For many years now, consumers in this country have been obsessed by ‘expiry’ dates on everything in the shops. This has resulted in a monumental amount of food waste. Research tells me that the two main items discarded by people are milk and bread. This is followed by vegetables, cooked meats, and cheese.

I am old enough to remember when there were no sell-by or use-by dates on anything. Milk was delivered in glass bottles on your doorstep, and food items were bought from individual shops like greengrocers, bakers, and butchers. When I was young, a fridge was a modern luxury, and domestic freezers didn’t exist.

People used something called commonsense to decide if something was unfit to eat or drink. If bread was turning green, it was no good. If milk had gone sour, it was no good. Vegetables didn’t go off because you had already eaten them, then bought some more. If sliced ham was shiny like a rainbow or smelled funny, you didn’t eat it. If cheese had tiny bits of mold on it, you cut those bits off and the bit that was left was perfectly good to eat.

Modern refrigerators are much better and more efficient then the ones we used in the 1950s-1960s. They rarely if ever stop working, and most can maintain the perfect temperature at all times. If you put food and milk away in them once it has been partly used, it will stay fresh for much longer than the dates printed on the labels would have you believe. As an example, I offer you this.

Julie works at our local GP practice, and it employs a lot of people. They have a large amount of milk delivered a couple of times a week for the staff to use when making tea and coffee. In December, they forgot to compensate for the Christmas break, leaving some containers of milk that would be thrown away. So on Christmas Eve they told staff to take them home if they wished to do so. Julie brought home two 4-pint plastic containers of semi-skimmed milk. One had a use-by date of the 24th of December, the other the 31st of December.

We used the one with the use-by date of the 24th of December until it ran out yesterday, the 5th of January. Then I opened the one with the use-by date of the 31st of December, and it was fine. I have no doubt it will remain fresh until next week when I next go to the supermarket.

So please don’t fall for the Sell-by/Use-by con. It not only makes you spend more money in shops and supermarkets, it increases the mountain of food waste and ultimately puts up the prices of the items in the shops.

Do what we used to do, use your commonsense.