At the end of January, the supermarket Morrisons will do away with use-by-dates on all milk cartons sold in their shops. Morrisons recommends people simply smell the milk and decide for themselves whether or not it is rancid enough to replace with a new pint from the shop. According to the recycling charity ‘Wrap’, Milk is the third most wasted food and drink product in the UK, after potatoes and bread. 330,000 tonnes are wasted in this country each year which is 7% of all the milk we produce. 81,879 of those tonnes are being chucked by individuals in their houses – no doubt because they’ve been spooked by the use-by-date.
Milk may not be as delicious shortly after the use-by-date but in the age of ‘health and safety gone mad’, it will come as no surprise to find out that it is far from dangerous. Ian Goode, senior milk buyer at Morrisons, said: “Good quality, well-kept milk has a good few days life after normal ‘use by’ dates – and we think it should be consumed, not tipped down the sink.”
At one point in my life, I lived in a flat where lodgers would come and go. I noticed that during the month that one very quiet and quite spooky girl lived in the house, the milk would curdle in a day. Some would say she left it out, others would say she was lucky not to have been born in the 17th century since she was quite clearly a witch. Either way, I have – on more than one occasion – drunk milk that was actually yoghurt. It was a horrid experience, one I hope I’ll never endure again and definitely one I learnt from very quickly. Ian Goode (senior milk buyer) claims that, “Generations before us have always used the sniff test”. This came as a surprise to me – as it would to most young people – and might explain how the witch managed to fool me on multiple occasions and not just the once; I’d never been trained to smell milk, only ever to look at it.
Morrisons’s date removal is quite a bold move. It’s unprecedented, in a time when people are barely trusted to wash their hands or breathe in a safety-conscious way, that a supermarket is encouraging this daily feat of autonomy over personal health and well-being. In introducing this new policy, Morrisons risks facing innumerable complaints (perhaps lawsuits) from urban dimwits who only ever learnt to read milk. Furthermore, they are demonstrating the sort of selfless transparency that is required of powerful corporations in order to protect the planet’s resources. The milk policy isn’t the usual virtue-signalling used to distract from and bolster a corporation’s ultimate fixation on profit. It might actually be a genuinely beneficial endeavour.
When supermarkets make it near impossible to buy, for example, fruit and vegetables without also buying a yard of plastic alongside it, chances are the general public will consume more plastic. So many people are diligent recyclers in the UK. Wales actually has the 4th highest recycling rate in the world according to data released by the European Environmental Bureau in 2018.And yet, most of the plastic the Welsh neatly separate from cardboard still ends up on the side of the road in Turkey or incinerated in Malaysia. Most people are not plastic junkies. We never asked to endlessly – and often pointlessly – sort through all this plastic, nor did we ask the powers-at-be to lie to us about the spoiling date of the milk we buy.When feeding the 5000, Christ told his disciples that even once they’d had their fill, they should “gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” These misleading use-by-dates have been a barrier to good conscience and have led us unknowing from doing with the abundant leftover fragments what Christ would want.
That all said, I’m happy to smell milk in the privacy and safety of my own home but I hope the shopkeepers of Morrisons will know when to throw milk away without having to regularly stick their noses in all the cartons. That might be a bit germy and chaotic. Or, is this the dawn of a new un-squeamish attitude towards waste? Perhaps lots of strangers smelling the milk we buy before we buy it is something we could come around to? One of those things that, although unheard of among young people, was done by the more robust and conscientious generations before…
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