Approximately 20% of all food waste in America is linked to confusion over date labels. Now, California is banning most food expiration labeling. So, what do expiration dates really tell us?

Guest

Emily Broad Leib, clinical professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

Marcia Walker, director of the Oregon State University Food Innovation Center.

Also Featured

Molly Fisher, On Point listener from Oklahoma City, OK.

Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: When it comes to expiration dates on food, Molly Fisher and her husband have pretty different philosophies. Molly thinks…

MOLLY FISHER [TAPE]: They’re fine recommendations, but they are not gospel.

CHAKRABARTI: Meanwhile, her husband thinks…

FISHER [TAPE]: They are law. Every time his family comes to visit, they will do a purge of our pantry and fridge based on what is printed on the container. I have watched things that I consider to be perfectly good, and my mother-in-law will point to the expiration date and say, “It expired five months ago.” It’s like, “Well, I’m not gonna retrieve it out of the trash now.”

CHAKRABARTI: Molly and her husband live in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, away from the in-laws. So when her relatives aren’t in town, the couple has to figure out what foods stay and what foods go into the compost.

FISHER [TAPE]:It’ll go like this, like, “This is out of date.” And I’ll say, “It’s fine.” And they’ll say, “Look at the date. It’s two years ago.” And I’ll say, “It’s still a closed thing of almonds. Like, I’m not worried about it.” And then they’ll stay.

CHAKRABARTI:  But…

FISHER [TAPE]: If it’s a ketchup or mustard that’s been in our fridge that’s a couple months out of date, I can count on my mother-in-law throwing it away on her next visit.

(MUSIC)

CHAKRABARTI: Molly has two young kids, so even though her husband would like to throw every expired food item in their house into the dumpster, Molly admits that they don’t really have the time to check all that often. And her mother-in-law won’t be here until next month. So we had Molly walk us through her food pantry to see how she’d assess these expiration dates in real time.

FISHER [TAPE]: Okay. I’m going from the top. So on the very top where, like, none of us can reach, we’ve got some, like, sweets, and I’m looking at candy sugar cones from Walmart for ice cream. And I know that we bought these last summer. Like, there’s no way these are fresh. But I would totally still feed these to my kids. Best if used by December 9th, 2026. So I think my mother-in-law would probably let me keep those.  Ooh, I wonder if my tea has any. Okay. This says November 2024, and yet I don’t think that my Earl Grey tea sachets have hurt anyone yet. Okay, I’m gonna get down a little further.

CHAKRABARTI: And then Molly moved on to her fridge…

FISHER [TAPE]: I have some Whole Foods 365 Organic Strawberry Fruit Spread, best by March 2026. That is definitely one that would cause a fight because of the date, but I would say it’s a preservative. If it was 20 years out of date, then we could talk. Looking at my club soda to see if that even has something ridiculous on it. Oh my God, it does. It says 12/2025. I think that’s something that they had to put on for a regulator and it means nothing. Trader Joe’s Whole Milk Ricotta Cheese says use by, or it says best by April 6th, 2026. Oh God, yikes. That’s got to go, because I opened it and saw that bad news. That was really vile. (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Molly, I’m with you because personally, I use the smell test to decide if food in our fridge has really reached its expiration date. So I’ve been through those that was really vile moments more than I can count. But to Molly’s mother-in-law, I want you to know that you, too, are not alone because 43% of Americans discard all food that’s near or past the label date, and 88% do so occasionally.

That’s according to a 2025 national survey from Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. Now, unfortunately, that generates a lot of food waste, and according to a 2013 report, also from Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, 20% of all food waste can be attributed to confusion over food labels. So at the beginning of this month, California did something about it.

A new state law took effect that eliminates most food expiration labels from packaging, just eliminates it, all of those labels but two. There’s two that are still gonna be on packaging in California. Those are the best by dates to signal quality and the use by dates for safety, so consumers can better understand what foods to keep and what foods to discard.

But all of this actually raises some pretty basic questions, right? Such as, how are these labels actually regulated? How many different kinds of labels are there? Are there any industry standards? And if there are so many labels and California can get rid of all but two of them, I guess the most basic question is, do we really need them at all?

Emily Broad Leib is with us, and she’s a clinical professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic that you heard the stats from them a little earlier. And she joins us today. Professor Leib, welcome to On Point.

