[SentraSE-R]

Most expiration dates on food relate to quality, not safety. The bakery or chip manufacturer doesn't want its reputation sullied by stale food on the shelves. So its distributors and route men dump out-of-date food into the trash. That food is safe to eat, of course.

Other foods, like egg sandwiches, milk, bratwurst, and cottage cheese, are likely bacterially spoiled when they reach expiration dates, and are unsafe to eat. Since some food poisoning bacteria can produce odorless and tasteless toxins within a matter of hours (others just multiply to dangerous levels), any of those products can be unsafe if mishandled, even within their expiration dates.

I've posed the scenario before, where a customer picks up an egg sandwich or a package of bratwurst and heads to the checkout counter. His wife calls him on the cell phone or barges in the door with an emergency, so he puts the food on a nearby shelf, unrefrigerated, but never returns. Hours later, a store clerk finds the food and tosses it in the garbage. Along comes a scavenger, puzzled at the waste of a perfectly good egg sandwich. Two hours or three days later, he gets Montezuma's Revenge. If it's two hours later, he realizes it's food poisoning. If it's three days later, he'll never connect it to the egg sandwich. The incubation time of many food poisoning organisms is 36, 48, up to 72 hours. It's an old story, but it bears repeating every time a dumpster diver implies his is a safe practice.