We live in a country where mothers go to bed hungry so their children can have something, anything, to nibble-on in the morning. Entire communities survive on the mercy of food parcels and soup kitchens. Traced back to the source, there are more funerals for hunger and malnutrition than there will ever be for so-called “expired food.”
Millions of tons of bread, milk, and maize get trashed each year – not because it’s rotten, but because the date on the packet says so. This isn’t really about food safety. It’s about legal-safety and profit-safety. Big companies don’t want to risk lawsuits, and supermarkets don’t want the admin. Protecting themselves, not the hungry.
It’s gatekeeping; plain and simple. Expiry dates are supposed to be for our wellbeing, but in reality, they cover backsides and keep brands ‘clean’.
Just think about this: Every day in South Africa, nearly 10 million learners are fed by school nutrition schemes (Department of Basic Education, 2023), and tens if not hundreds of thousands more, eat from soup kitchens across the country. Most don’t have fancy certificates or strict “phytosanitary” standards, just care and common sense. If expired food and lack of paperwork were really deadly, why aren’t the kids and the elderly dying like flies? The real danger isn’t food, a day past its date – it’s hunger and being denied a meal thanks to corporate “concern.”
We worry about yesterday’s bread, but the real killers – hunger and dirty water – get no headlines. Over 9 million people die every year from hunger worldwide (World Food Programme, 2021). Here at home, it’s a silent struggle in rural villages, city townships, and quite frankly, everywhere else for that matter.
Over 1.4 million people globally die just from drinking unsafe water (World Health Organization, 2023). No expiry date on that, unfortunately.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about telling people to eat or drink obviously rotten stuff. For ALL the centuries – including virtually the whole of the 20th century – common sense was our label. If it looked off, smelled off, or tasted off, you spat it out and threw it away. Self-preservation didn’t need a sticker. Maybe our common sense has simply expired?
We’re told, “It’s for your safety, Baba. Where’s the proof of mass deaths from expired food – food that would have continued to sit on chaotic shelves – eaten by consumers too-sloppy-to-know or care? Meanwhile, people are dropping dead from hunger and thirst literally, every day. That’s the real crisis.
If it looks like scam, smells like a scam, cooks like a scam and tastes like a scam; it’s a scam!
And the irony? The same “caring” supermarkets that won’t sell food past ‘the date’ happily donate their “freshly expired” stock to orphanages and the destitute. Kanti which one is it? Is the food safe or not?
If it’s still safe enough for the conscience-appeasement, why is it “too risky” for the silent, unrepresented majority? If it’s truly dangerous, why give it to children in orphanages, and brag about it?
The next time you see food being trashed, ask yourself – safe for who, exactly?
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