EMILY BROAD LEIB: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: So before we dive into the policy and the regulation, I’ve got to ask you, what’s your philosophy on food expiration dates in your own home?

LEIB: I feel like I have to use the best practices in my own home, and we’ve been pretty good about it. And interestingly, it sort of changed our whole outlook on how we use food in our home, how we make sure to use things up before they aren’t good anymore. But we mostly don’t look at the dates, and and we keep in mind a handful of foods where there’s actually increased risk, but for everything else, we really do use the smell test, the taste test, the look test.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Good. And little later in the show listeners, I promise we’ll ask both Emily and another guest that we’ll bring on later really what best practices should be in American homes. But, so Emily, let’s go back to kind of basics here because I’ll admit, whenever I look a  labeling on packaging, I don’t actually personally distinguish between use by, best by, or whatever.

I just see a date on there. But there are some 50 different kinds of food expiration labels. First of all, how did we get to having so many?

LEIB: So part of the issue has been that there was, until this California law, no real requirement that any of the labels be standard. So, I think we can talk more about, there are a number of states that require food have some label on it, but most of those states even still say, it could be any of a variety of different date labels.

And so I think companies have tried to get creative. They play around with it. We see dates, not just the typical ones like “sell by” or “best by” or “use by.” You see “expires on,” “enjoy by,” all kinds of different things. And about 10 years ago, Walmart got really interested in this issue, in part because of our reporting and work we were doing with them and thinking about reducing food waste.

And so they ran a study of their own private label brands and found that there were about 47 different date-label terms being used just within Walmart private label brands alone.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. So that means that there’s likely more because, I mean- Yeah … Walmart’s obviously a huge retailer, but so that leads to the next question, which I guess the answer’s kind of baked into what you just said.

There’s no national regulation on what the labels need to be, whether they even need to be on food packaging. Is that right?

LEIB: That’s right. So there’s, at various points, including over the last decade or so, have been discussions about or efforts to try to create national standards. But in, in terms of U.S. law right now, the only food that has a required standard label is infant formula, which must have the term used by on it.

And actually, that was because for babies, most infants are only consuming infant formula, and there was a concern that after a certain date, that there would be a decline in nutritional value. So the used by on infant formula is really about if you’re feeding this to your infant, that they’re getting the nutritional values that they should be getting for that food.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. So the only food, I’m just in a repeating mode today, forgive me, Professor Leib, but the only food that has to have a label, a use-by label, is infant formula, which means the ubiquity of all the other labels that we see, they’re not required to be there. So why are manufacturers putting them on on food products?

LEIB: So there’s sort of two main reasons that manufacturers are using them. The first actually is really, was responsive to consumers, and I think we saw, starting in the 1950s and really peaking in the 1970s, consumers, as they got further and further away from food production, requesting this information.

And at the time, I think consumers really knew or really interpreted them as freshness, and they wanted to just know, now that I’m not producing this directly in my own farm or buying it from my neighbor who produced it, and these supply chains are longer, how do I know how long to eat this food or when I should try to move it out of my own refrigerator?

And so that,  there’s a consumer angle with manufacturers really trying to respond to that. But then around the same time, we saw a bunch of states start requiring date labels on different foods. And the crazy thing, and this was sort of what brought me to this work, was realizing that across the 50 states, there are about 40 states that have some date label requirements.

Let’s leave the new California law to the side, because I think that is truly exceptional. But all these other states, no two states require the same thing. No two states require date labels on the same foods. It was really kind of a mess of different rules. So there’s a number of manufacturers that maybe would think, “My food really doesn’t need a label on it,” but they’re required to put one on because of the state law.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that’s interesting. So just going back to the ’50s and ’60s for a moment, I mean, what you’re saying is when supply chains are getting longer and people are getting further away from the actual producers of the food you’re also talking about the age of more processed food or food products that aren’t just strictly dairy, meats, or, or fruits and vegetables, right? I mean, there’s a whole change in the American food system that this is coming along with.

LEIB: That’s right. So we see, post-World War II, everyone’s having refrigerators, and as you said, more packaged food, more the rise of not maybe what we see in terms of today’s grocery stores, but the precursors to today’s retail.

So people are starting to buy more and more stuff from further away in boxes and packaging and and have less kind of connection or knowledge about where that came from. And it also coincides with the beginning of people having just less sort of food knowledge generally. And again, at that time, I think people really saw these dates as sort of freshness labels.

