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| http://youarebeingmanipulated.com/fair-food/ I agree...it is amazing how much food is thrown away, just to make people buy more to replace it.
By the way, even the humble expiration date can be manipulated. Interestingly enough, no one regulates expiration date (with some exception, like milk and baby foods in some states). Essentially, the manufacturers are free to put whatever they think is appropriate in terms of expiration dates. Even the language is up for grabs: a few years ago, most expiration dates were called, stunningly, expiration dates. Lately, you will notice that the verbiage is very different – “best by”, for example, or “freshest before”. The issue is that most foods are actually designed to last a long time, and even when they get old they lose flavor – they don’t become health hazards. But since we’ve all been conditioned to check the expiration date, we tend to throw away any food that has passed its ‘best before’ date. We tend to throw away 14% of our food, mostly because of expiration dates. That’s a lot – around $600 a year for the average household.
So where’s the manipulation? Well, if you throw away something, you tend to need to replace it. So, theoretically, if you throw something away more frequently… Can you see where this is going? Manufacturers used to focus on creating foods with long expiration dates, so that supermarkets and consumers could stock them for longer. But a few of them realized in time that shorter expiration dates would have an interesting benefit – consumers would, on average, throw away the food faster, and hence need replacements more often, which would mean more sales. And while there are obvious penalties for making an expiration date too long (the food loses flavor), there are few downsides for shortening the date.
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Jim Rogers off his rocker? from Mish
