Find an expired date? Eat it!

My cousin told me she was on the point of throwing away a bottle of cider vinegar which had expired 2 years ago, when it occurred to her that vinegar can't expire. So she drank it with honey in a home remedy for a cold, and was quite pleased with the results.

Yes, she was right not to throw it - because it's such an acidic substance, vinegar is unsuitable for bacteria to breed in.

If the date on her bottle of honey had expired, I would have told her to hang on to it too - liquid honey has so much sugar that it kills almost all bacteria, and the moisture content is too low to allow fungus to grow.

A moment of thought should bring to mind that the ancients used to put things in honey to preserve them. I recall a rather gruesome tale of how a human head was preserved in honey so that it could be delievered to some emperor who lived a way off. The stuff that crystalises out of honey that has been left alone for a bit is sugar crystals. If you don't like crystals in your honey, just apply very gentle heat.

And of course vinegar is used in pickling.

I appreciate the intentions of our health departments in wanting to protect us from unscrupulous people who would sell us old and harmful foods, but their scattershot method of requiring EVERYTHING be labelled with an expiry date can lead to lots of wastage.

I know of people whose knee-jerk reaction is to throw away anything that's past its expiry date, including that grandaddy of preservatives, salt.

When asked they want to throw out salt, they say, 'maybe it can still be used, but it's cheap, so who cares?' Well, it is cheap, thank goodness, but it has been processed and packed and transported. What a waste of resources, just because some idiot thinks that old salt might... what could they be thinking? It might grow fungus? Germs might get into it? Obviously they think that the salt might harm them in some way, and they're not thinking of their blood pressure.

What next? Are they going to scrutinise their bottled water to make sure it doesn't get too old?

The fact is that we can often tell when lots of different foods go bad. You can see the mould on bread, and you don't have to depend on a rocket scientist to calculate when it goes bad. As for worrying about buying a loaf near the end of its shelf life, relax - the same van that delivers the next day's supply will take away the old ones. That's what happens with unsold newspapers.

You don't need to consult the bottom of a tin to know if it can still be eaten - if it's swollen, throw it away. If it looks fine, and you open it and the food smells funny, throw it away.

Surely we can apply our common sense, or are we so bereft of sense that we leave our brains in the freezer, and depend on the 'experts'? Watch out for 'experts' - the current credit crunch is the work of 'experts', as was Long Term Capital Management, which was cited in a talk I attended the other night (it was free, with a buffet dinner thrown in). The speaker was an entrepreneur, who said that passion was much more important than knowledge, and illustrated his point with LTCM. It was a hedge fund that recruited two Nobel prize winners (economics) and brilliant mathematical minds (the sort AIG just gave millions in moolah to, not for bringing the whole system down, but just because their brains are still so desirable). Bottom line: LTCM lost US$4.6 billion.

Speaking of 'experts', here is an interesting article I found on how expired medicines are perfectly usable:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/460159 (if you don't get the page, google medicine expire and look for the url) or you can check up the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide for something similar.

Now then, not all the experts say the same thing. We'll just have to use our own common sense, then.