But fast-forward to today, most people forget that and this lack of general food knowledge means that people think these dates are really about safety, all of them, which they’re not.

CHAKRABARTI: Emily, we also spoke with Nick Lapis. As you know, he’s the director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, and he told us that, so the law that went into effect on July 1st of this year passed in California in 2024, but it actually started out as a bill that was first introduced 10 years ago.

So here’s Nick, and he’s one of the bill’s co-sponsors.

NICK LAPIS [TAPE]: At the time when the bill was being heard, the chair basically said, “Well, we’re gonna, you know, not let the bill move forward today, but we’re gonna hold you accountable for this promise.” And the industry had committed to voluntarily phasing in the same requirements over a couple years. And what we found was, surprise, surprise, if there’s no uniform mandate, folks are not gonna comply uniformly. And there was a study that came out that basically looked at the effectiveness of the voluntary pledge, and it found something like a third of labels were actually using the right terminology.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Emily, tell us a little bit more about this, that there was a period where the food industry said, “Well, we will on our own do something to sort of simplify the expiration date labeling.”

LEIB: Yeah. So couple things happened around that time. So one was actually, and I mean, a huge gratitude to Nick, to Californians Against Waste, and to other advocates in California, which has been really a leader in not only this effort on date labeling, but on trying to reduce food waste more broadly.

One of the driving factors of reducing this confusion about date labels is that food that ends up in garbage disposals and landfills, et cetera, is a huge emitter of methane. And California has really been committed to this climate-based effort to reduce food waste. So at one point, as Nick mentioned, there was legislation that was introduced in California that would’ve required these standards about a decade ago.

It ended up being enacted, but it was downgraded to be encouraging industry to use these standard terms. And the food industry really did come to the table at that time and said, you know, “Leave it to us. We’ll work together.” And in February of 2017, the two main trade associations for food, the association that covers retail and the association that covers food manufacturing, came out with this voluntary food code dating pledge.

And as Nick mentioned, they really pledged to similarly the same two terms that are now in this, California law. They pledged to put those on all foods. And it was not as successful as one would’ve hoped as, and one big issue, I think, is the biggest food companies signed on, but there are a lot of smaller food companies that weren’t involved.

And actually, we ran a separate study that said in about 27 states, there was at least one food product where, even if the food company wanted to use the standard label, they couldn’t because of state laws. So for example, there are a handful of states that require the use of the term “sell by,” and that voluntary standard would’ve only had the terms “best if used by” or “use by.”

So it wasn’t as successful, and I think California came back to the table and said, “Let’s get this across the finish line and really change this.”

CHAKRABRTI: Yeah. So I wanna just take a step back quickly for a moment and talk about the amount of food waste that we’re really dealing with here. I’ve seen that in California alone, well, actually, let me just say in the United States overall, food waste is estimated to be something like 30 to 40% of our entire food supply, which is just a shocking number. But then in California annually, Californians throw away some 6 million tons of food. That’s their food waste overall. And I did some quick calculations, so 6 million tons is 12 billion pounds of food. And if 20% of that is being thrown away because of the labels on food, we’re talking about 2.4 billion pounds of food. So if you imagine 2.4 billion packages of a pound of chicken, or 2.4 billion bunches of bananas. I mean, it is an astonishing number that’s just going into the bin because of the dates.

LEIB: Yeah. It’s a huge issue. I think I mentioned the climate impact, the environmental impact, but of course also the resources that go into that. Like, nationally, more than 20% of our water goes to water crops that become food waste. California again, if you think about water also being a challenge there. There’s this huge environmental footprint. And then the waste, that household-level waste, there was a study that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency did about a year and a half ago that it says a family of four wastes $3,000 a year on food that they unnecessarily throw away.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So the California now, the new law says all food labeling, expiration date labeling needs to go away except two of them, right? And they are the “use by” dates and “best by dates.” Is that right?

LEIB: It’s “use by” and “best if used by.”

