days. Get food cold within two hours of cooking, or one hour above 90 degrees, and split large batches into shallow containers so the middle chills.
Four questions before something goes in the bin
- Is this a quality problem or a safety problem? A limp carrot, stale bread and a dull apple are quality problems with obvious uses.
- Could the freezer buy time instead? Bread, sliced fruit, cooked portions and most meat freeze without ceremony.
- Is it a high-risk food, and how long has it been open? Deli meat, soft cheese and cooked rice get days, not weeks.
- Is this something that should not be judged by eye at all? The next section is that list.
Where judging food yourself stops working
The date-label correction is real and it has a hard edge. The fact that a printed date is not a safety date does not mean you can judge anything by smell, and three categories prove it.
Infant formula. Stated again because it is the one place the printed date governs. Past the Use-By date, the nutrient content is no longer guaranteed. This is not a judgment call.
Visible mold, in the wrong food. FSIS splits foods in two, and the split is about moisture rather than appearance. Where the food is dense and dry, mold stays near the surface: hard cheese and firm vegetables such as cabbage and carrots can be rescued by cutting at least an inch around and below the spot without letting the knife pass through the mold, and hard salami and dry-cured country ham carry surface mold normally and can be scrubbed.
Where the food holds moisture, what you see is not the extent of it. FSIS says discard rather than trim across that whole group: lunch meats and hot dogs, cooked meat and anything made from it, soft and shredded cheeses, yogurt, jams, soft produce, bread, and nut butters made without preservatives. Some molds produce mycotoxins, which are poisons rather than merely unpleasant, and FSIS advises against sniffing a moldy item because inhaled spores irritate the airway.
Anything where the hazard has no smell. This is the sharpest limit on sensory judgment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that botulinum toxin cannot be seen, smelled or tasted, and that even a small taste can kill. CDC’s instruction on canned and preserved food is to throw it out whenever there is doubt, which covers home-canned goods of unknown provenance and any container, bought or homemade, that looks wrong.
When to get medical care. CDC lists diarrhea, stomach pain or cramps, nausea, vomiting and fever as the signs of food poisoning, and names four groups most likely to become seriously ill: adults 65 and older, children under 5, people with weakened immune systems, and pregnant women. If someone in one of those groups gets those symptoms after a questionable meal, call a clinician instead of waiting it out. Difficulty breathing or muscle weakness after eating preserved food is an emergency, not a stomach bug, because CDC links those signs to botulism. Call 911.
For ordinary questions about handling, cooking temperatures and storage, use the FSIS charts rather than improvising a household rule.
Donating food, and the law that changed in 2023
Fear of being sued stops a great deal of edible food from moving, and the fear is largely misplaced.
Federal law, at 42 U.S.C. 1791, is the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. It shields a donor from civil and criminal liability over the nature, age, packaging or condition of food given in good faith for distribution to people in need. The shield has one hole: it does not cover injury or death caused by gross negligence or intentional misconduct. The statute defines gross negligence narrowly, as voluntary and conscious conduct by someone who knew at the time it was likely to cause harm. Ordinary mistakes do not qualify.
The protection reaches further than most people assume, naming grocers, wholesalers, restaurants, farmers and hospitals, and covering gleaners along with the landowner who lets them on. The statute’s phrase for what can be given is apparently wholesome food, which includes food that meets quality and labeling standards even when nobody will buy it because of its looks, age, grade or sheer surplus.
Congress widened the shield on January 5, 2023. The amendments created a qualified direct donor, covering grocers, wholesalers, agricultural producers and processors, restaurants, caterers, school food authorities and colleges, and extended protection to food those donors hand straight to a person in need rather than routing it through a nonprofit. They also created a good Samaritan reduced price, capped at the cost of handling, processing, packaging and transport, so a below-cost transfer does not forfeit the shield.
