Use your noddle!

Are shoppers really so silly as to think that food cannot be safely eaten after its "sell-by" date?  As the government has decreed that such dates should be removed from packaging, it would appear so.  What about "use by" dates?  Do you take them as gospel?  Perhaps it's a generation thing, but as these for me are a relatively new feature, I use my common sense and experience.  Firstly, provided stuff is kept in the fridge, I am happy to go one or even maybe two days beyond any use-by date, on the basis that such dates are almost certainly calculated erring on the side of caution.  Beyond that, use your eyes, nose and brain.  Pork is iffy, so you have to be careful with that - beef on the other hand, up to a point actually improves in flavour for being kept.  Eggs may go stale, but rarely go bad.  Mould on cheese - just scrape it off.  Ditto on bread.  If something smells nasty, dump it.  Just basic common sense rules.  And it's perfectly safe to eat something after its "best before" date - it just may not be quite as tasty as it once was, that's all.  And putting stuff in the freezer effectively puts its use-by date on pause - so if it had three days to run when you put it in, it will still have three days to run when you take it out. In these straitened times, we can ill afford to throw food away unnecessarily.