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

LEIB: And I know it’s a little confusing that the word “use” is in both of them. But we actually have some data showing that for the quality terminology, when you compare “best by” or “best if used by,” et cetera, “best if used by” outperformed the others a little bit, and that really led to that being the standard that ideally, consumers would able to, if they see that label on a product, they know this product isn’t likely to have some foodborne illness that can increase over time. This is a food that really the label’s a guess at freshness and quality, and as long as it smells and tastes and looks fine to you, the biggest risk is that it’s gonna be stale and not that it’s going to be contaminated with some sort of pathogen.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that’s the “best if used by,” and therefore the just regular old “use by” date, that is a safety indicator.

LEIB: That’s right. And ideally it would be used on a very small percent of food. I think the majority, 90, 95% of food really it’s impossible to say when it will increase in risk. There’s a very small handful of foods that we know if they are contaminated before before being sold, are foods that are not gonna then be cooked or reheated in some way that would kill that contamination.

So, things like deli meat or prepared pasta salad or something like that you would get at the prepared food counter. Those are the foods where ideally with the standard labels, consumers would know, those foods will have the “use by,” I should really make sure to use them by that date and not consume them afterwards.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So those are the only two now that will be allowed in California. There’s a third one that’s really common that has been eliminated in California, and that’s the “sell by” dates. I think everyone has seen that on  food products. But I understand that date was actually never intended for consumers, even though we use it all the time as a metric for whether we should eat something or not?

LEIB: That’s right. So prior to this era of, around the same time we talked about, around the ’70s, et cetera, a lot of manufacturers used to put just a set of numbers on products, and then they would give kind of like a decoding guide almost to the stores that said, “You know, when you see this set of numbers, this is when you should remove it from your shelves.”

And that fell out of favor. It again, was annoying, like the stores had to go look something up. And what the stores really wanted and the manufacturers wanted was to know when to rotate stock off the shelves. So “sell by” became the date to do that. But it’s really hard for consumers to know what to do with that, and I think most consumers just see that date and think, “I can’t eat it after that date,” even though that was never really the intent.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, this is so interesting. Okay. Emily Broad Leib, hang on here for just a second because we want to bring in a food scientist right now to tell us a little bit more about the testing that goes on in order to determine some of these dates. So Marcia Walker is the director of the Oregon State University Food Innovation Center, and she’s joining us from Portland, Oregon.

Marsha Walker, welcome to On Point.

MARCIA WALKER: Hey. Hi.

CHAKRABARTI: So, let’s just get down and dirty with food testing. When you test food for quality, for example, what kinds of tests are you doing? What are you looking for?

WALKER: Yeah, that’s a really great question. So we offer a service to food manufacturers where we can actually put their food product in a testing chamber, so we can control the conditions that it’s stored in more professionally than, a consumer would and we can control temperature and humidity. And the things that we look for really are easily measured by chemical indicators. So we check pH, which is a measure of acidity. We can check water activity. We can check Brix, which is a test of the sugar. And all those parameters help control the shelf life of the food product.

And then of course, we do what consumers do. We look at it, we taste it, and we smell it. But then we can also do microbiological testing to actually verify if there is anything that would cause concern to consumers.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, when we say shelf life, since we’ve used this phrase several times already in the conversation what specifically do you mean, Marcia, about what shelf life actually is?

WALKER: Yeah, so most food manufacturers go by the quality of the product. So, if a product has a 12-month shelf life, what they’re looking for is they really want it to be a really good consumer experience. So almost as good or maybe 80% to 90% as good as on day zero. So they’re looking for that consumer experience to be just as good as when the consumer bought it.

CHAKRABARTI: Got it, so taste, texture, things like that.

WALKER: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s not the actual safety of the food. Okay, so then you give this information to the manufacturers, and what do they tend to do with it?

WALKER: Usually they will go by the dates that we recommend, but it’s really up to the food manufacturer to decide what that date should be.

And again, it’s not often about the food safety of the product. Clearly if, you know, there was a food safety risk, we would alert the consumer or the food manufacturer to that. So it’s really about them accepting what quality they want it to have if the consumer were to eat it after 12, even 15 months.

CHAKRABARTI: Emily, did you wanna jump in here with any thoughts?

LEIB: I mean, I’m delighted to hear Marcia explaining and I think to that point, getting to this shelf life question that again, I think is where there’s a misalignment between what food companies are saying and food scientists, like what Marcia’s doing, and then consumer understanding that have gotten out of alignment that again, consumers for the most part, are seeing these dates and thinking, “If I eat it after that date, I’m going to get sick.”