A point of bookkeeping, since the popular name for this change is slightly wrong. The bills were titled the Food Donation Improvement Act. The law that passed is Public Law 117-362, which originated as S. 5329 and carries no short title at all; its official heading says only that it amends the Emerson Act. Search for a statute under the popular name and you will not find one.
The national goal, and the one change worth making
The United States has a published target. EPA and USDA announced it on September 16, 2015: cut food loss and waste in half by 2030. In September 2021 EPA reset the baseline to match United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Target 12.3, fixing 2016 as the start at 328 pounds of food waste per person per year, with 164 pounds as the target.
The measured trend runs the wrong way. EPA reports 335 pounds per person in 2018 and 349 in 2019, a six percent increase over the baseline rather than a cut. That page was last updated on December 4, 2025. A companion document, the National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics, is in limbo: EPA’s page for it, updated on June 25, 2026, says the strategy is under review to determine how it fits the current administration’s priorities.
The evidence that households can be moved is thinner than the attention the subject gets. Two randomized controlled trials have measured it directly. One, published in Circular Economy and Sustainability in 2022, tracked 47 treatment and 52 control households in Ontario and found a sustained 30 percent cut in avoidable food waste sent to landfill long after the intervention ended. The other, published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling in 2021 by researchers at Ohio State and Louisiana State, found a 79 percent cut in food wasted during meals and no measurable effect on total household waste once preparation and refrigerator clear-outs were counted. Both are small and short. Together they say targeted behavior change can work, and can also move the loss to a different step in the week.
Composting sits at the end of this article for the same reason it sits at the end of the sequence. It is the least bad way to dispose of food you already failed to eat, not a way of not wasting it. The energy, water, fertilizer and shipping behind a head of lettuce are gone the moment it hits the pile. Article 743 covers the waste hierarchy and why recycling and composting rank below prevention.
If you take one thing from this: the date on the package is a quality estimate written by the company that made the food, not a safety instruction from a regulator, and infant formula is the only exception. The expensive habit is buying for the week you imagined instead of the week you will have, then letting a printed number make a decision you could have made by opening the container and looking.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service. “Food Product Dating.” fsis.usda.gov
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service. “Leftovers and Food Safety.” fsis.usda.gov
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service. “Molds on Food: Are They Dangerous?.” fsis.usda.gov
- FoodSafety.gov (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). “Cold Food Storage Charts.” foodsafety.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “2019 Wasted Food Report, April 2023, EPA 530-R-23-005.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Sustainable Management of Food Basics.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “United States 2030 Food Loss and Waste Reduction Goal.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “How to Prevent Wasted Food at Home.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Food Donation Basics.” epa.gov
- Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. “42 U.S.C. 1791, Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act.” law.cornell.edu
- U.S. Government Publishing Office. “Public Law 117-362, An Act to amend the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, January 5, 2023.” govinfo.gov
- U.S. Government Publishing Office. “H.R. 6251, Food Donation Improvement Act of 2021, as introduced.” govinfo.gov
- University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “Storing Fresh Fruits and Vegetables for Better Taste, Publication 21590.” postharvest.ucdavis.edu
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “About Food Poisoning.” cdc.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Preventing Botulism.” cdc.gov
- PubMed. “Neff RA, Spiker M, Rice C, et al. "Misunderstood food date labels and reported food discards: A survey of U.S. consumer attitudes and behaviors." Waste Management, 2019. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.wasman.2019.01.023.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Everitt H, van der Werf P, Seabrook JA, Gilliland JA. "The Proof Is in the Pudding: Using a Randomized Controlled Trial to Evaluate the Long-Term Effectiveness of a Household Food Waste Reduction Intervention During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Circular Economy and Sustainability, 2022. PubMed. DOI: 10.1007/s43615-022-00193-7.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Roe BE, Qi D, Beyl RA, et al. "A Randomized Controlled Trial to Address Consumer Food Waste with a Technology-aided Tailored Sustainability Intervention." Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2021. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.resconrec.2021.106121.” doi.org