I eat the wonderful pancakes that come from the freezer. Mmmmmmm.

From my Snapple cap at lunch today:

The only food that doesn't spoil is honey.

Mmmmmm. Bee poop.

You're making me have junior high flashbacks to what the boys used to refer to eggs as.

I've got the "heel" of a bottle of milk (generic store brand) dated "sell by Dec. 16) in my refrigerator, saved the other day for making biscuits....(in which I think sour milk works best). Unfortunately, it still smells OK. If you knew how long eggs were stored, you wouldn't ask. "Canned" goods in clear glass can be a problem, since they do begin to change in color over time, while remaining edible.

Most spices if ground are already "dead" (or pretty moribund) the day you buy them, while most of the seeds (cumin, etc.) have long storage lives, with nutmeg being good almost forever. Never buy ground ginger, for fresh and even candied are far better. We keep 4-5 different dried peppers - long-lived around, plus fresh Thais and Serranos (cheap enough to buy and discard), while Chipotle (ripe smoked jalapeno) is best canned. Vanilla bean store well in sugar, the resulting sugar being even more useful than the vanilla beans.

Living in an area where wind storms can interrupt electricity for several days, "emergency" supplies of edible canned goods, not often a choice for eating ought to be consumed occasionally and replaced, and I don't let the freezer get very full during the stormy part of the year.

I had heard about the pancake/waffle mix issue before, and I notice that the mix I use, from Williams-Sonoma, does have an expiration date. I check the dates on everything I buy, canned goods, dry goods, and sodas, and like a lot of others, I rummage thru the dairy case to get the most far out date available. I did work as a volunteer at a food bank, where we were told that we could repackage canned goods and items like salad dressings for a year after their expiry date and that would be fine from a food safety perspective (assuming, of course, that the items weren't opened or damaged). So I think for many of those types of items, it is definitely a "best before", not a use by...but I always get rid of them anyway, and wouldn't buy them. Meat and chicken I'm even more on top of, and in any event, it has to be used or cooked within three to four days of getting home...

This is a timely topic. What about bloody mary mix that comes in a bottle? It says "refridgerate after opening" but it doesn't say anything about expiring. Does this stuff go bad, or are there enough preservatives and salts in there to keep it?

I wonder about vinegar as well. Isn't it used to make pickles?

If you want to know what day of the year your eggs were packaged on, (layed on?) look on the end of the carton. There should be a 3 digit number. It corrresponds to the day of the year: expressed 001-365. So, for example, today January 11th, would say 011.

The "expiration" (actually a sell by date for eggs, which gives you at least 7 more days) should be at least 2-3 weeks later than the three digit laying date. Eggs do keep a long time, and boy, you sure know when they aren't good anymore, LOL!

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.

I remember now that I had a Nabisco driver in my neighborhood years back. He used to discretely share the oldies that he pulled from the shelves. No one died as far as I can recall.

BamaVol and others may remember this recent thread on milk's expiration:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=592942

As noted in my post in that thread, I have found the date stamped on milk to be inconsistent between brands. In some cases it indicated a week before the milk went bad and in others it indicated that the milk likely would start turning the next day. So it may indeed be a "sell by" date, but the processors may have different notions as to how much time there should be between this date and when the milk is expected to turn.

Post #17 in that thread also describes a test for eggs.

Like others who have commented, I am also suspicious that dates stamped on some medical and food products are more based upon the manufacturers' wanting new sales than the product actually going bad.

I always ignore the expiration dates on soutwest drink coupons.

Obviously, you need to think about the product and what causes it to either go bad (milk) or lose effectiveness (tylenol). But, there are expiration dates on many things that are hard to imagine. I believe that because the state of New Jersey requires it, bottled water has an expiration date. I'm not likely to be too exercised if my bottled water has passed its expiration date.

In answer to the OP's question, usually no on most products but medications are treated differently based on the particular item and what, if anything, I know about its longevity.

It's not that I ignore them, I just usually forget to look.

While I was in Mexico, my host family had spices that were priced in old Pesos. The peso converted in 1994.