A single crossing of the road can kill you. A single car drive can kill you, hell you could go to sleep one night and never wake up for many many reasons.
You can't avoid things just because they could kill you.
You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses, and it doesn't really correlate with best before dates, cooked reheated rice is the main risk.
> You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses,
There's not "one" exception. You can't smell the toxin caused by bacillus cerius; you can't smell campylobacter; you can't smell listeria; you can't smell samonella; you can't smell e coli; you can't smell C. perfringens etc etc etc.
It's about the statistics, same reason we have seatbelts and helmet laws. If a less aggressive sell-by date means one in a million loaves of bread gets moldy, that might kill a handful of people a year. If nothing else, allowing people to die from preventable sales of expired food is bad politics.
Best before and sell by is a guarantee. Its the company saying this product will last until X date. Just like your car doesn't become unusable when the warranty runs out, neither does bread, especially when you make some attempt to store it properly, because best before dates are based on the opposite.
Each year about 3000 people in the US die from food poisoning. About 100,000 people are hospitalised, and some of them will have been caused permanent harm.
To add: even if we throw out a few hundred million dollars worth of food, that's more than a fair trade for a few thousand lives and 40x that in hospitalizations.
> Best before and sell by is a guarantee. Its the company saying this product will last until X date.
As I mention elsewhere in the thread, these dates do not have any legal meaning at all for the manufacturer. They do have meaning for the vendor (the grocery store), but that's not what people generally imagine is going on.
Even the phrasing "best before" explicitly doesn't guarantee anything; a manufacturer would be crazy to make such a guarantee.
A guarantee, as in we will stand behind this product until X date. You wouldn't necessarily expect to have no problems with a car in the warranty period, you would expect any problems that arise within the warranty period to be sorted.
I would expect bread consumed before the best before date not to be stale, if it was I would expect to be able to get my money back, I wouldn't expect the same after the best before.
> I would expect bread consumed before the best before date not to be stale, if it was I would expect to be able to get my money back, I wouldn't expect the same after the best before.
One problem with food is that there are too many variables about how it's stored after it leaves the store. For example, bread can go stale if it's not stored in an airtight container.
And that's why I use my own judgement when deciding if its ok to eat.
The best before probably takes into account the worst case and is set low accordingly. I go to the effort to store bread appropriately so that lower bound is no longer particularly relevant to me.
> The best before probably takes into account the worst case and is set low accordingly.
Absolutely not, if you think bread going stale is relevant to the expiration date. (Which it isn't.)
If you leave bread exposed to the air, it will go stale almost immediately, long before a one-week expiration period has elapsed. The expiration date is obsolete as soon as you open the product.
When you cross the road you look around, evaluate the risk, then cross. You don't close your eyes and hope, neither do you just never cross the road.
The same should apply to food, there have been multiple food poisoning cases in the US stemming from salad, so following best before labels isn't going to avoid all risk. The best option therefore is to evaluate risks for yourself. I don't blindly drink milk based on the date. If it stinks and is lumpy, I don't drink it, regardless of whether it's in date or not.
The Use By date is one method people canuse to evaluate the risk.
Your salad example doesn't support your point, it counters it. We can't smell food poisoning, so suggesting that people just sniff the food to see if it's safe to eat is, by your own example something that isn't going to work.
You keep saying "use common sense" and "using my senses", but you cannot use your senses because you cannot smell most food poisoning bacteria.
When you sniff food and it smells bad you know that food can't be eaten, so you throw it out. When you sniff food and it doesn't smell bad can that food be eaten? You don't know.
That's why they have the dates: the dates take into account the most common food poisoning bacteria, and best practice storage in the home, and make a balancing act.
What you do with your own body is obviously up to you, but please don't use "I can smell if it's bad" if you're feeding children or old people because they are at risk of death or permanent harm.
You can't avoid things just because they could kill you.
You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses, and it doesn't really correlate with best before dates, cooked reheated rice is the main risk.