So I think that’s Part of what we really need to solve for.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, you know, Marcia, let me turn back to you because I’m thinking here that in this conversation, I don’t want listeners to presume that we’re just talking about the large manufacturers, right? Because we started with the example of Walmart.

And, there’s these huge stores, which I’m sure they’re doing, they’re auditing their food quality and food safety all the time. But there are also a lot of smaller manufacturers who may be, I don’t know if they have room in their budget to turn to do food testing. In those cases, do you know what those smaller makers might do?

WALKER: So we serve a lot of entrepreneurs as we call them, and a lot of these are the food startups or much smaller. They don’t have in-house capacity to do their own testing, so they seek our expertise. And a lot of times they’re very risk-averse too, just like the big companies. They don’t want their brand name affected, so they will take generally our guidance.

But also, we’re talking around the consumer not throwing away food, but it also costs these companies money. So some of the smaller companies the longer the shelf life they can put on there, it actually helps them, too. But it’s this fine balance between what should that date be versus if somebody’s going to come back and say they had a bad experience with their product.

So, I think it’s as Emily said, not an easy decision to make.

CHAKRABARTI: Now Emily, I understand that you’ve talked to some companies in the state of Massachusetts who weren’t again, the Walmarts of the world and didn’t necessarily have the budget to do this kind of food testing.

What did they tell you?

LEIB: Yeah, so I would say I think the majority, again, big companies are either doing in-house testing or using a lab, and my understanding is there are also charts or sort of, like, general guides that companies can use. But we have actually talked to some small companies that said, Massachusetts is a great example. Massachusetts requires all food to have a date label if it’s either perishable or semi-perishable. So that means any food that would go bad within 90 days in Massachusetts is required to have a label. And we’ve talked to companies that have said, you know, “We were pretty small. We were starting out. We did all the other things we needed to do, and then we kind of just came up with a date label without really using any actual science.” And again, that’s fine as long as we’re communicating that clearly to consumers. I think if that’s the best we can do, again, that’s okay, but consumers should know that this is really an estimate of taste and flavor.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. Marcia Walker, I’ll turn it back to you. This is so interesting because, this is obviously an issue that hits literally everybody because we’re shopping and eating to stay alive. So let me ask you, can you give us some of your expert advice? If someone’s standing in front of the refrigerator right now, how should they best determine whether to keep a food item or if it’s time to get rid of it?

WALKER: Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting, because I know so much about it, so I may make a different decision. I think also it’s important to remember that the manufacturers put things in there to extend the shelf life too.

So there’s, pasteurization methods like heating or refrigeration. Those extend shelf life. There’s chemical additives that we can add to extend that. And then there’s the shelf life both from before it’s open and then after it’s open. So sometimes making those decision is a lot of guesswork, and that’s why those dates are on there, to take some of that guesswork out of it.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Marcia, I just wanted to ask you a couple more questions of like, how to really determine whether or not food is edible.

So for things like, let’s say deli meats or pre-prepared foods that you can get from grocery stores, should we rely on the labels for those?

WALKER: Yeah, I think those are pretty high risk, especially if it’s being sliced in a deli. There’s a risk of contamination from that deli slicer in your store.

A lot of the ready-to-eat products, though, have antimicrobials we call them, in them, so it helps protect against any kind of spoilage. There’s also mold inhibitors that are put into products to help really extend that shelf life. You know, I think there’s a degree of risk. Stuff that’s stored in your pantry obviously has way lower risk than something that would be need to be in the refrigerator.

CHAKRABARTI: So at the end of the day, are you saying that in terms of safety, that the smell and taste test is still a pretty good way to measure?

WALKER: Yeah, I think that it really is, honestly. But again, if the consumer has a bad experience with it, a lot of times that comes back to the food manufacturer. So, we would like to be able to make the consumer have that choice, but we also have brand reputation to consider in that equation.

Ah, that’s interesting. Okay. Well, Marcia Walker, director of the Oregon State University Food Innovation Center, thank you so much for your expertise and guidance.

WALKER: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: All right. Emily, so I wanna go back to what’s been done in California, and again, reasons why. So let’s listen to a little bit more from Nick Lapis because in terms of the impact of that just in California alone, 2.4 billion pounds of food every year that gets thrown out because of these dates maybe other folks in states have run into the same thing. Like for example food banks were having a hard time in California giving out food to people for free because folks had a lot of confusion over the labels on the foods that was being donated to food banks. So here’s Nick Lapis again from the, from Californians Against Waste.

