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Some tourists in the Museum of Natural History are marveling at some dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, “Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?”
The guard replies, “They are 65,000,011 years old.”
“That’s an awfully exact number,” says the tourist. “How do you know their age so precisely?”
The guard answers, “Well, the dinosaur bones were sixty five million years old when I started working here, and that was eleven years ago.”
Sometimes expiration dates refer to when enough plastic from the packaging has decayed into the food material that it might be a problem. Bottled water works that way.
I don’t know:
- How much science there is behind the dating
- How much plastic you’re consuming in your food anyway and so who cares what’s the difference
- Whether that’s what’s going on with this salt package specifically
But it’s not automatically crazy for there to be an expiration date on an immortal product if it comes packaged up in plastic.
I’m no expert, but I did watch a minidocumentary that explained that these best by dates are mostly arbitrary aside from perishable foods.
For some products they’ll have taste testers rate the same product packaged at different times from 1-10 with 10 being factory fresh, and when it drops below an average of 7, that’s the date they put on the packaging
Yeah but this kind of salt they only taste test every half million years or so, so the expiration dates cant be trusted to be that precise.
Yeah a lot of the dates are just guesses that they know for a fact it will last longer. They are required to put a date but not required to actually test how long an item lasts. A lot of items last much longer than their expiration date. Salt should be good indefinitely.
I think the law is to enforce “open dating” instead of having some secret coding that hides info from the consumer. What date they put on there is totally up to the manufacturer, so unless you can match dates and experience with the optimal time to eat something, it’s only useful to make sure you got the latest product compared to the rest on the shelf at that time.
Climate Town had an excellent video on the subject. (since they’re always excellent)
Yeah. I feel like they probably just pick some random bullshit, and if people get botulism they look at reducing it, and if they throw away a quarter-million dollars worth of product that expired they look at increasing it, and if neither of those happens then they don’t worry about it. I have no knowledge of it but even hearing that they do taste tests is a little surprising to me. But I am cynical.
I did know some people who were once “employed” on a sort of temp job that was excising already-passed expiration dates from a massive number of cans of fish, and then stamping new later dates on them.
☹️
Well, I understand that with some years in an plastic bowl, the salt may absorb some substances and microplastics. But about Honey, what comes in glass jars? There they also put an expiration date, even though still edible honey has been found in several thousand years old Egyptian tombs.
The expiration date - unless it’s a different legal definition where you are from - is not really about being edible, but just signifies the guarantee the producer gives, basically “up until this date we will guarantee this product will maintain the expected quality”. In this case, I think it will be them not guaranteeing that the salt won’t have drawn water from the air and clumped up or something like that.
i think what you are describing is the “best before date”. the expiration date instead works as OP describes it: after the expiration the product should be tossed.
i usually see expiration dates on fish and meat. afaik honey never comes with an expiration date; the best before date is probably only relevant for the taste of the honey, not for its safety.
As a salt vampire, I will happily take any expired salt off your hands.
And off your face.
Anyone else hate it when products fluff themselves up with dramatically grandiose blurb? FORMED BY THE PRIMAL SEA shut the fuck up
Part of my job is to write that kind of copy. If you take it seriously, you’ll drive yourself nuts.
You should start every one with “originally formed inside of an actual star” or something similar.
Wrenched from the platonic forms through seething quantum foam as the Demiurge’s machinations reach fruition, our custom-made mounting clamps won’t fail you like your precious god.
No, you should absolutely not use it. Send it to me asap for safe disposal; I have a fully equipped facility to process it safely and thoroughly.
Does that facility have 20 digits?
Yes, salt doesn’t go bad
But this looks like natural salt, so no preservatives 😁
Lots of salty comments in this thread