Food Expiration Dates

This is a recent story that I've seen run by several news outlets on food expiration dates:
http://www.today.com/news/confusing-sell-dates-food-may-be-costing-you-money-8C11339499

The bottom line is that most dates stamped on packages are just a guess of when products will be at their highest quality.  Most can be used far beyond the recommended date stamped on the package.  There are three exceptions to this.  Meat, dairy and formula have expiration dates that should be observed (they will say "exp." on the label).  Otherwise, in some cases, the products will be good for years beyond the "best by" or "sell by" dates.

A quote: "Broad Leib (lead author of the study from Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic) said food can be totally safe well past the date, from cereal to salad dressing, even eggs. She said "use by" or "sell by" dates on a product have "nothing to do with safety at all. It's just a manufacturer's best guess of when that food is going to be the freshest and at the best quality."

Another quote:  "According to countless food safety experts, the National Food Lab, there's not been a single instance of food-borne illness or food poisoning linked with people eating food after that date," Broad Leib said."

Finding Storage Items in your Current Menu

 

Ed and Myrna wanted to start working on their three-month supply.  They understood the basic concepts, but it just didn't seem like the food they ate could be stored easily.  They liked fresh green salads for dinner and fruit for breakfast.  They wanted to continue to eat this way, but were concerned that they couldn't store these foods. 

A challenge?  Yes!  But I haven't met a menu yet that didn't have options for easily-stored items once you broke it down.  A common misconception is that in order to rotate through storage items, you have to eat only the meals you have planned for in your storage.  This is definitely not the case!  You should eat normally and incorporate storage items into your diet as you would typically.  Your three-month supply plan does not become your new menu. 

Here are some examples from Ed and Myrna's situation:  Ed and Myrna are elderly with grandchildren that live locally.  For breakfast, they typically eat granola with fresh fruit and yogurt.  Once a week, their grandchildren come for breakfast and they share pancakes.  Ed and Myrna can store pancake mix, syrup, and granola in their breakfast plan.  They can store several gallons of milk in their freezer.  If the need arose for them to use their three-month supply, they would just continue eating granola and pancakes, both of which are part of their regular daily diet.  Ed regularly makes a great cobbler cake that calls for canned fruit so they store a little extra of that canned fruit to be used for breakfast fruit.  Even if Ed only makes that cake infrequently, they will be able to rotate through their supply of canned fruit before the cans reach their expiration dates.  They would prefer the fresh fruit, but if it isn't available, they'll have a rotatable option.  The pancake mix, granola, canned fruit, and syrup are all part of their regular diet and will be used and rotated before expiration dates.

For lunch, they like to have sandwiches.  They mostly use store-purchased bread and wraps.  Loaves of bread, tortillas and pita bread can easily be stored in their freezer.  Lettuce and tomatoes are not storage friendly and there really isn't a good alternative.  But both Ed & Myrna would be okay with cheese and meat.  Lunch meat and pre-sliced cheese can also be frozen and rotated.  Besides the frozen deli meat, they also keep canned chicken and tuna fish, which are types of sandwiches they sometimes have.  Myrna likes to bake, so they also store flour, sugar, salt, and yeast that can be make into bread or wraps.  They also store mayo, mustard, fruit juice, bags of chips and jars of pickles (all of which they already eat). 

As I mentioned earlier, they like to eat salads for dinner.  Storing salad greens is not an option.  A garden would provide some fresh greens, but they'll have to think beyond the salads.  Sometimes Ed & Myrna have soup and bread sticks with their salads.  Other nights they'll slice several breasts of chicken onto their salads.  On Sundays they usually have something different.  They'll eat a roast and potatoes, chicken burritos, or crock-pot chicken.  Their three-month supply dinner menu could include soups, chicken breasts, as well as their Sunday-evening rotations.  That would means storing chicken (frozen or canned), roasts (frozen or canned), soup supplies including beans and broth, spices, tortillas and salsa.  They can also store canned and frozen vegetables as well as salad garnishes like croutons.  In a situation where it is necessary to eat from their three-month supply, they might not be eating salads every night, but they will have food stored that they already regularly eat.  By incorporating these meals into their normal menu occasionally (like they were anyway), they'll be able to rotate through their food before hitting expiration dates.

Of course, one of the most important and easiest-to-store items is a cookie mix or ingredients to make cookies.  Ed stores these items as well as the supplies for his often-made cobbler cake. 

