this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I’m with you as far as “humans deserve food that won’t make ‘em sick, regardless of circumstances” but expired food can often still be fine - you just are outside of the manufacturer’s guarantee that it should still be good.
When I gotta choose between “expired food” and “nothing”, I choose to give expired food the visual + sniff + small taste test before consuming.
I'm sure they meant best before, not expired.
Expiration dates are arbitrary estimates of the goodness of food.
If it smells bad or looks bad, don't eat it. It's that simple.
You also need to think about the kind of food qe're talking about. Milk has a date after which the product my start to turn and curdle. Dried pasta has a date after which... the quality might suffer a little? Fruit goes mushy and baked goods mold. The dates put on these items are designed to limit liability of the company(s) providing them. You don't put 4 weeks on a bottle of milk thinking it will turn at 4 weeks and 1 day, you put 3 weeks on it knowing that it gives you leeway, not only for time, but also quality of storage. If you buy a bottle of milk but it takes a couple hours to get it back into refrigeration, of course it will affect the life span. And no one is talking about giving away bloated canned goods. Dented cans are most often sent back to the warehouse, especially if the dent is on a rim or seal.
The printed expiration date is not quite an exact time when the food is actually expired. I'm sure most people have the sense to tell if a free gallon of milk is good or not a week after the printed expiration date.
It's not like food products immediately expire on midnight of a printed date. Free food is free food yo. Some can last way longer than the printed date if stored properly.
And even if a loaf of bread is marginally starting to go stale doesn't mean much of shit, as long as it ain't gone outright moldy people will gladly eat it.
And BTW, that tends to be the nature of the food that donation centers give away anyways, food that's just past the expiration date.
Expiration and best before are two completely different things.
You’re talking about best before dates, not expiration dates.
Man, we have a local gas station that'll throw away 30 or more fresh cooked bacon/sausage egg and cheese biscuits at 10:10am, just because breakfast ended at 10am.
They refuse to sell them after exactly 10am, they refuse to give them away, and they throw them all out into a locked dumpster.
As if the food somehow rotted away at exactly 10am, hell it was still hot! Wasted food my dude, because of laws and an arbitrary set time.
I'll let you in on a little secret. Those best by dates are a lie. They only are there to encourage throwing out good food and buying more. It's a planned obsolescence.
There’s expiry dates and best before dates, people need to stop conflating them.