Over the years this subjects become a bit of a pet peeve with me. There is a common and ongoing misconception, bordering on stigma, about what an expiration date is. A frustratingly large number of people seem to believe that the Dept of Health, FDA and food industry in general has some magic crystal ball that can determine exactly when a product is no longer fit to eat and they stamp that date by law on every container every package and every jar of product you might see in your local grocery store.
Actual fact of the matter is that in the old old old days in order to avoid product wastes stores vendors and restaurants continued to sell product for years that they had on hand.
And since many products do spoil on the Shelf after a number of years the FDA and the like had to draw the line somewhere, it created expiration dates on products as a guideline after which the product cannot be sold. These dates also take into account the probability that a product might sit on a persons shelf or store restaurants shelf for a certain amount of time as well.
It's a guideline. It's a guess. It has nothing to do with when that product actually expires, because nobody can know that due to the fact that when a product goes bad depends on too many other factors that are beyond the manufacturers control. For example I have purchased milk that was already sour one week before its expiration date. Why? Because it was obviously mishandled--it probably sat in a crate on the dock for 4 hours before being loaded into the fridge.
My advice is, pay attention to the expiration date when you're standing in front of a shelf, ready to purchase product--you may as well get the freshest product you can.
But since you have no idea how that product was handled prior to your purchase, pay no attention to the expiration date once it's sitting in your pantry or in your frigerator.
Pay attention to the product itself. Its look it's smell its texture its taste.
If it seems to be bad dump it--if it doesn't seem to be bad keep it. If you start dumping good product because the expiration dates gone by you're not being safe, because there's no basis for that...you're just cheating yourself.
There you have it, my two cents worth.