Ed & Myrna are actually fictional, but represent some of the typical issues that I've encountered.  Many of your personal menus are already very storage friendly.  Items like cereal, peanut butter & jelly, taco soup, burritos, pasta dishes (spaghetti, mac & cheese, alfredo), beans and rice, and chicken salad are items from my own menu rotations that are also extraordinarily easy to store.  If you think your menu can't be adapted, you might be surprised.  Ed & Myrna were.  :o)

Iron Chef: Food-Storage Style

Do you ever buy a food storage item for your family only to find out that it is a complete "miss" and no one will even touch it?  This happened to me this year.  I purchased 5 boxes of Kix cereal on a great sale.  Those boxes have been sitting down on our cereal shelf for almost a year now.  I brought a box upstairs in hopes that someone would open it and give it a try.  I even rearranged my cereal shelves so that all of the boxes of Kix were highly visible right at the front.  But no bites (literally)!

So, for a recent Family Home Evening I decided to ensure that the Kix cereal got used.  I was in charge of the activity and planned an Iron Chef Competition:  Food-Storage Style!

If you've never seen an Iron Chef competition, the gist is that two teams (chefs) are given a "secret" (previously unknown) ingredient and then have one hour to create unique foods which are then judged.  The winning team is determined by which receives the most total points in three categories:  plating, originality, and taste.  Each judge can award up to 5 points for plating and originality and 10 points for taste, for a total of 20 points which are then added together.

We broadened the time limit and then talked our good-sport neighbors, who I'm pretty sure thought we were crazy, into being our judges.  Of course, our secret ingredient was Kix cereal.  Dad's team created a Kix-Brownie by replacing most of the flour with crushed Kix. They dusted them with powdered sugar and drizzled with a chocolate sauce. My team created a chilled peach pie with a Kix cobbler-crust. We added a sprinkle of toasted crumbled crust on top. Sorry, I forgot to take pictures.

After we created our concoctions, we delivered the treats and judging slips.  We sampled each-other's dishes while waiting for the results.  After a few minutes, our neighbors returned the totaled judging sheets.  The winner?  Chilled Peach Pie!  Who knew that the neighbor-dad didn't like brownies?  His super-low ratings for the brownies threw the game to the peach pie by just 3 points.

Unfortunately we only used one box instead of all four like I hoped.  So, I'll likely donate the remaining boxes to the food bank.   Even if you only use a bit of your unused storage, having an Iron Chef competition is a fun way to help you rotate through some of your own less-used food storage items. 

I'd love to hear about your competition if you try it!

Food Storage Tags

You may remember this previous post, Labeling Long-Term Storage, from back in 2009 where Stephanie shared her idea of making tags to help with locating, rotating and replacing her food storage.  Well, I've had two-year intentions of doing the same thing, but have never gotten around to it.  Just this past Christmas, my wonderful parents-in-law gave me a new fun laminator and I've been itching to use it for this project since then. 

I made my tags using a different color of cardstock for each food storage product that I keep in buckets.  Actually there isn't much rhyme or reason to the colors.  I just used the colors that I had on hand.  In the picture below, you might notice that the brighter colors are easier to see and read so I would recommend that you use bright colors instead of dull or dark colors. 

I figured out how many tags of each that I needed.  For example, I knew that I wanted to always keep four buckets of flour on hand, so I used my word processor to print four "flour" labels.  I repeated this process for each of the items I keep in buckets: wheat, sugar, powdered sugar, brown sugar, rice, oats, and beans.  I laminated my tags for durability, but this isn't necessary.  Then I hole punched the side and tied each onto the bucket handles with some white yarn.  I made more than 40 tags.  It took about two hours from start to finish (but most of that time was spent doing second and third runs through my laminator in order to fully seal the tags - I'm sure you could do it in a fraction of that time).  I love the result!  It is so easy to figure out what is in each bucket now.

Recently I ran out of flour.  So I ran down into my storage area, grabbed a bucket of flour (which was so easy to find because of the easy-to-see tags) and emptied the previously-stored flour into my upstairs bucket.  I actually left the tag on the empty bucket and let it remind me that I needed to buy some more flour to replace the now-empty bucket.  I could also untie the tag and slip it into my purse or tie it to a shelf as a reminder that I need to replace that flour.  When I refilled the bucket with flour, I flipped the tag over and wrote 2011 on the back with a black permanent marker so that I would know the age of the newly purchased flour.

Here are a few other ideas and tips that you could use for labeling your food storage:

*Use different colored ribbons for each different food (i.e red for red wheat; black for black beans; pink for pinto beans; tan for oatmeal; white for rice; etc.).
*Use a different colors of  ribbon/yarn to indicate the purchase date.
*Use different colors of permanent markers to differentiate between foods and/or dates.
*Wrapping ribbon and index cards would work just fine.
*Magnetic labels could be used with #10 cans or steel shelves.
*Instead of tying a ribbon to foil pouches or #10 cans (that don't have a handle like a bucket or a neck like the PETE bottles), just tie a tag to the shelves or adhere a label with a small piece of ribbon directly to the product.
*Label two sides and the top of each container for more visibility.
*Use cup-holder screws to hang labels (of items needing to be replaced).
*These tags would be a great idea for a cheap, but love-filled gift.


I would love to hear your ideas!