I finally got around to reading the Slate.com food writer's article on expiration dates yesterday, after hearing her on NPR. Her findings confirm what I’ve long suspected, that expiration dates are mostly unregulated, highly variable and ridiculously conservative. We’ve got four half gallons of milk in the fridge right now that supposedly “expired” on Sunday. Our record is six days. Not because we‘ve lost our nerve after that point, or encountered stinky milk, but just because we‘ve usually drunk it up by then.
Our family goes through six gallons of milk a week. We should probably get a cow. But in the meantime, scoring short-dated milk is a high priority for us. The kids know to look for the orange stickers some supermarkets put on their most aged cartons. I paid only 65 cents each for the ones in the fridge.
Not everybody’s so desperate to unload old milk, though. At a general store in a village near here, I once found a gallon of milk six days its expiration date that had been marked down only 40 cents -- and because it started out higher to begin with, was only slightly lower than my target price of $2 a gallon. “Those dates don’t mean anything,” the store clerk said, nodding her head toward the back of the store. “He‘s drunk it 10 days past the date, and never had any trouble.” She didn‘t say who “he” was. For all I know, she was talking about her dog.
Nadia Arumugam, the Slate writer, makes a good point that “expiration bacteria” is much less harmful than “unclean” bacteria like e coli or salmonella. I’m still wondering, though, whether the “expiration bacteria” in pasteurized milk is the same as the “expiration bacteria” in raw milk. Can modern milk transform into other delicacies, or has it lost that capability? As the descendant of Swiss cheesemakers (though I believe what they made on my great-grandfather’s farm was more akin to cottage cheese), I intend to find out.
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