Malaysians throw away a genuinely alarming amount of perfectly edible food every year, and a huge part of the reason comes down to one simple misunderstanding, confusing a best before date with an actual expiry date.
Best before dates are a quality indicator rather than a safety deadline, meaning food may lose some of its crispness, flavour, or freshness after that date without automatically becoming unsafe to eat, and the better approach is to rely on your own senses, sight, smell, and taste, to judge whether something unopened and shelf-stable is still good. Expiry dates work completely differently. They are a genuine safety cutoff, and food past that date should be thrown away rather than risked, since the concern there is harmful bacteria rather than just reduced quality.
The scale of the confusion is bigger than most people realise. Research studies looking at Malaysian household consumers found that most respondents threw away pantry, refrigerated, and frozen food as soon as it passed its labelled date, even when the food was still perfectly edible, with many discarding items within a day of the printed date regardless of what type of label it actually was. Malaysians reportedly discard around 15,000 tonnes of food this way, and a large share of it, roughly 60 percent by some estimates, was still fit to eat.
Some countries have started tackling this at the retail level by removing unnecessary best before labels entirely from naturally durable items like potatoes and apples, nudging shoppers to trust their own senses instead of a printed date. Malaysia has not gone that far yet, which puts more responsibility on individual households to actually understand the difference.
My Opinion
I used to be guilty of this too, tossing biscuits or canned stuff the second the date passed without a second thought, purely out of habit rather than any real food safety logic. Once you actually understand that best before is about quality and not safety, it changes how you shop and how much you waste. Doesn't mean you should eat anything questionable just because the label allows it, use your nose and your common sense too, but a lot of good food is ending up in the bin over nothing more than a misunderstanding.
Ronny M (ronny76netstuff@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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