2023-11-10 12:14:19
The German Food Minister is campaigning at European level for expiry dates to no longer appear on products with a long shelf life.
Verena, 77, is shopping in a supermarket in western Berlin, not really paying attention to the dates written in very small print on the packaging. “Dates are useless. It’s an industry trick to sell more”assures the septuagenarian.
“In my time, there was none. What is not good, you can feel it! For fish, you can see it in the eyes, in the gills. If the jam or the bread is no longer good, it There’s mold. It’s a habit.”
Verana, 77 years oldat franceinfo
For Susana, mother of two young children, it is quite the opposite. “I do not consume any product whose date has passedshe says, not even a day. We are very careful. There are so many things that can make us sick. We throw away a lot because each time, we buy too much.”
Useless for rice, pasta, lentils, spices or even honey
Each German throws away on average 80 kilos of food per year. At European level, nearly 59 million tonnes of food go into the trash, which represents around 130 kilos per inhabitant. Partly avoidable waste, says the German Minister of Food, who is campaigning for the European Union to ban the mention of use-by dates on products that have a long shelf life.
Thomas Henle, professor of food chemistry at the Technical University of Dresden, confirms that for some products this date is not useful. “For foods that are very dry and contain little water, for example, rice, pasta or honey, we might remove it, he assures. As long as the packaging is closed, they can theoretically be stored without time limit. We discovered, for example, honey in amphorae from Antiquity which were thousands of years old, and this honey was in theory still edible.. Added to this inventory are lentils, tea or spices, which, stored airtight and protected from light and humidity, can be kept for many years.
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