Originally Posted by
CrazyOne
I always took the dates on drugs like this as a potency issue more than a safety issue. After the date it won't hurt you, but it may not be effective. (Not sure if your friend would confirm that or not, just what I had generally assumed.)
As far as food, I do look at dates. We don't have overstock of much, so this isn't a problem. We do have some canned things around for a while, but cans are usually good at least for a few years and sometimes aren't date marked at all.
When I was in grad school in the mid-80s, my mom worked as a rep for food brokers and Bristol Myers. One of the "benefits" was pulling out of date food and "destroying" it (which often meant digesting it in our stomachs).
When the broker was handling a new line from Campbell's soup called "Fresh Chef", which was a line of refrigerated soups, pasta sauces and salads, the product very often had a very short date. The brokers ended up removing cases of the items shortly after the stores got them in. The soup and sauces, in reality, never needed the cold... they were vacuum packed like regular jarred pasta sauce (think Ragu or Prego). The refrigeration was a gimmick. My family, friends and myself were stocked with soup and pasta sauce for several years thanks to this. It kept great... I remember eating some of this 5 or 6 years after the fact and it tasted great. As long as the lid popped when we opened it, we ate it.
Same when mom worked for Bristol Myers. I had Excedrin and other drug type products that lasted me a good 6 or 7 years. I still use some of the small sample bottles to store little items.
My wife (who I didn't meet until mid 90s) is the exact opposite about dates. If it's one day over, out it goes. Then again, she had a friend who had a daughter die of e-coli from an undercooked burger.