USDA: Eat foods up to 18 months past the expiration date

The US Department of Agriculture is advising Americans to consider eating foods up to 18 months past the expiration date.  Yesterday, the USDA announced that the average American wastes 36 pounds of food per month..! From the Washington Examiner:

The Agriculture Department has determined that 36 pounds of food per person is wasted every month, about 21 percent of the available food in the United States. And one big reason: those expiration dates are wrong or overly cautious.

The solution. Hold your nose and just eat it. Even if it is 18 months past the expiration date.

It sounds yucky, but officials think they’ve got the trick to get moms to feed expired but safe food to kids and adults alike — they’ve even got an app. It’s called FoodKeeper and it is supposed to have a more accurate calculation of food expiration dates, even for baby food and eggs.

The FoodKeeper app sounds like it does the same thing as one of my favorite websites, www.StillTasty.com, and especially in the cases of canned and frozen foods, things are good beyond the dates.  (Now, I’m not talking about things like that expired food at Dominick’s madness a few years ago where the food on the shelves was already years old..!)

Do you really believe the average person is throwing away 36 POUNDS of food a month? That’s more than one pound of food per person per DAY hitting the trash? I find that very difficult to believe. We’re big leftover-eaters or repurposers over here (last night’s whole chicken becomes tomorrow’s chicken soup, and so on.) There’s simply no way the Cataldo household is throwing out 180 pounds of food on a monthly basis!