NICK LAPIS [TAPE]: The “sell by” dates are supposed to communicate to a store when they need to pull something off the shelves, and “sell by” dates don’t really communicate anything about safety or quality. They’re purely for stock rotation at a grocery store. And at that point, a lot of the stores donate stuff to food banks. In California, they’re actually legally required to donate to food banks. And the food banks were saying that they were having a hard time giving away food that was past the “sell by” date because their customers didn’t want to receive food that could make their family sick.

CHAKRABARTI: You know, Emily, I’ve also heard in in other states, for example, food banks won’t even accept food that has,  that’s past some of these date labels.

LEIB: That’s right. And it actually, I mentioned earlier all these different state laws. There are actually about 20 states that restrict sale or donation of food after the date.

And again, in those states there’s not any standard, so that would apply also to food that’s, you know, has a “sell by” label or that’s labeled for this sort of quality reason. So it’s made it really, really difficult to, you know, make sure that safe, edible food can get to people and that people can understand that it’s safe and edible.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So when California passes a major state law, it inevitably has some national effects, right? Because California’s … What is it? Like, one of … It’s in the top 10 biggest economies in the world as a state alone. And I understand that in New York there’s a similar bill on the governor’s desk there now likely to get signed.

So I’m wondering if we’re headed, if we’re not already there, to a new national standard, even if it’s an informal one.

LEIB: Yeah. So we’ve actually been really pushing, along with many partners, for a national standard. I’m delighted, and we’ve worked very closely in California and with advocates in New York.

And actually Massachusetts, the bill hasn’t gone anywhere, but has had a bill similarly introduced over the last at least five or six legislative sessions that would do this too. But I do think the fact that California’s has now gone into effect has really helped put effort on or push companies to put pressure on the federal government to make this national.

And we’ve actually also in global work we’ve done on food waste and food donation have seen that the U.S. is, as of now 30 countries and the entire European Union where we’ve worked, the U.S. is the only one that doesn’t have any national standards for date labels. So I think it’s high time that we had something like what California’s done, something that makes sense, that can be clear to consumers, can sort of bucket food into these two categories of when the consumer should use the taste test or the smell test and when consumers should be a little more wary of the date.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I wonder ’cause you started by talking about Walmart, and I don’t imagine that now Walmart’s gonna have two different groups of labels, right? For California products that are sold in California versus everywhere else. Or is Walmart still gonna actually have to have different kinds of labeling for their private label foods because of the different state regulations?

LEIB: It’s a great question. I think you’re right that they’re gonna attempt to do things to, you know, use the California standard in as many states as they can. There are states where that doesn’t apply. We, a couple years ago, made a film actually about the State of Montana, which has the strictest milk date labeling law in the country, and requires “sell by” on every single milk, and that date has to be 12 days after pasteurization, which is extraordinarily short.

So it’s a little bit of a question. I think Walmart knows better than I around how strictly the states are actually enforcing that in store. But technically, if they use the California standard labels in Montana, for example, or other states that require the term “sell by,” they would be out of compliance there and could get, you know, their product pulled off the shelves or get a citation.

CHAKRABARTI; It goes without saying that for food manufacturers large and small, this is kind of a pain having this national patchwork from state to state, which makes me think, I think the the Consumer Brands Association, which is what the, the largest industry voice on this issue, they’re actually in support of passing a federal level law, right?

LEIB: Yeah, that’s actually been, and again, California has really jumpstarted that. So my, through Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, we are also part of a national food waste policy coalition called the Zero Food Waste Coalition. And earlier this year, Zero Food Waste Coalition and Consumer Brands Association collaborated on a letter to Congress that really, 30 food companies, some of the biggest retailers, Walmart, Amazon, brands like Unilever and Nestle, all signed this letter to Congress saying, “Can you just make these standards national?”

And I think they see both to your point, the benefit of having something they can do across states, and also the proposed mechanism of regulating is actually really to say to companies, “You don’t have to have a label on products, but if you do use one, you have to use one of these two standard terms.”

