Dorsetmike
Member
I seem to recall that "curing" bacon/ham, pickling vegetables and making jam were intended to preserve the food so treated, so why now do so many of these items need comparatively short sell/use by dates, and just how much accuracy is there in these dates and the use within x days of opening?
Similar with tinned foods, who and what determine usable periods? Have canning methods changed for the worse over the years?
In my usual grumpy old fart mode I often wonder if it is more a case of "convince the consumer to chuck it away and buy some more", nowadays re-inforced by the "claim damages" culture.
I remember my mother spooning the occasional bit of mould off the top of a pot of home made jam (she made dozens of pounds each year) and we ate the rest of it with no adverse consequences, similar with cheese, take a slice off all round if/when mould appeared. The looks and smell were the main indicators of not usable.
Catering for one it's not easy sometimes to consume a tin or jar of something within the quoted period so it gets wasted, or you buy the smaller sizes and pay nearly as much, e,g a small tin for 35 and a tin twice the size for 40.
Similar with tinned foods, who and what determine usable periods? Have canning methods changed for the worse over the years?
In my usual grumpy old fart mode I often wonder if it is more a case of "convince the consumer to chuck it away and buy some more", nowadays re-inforced by the "claim damages" culture.
I remember my mother spooning the occasional bit of mould off the top of a pot of home made jam (she made dozens of pounds each year) and we ate the rest of it with no adverse consequences, similar with cheese, take a slice off all round if/when mould appeared. The looks and smell were the main indicators of not usable.
Catering for one it's not easy sometimes to consume a tin or jar of something within the quoted period so it gets wasted, or you buy the smaller sizes and pay nearly as much, e,g a small tin for 35 and a tin twice the size for 40.