So it’s pretty light touch as far as what would be required on companies, and it gives them still a lot of freedom to choose whether to use a label or kind of back to Marcia’s point, the companies are the ones that know all this information about the ingredients, the pH balance, the packaging. They’re the ones that know best should it be a safety-based label or should it be a kind of quality and taste-based label.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, when you say proposal, are you talking about  there actually is a federal bill that has been proposed. Is that what you’re talking about?

LEIB: Yeah, there is a federal bill, the Food Date Labeling Act, that has also been now proposed every Congress since 2016, though it’s evolved a little bit.

CHAKRBARTI: (LAUGHS)

LEIB: I know. It’s evolved a little over time, but, but we are, I think, you know, again, seeing now industry really saying, “This would benefit us, and it would benefit consumers,” and there’s been more bipartisan support behind it in the House and Senate over the last legislative session and then the current Congress.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, Professor Leib, got my hopes up there for a second until you said it’s been introduced for 10 straight years. (LAUGHS)

LEIB: I know.

CHAKRABARTI: But are you feeling optimistic? Because again, getting back to California, that’s a pretty big push from the nation’s largest state. I feel optimistic that we’re seeing this snowballing kind of energy.

Congress is really tricky. I’m not, this is no surprise to anyone. (LAUGHS) They’ve had a really hard time doing even the basics, and I think one thing that’s really challenging here is there’s a lot of inertia, especially for this orphan single-issue topic. It’s very hard to get little bills like this passed.

And so I think, you know, again I’m more optimistic than I’ve been ever, but it’s hard to say that this is really gonna get across the finish line, and that’s why, again, states like California, like New York, and hopefully here in Massachusetts at the very least can start taking these steps to improve, consumer understanding, reduce consumers’ household waste and waste of money, and improve safety.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And I imagine that if a federal bill gets passed whenever that we’d be looking at, what, FDA or USDA to be the regulatory bodies?

LEIB: Thank you for saying that. One of the tricky things with it actually is that our food supply is, has a fragmented oversight, so most food is overseen by FDA, and then all meat, poultry, and some egg products are overseen by USDA.

So the, the legislation says the two agencies have to collaborate, and they both have to use these standard labels for food under their oversight. But I think this whole effectiveness of this kind of legislation, whether in California or whether at the national level, hinges on being able to then educate consumers about what these labels mean, and if you don’t do it across the whole food supply, that becomes really, really tricky to do that education.

CHAKRABARTI: You mentioned the European Union. I’m wondering if you could just briefly talk to us about what other countries do. How do they handle this issue of whether they should even put expiration labels on food?

LEIB: Yeah. So the European Union, I would say, is about a decade ahead of us. More than 10 years ago, they started requirements of standard labels on food slightly different than ours, like “best before” is the quality label, but similar, and “use by” for foods that are labeled because they increase in risk after the date.

And they’ve iterated on it a lot. There’s actually been a lot of consumer education. The UK in particular, which now I know is no longer part of the EU, but has kept this part of the laws, did a big campaign called “Look, Smell, Taste, Don’t Waste,” that was really around how to, use that best before date.

And now there’s been an effort in a bunch of countries to say, “Okay, there’s some foods that really just don’t need a label for the date at all, and let’s get the date off that.” So I remember your segment at the beginning talking through foods like the seltzer water or bottled water, vinegar, things like that where that date really doesn’t have, the food isn’t going to change over time. There’s been efforts to say, “Let’s find those dozen or so foods where we really don’t even need a date at all, and let’s get rid of it so that we can help consumers not be wasting food.”

CHAKRABARTI: So this is really interesting. We’ve got about a, a minute or so left, Emily, because we keep talking about obviously what the industry can do to make these labels simpler and more meaningful.

But now we’ve got many decades of established consumer behavior that would also need to change, right, for people to understand what the labels mean and to know that, “well, I can keep that bottle of vinegar for, geez, many years beyond what I thought previously,” right?

LEIB: There’s actually a really interesting, and I wish I had a source for this, but there was a study that I saw where people ate canned food that was like, they tasted canned food that was within whatever the date was, and then they tasted canned food that was 25 years old, and they actually thought the food that was older tasted better.

So, you know, I think even if we move to this place where we have these sort of clear standards and we can educate consumers, I do think there’s, there could be efforts to really say do we need these for certain foods, or can we even tell consumers, for some of these things, they’re, they’re made in a way that’s meant to preserve them for an extremely long time. And, as long as they taste and smell fine to you and you can enjoy them, keep enjoying them.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.