This may seem a bit of a silly question,but is it ok to eat margarine and butter which is out of date? My margarine and butter both taste fine but the use by date was December 2011.

Personally i wouldnt eat it as it could be rancid. I think you have to be careful with all dairy food.

It smells ok, maybe I should get rid of it at a later time. I don't like to waste things though and thought if it tastes alright then I won't have to spend money (which I don't have much of) buying another one. I'm a bit tight

That's why they switched to use by dates so people would know when it was no longer safe, even though manufacturers don't want to poison their customers they do want to maximise profits so I no longer eat stuff past the use by date as it will be at best iffy at worst make me sick.

Have you smelt rancid butter? Trust me, it's not a smell you forget in a hurry and you would definitely notice if your butter had gone off!

OP, as long as it smells ok and tastes ok and it's been kept refrigerated you should be fine. Margarine has so many weird chemicals and preservatives in it anyway that it'll probably still be good to eat in about a decade. As for the butter, just give it a sniff before you use it, if it starts to smell sour at all, chuck it!

Ok thanks for the advice

I read somewhere a couple of months back about a propsed stop to this 'use by' date rubbish.... which it is IMO. People didn't have use by dates years ago... they used common sense! Smell, how the food looked etc

I'm all for it! It's ridiculous the amount of food that gets wasted because of a 'use by' date! I eat/drink things way past their so called dates of going off! Obviously I'm careful with certain things but as i said above it's simply common sense!!

I certainly am quite happy to let a good cheese go a couple of days past its date - that's when it is at its best in my opinion

If it smells ok I don't see too much of a problem

Weeks or months is best for cheese

I found a bag of mustard seeds years and years past their use-by date. so as an experiment, I put some in a small dish on a wet paper towel. They all sprouted just fine. Surely there's no way these are past their useful edible life.

'Use by' dates are for short life products & are usually to do with avoiding food poisoning.

'Best Before' dates are for longer life products & are usually to do with quality, not safety.

Ignoring Best Before' dates is usually perfectly ok.

Ignoring 'Use by' dates can often be ok, especially as manufacturers usually build in a safety margin, but it is possible for food to look & smell perfectly ok, but still be dangerous.

Can you give an example of where a food looks and smells OK but is dandgerous?

I would have thought use by dates will have been brought in as more processed food becomes available.


I don't know what chemicals they add to them but they look and smell ok but I have been poorly after eating out of date ready meals.

If you only use unprocessed food (which I try to nowadays) it is generally easy to see if veggies, cream, butter etc are no longer edible.

quite often with meat.

Yes, the once opened consume within three days is a nonsense. As is a (very large btw) bag of carrots having *eat within 2 days* on it.

Early in March I finished a large bag of potatoes I had bought at one-quarter the normal price on Boxing Day - they actually had 26 Dec stamped on them.

I'm still here!

Not as long as yours, but the potatoes I bought on Christmas Eve were not finished until the first week of February. They were fine too.

I never go by the use by dates....never lol As another poster has pointed out, I have bought potatoes with a use by date of a weeks time and still been using them after a month. If they aren't spongey then I'll use them. Same with most things, if it smells okay, looks okay then I use it.

I'm not really fussy but i have to admit i would probably be giving butter with a Dec 2011 date a miss. Saying that i have been buying some KP Readly Salted Peanuts at a local shop with a use by date of 10th Feb 2012 and they are fine (1/3 of the original price as well).

Incorrectly prepared fugu?

The only thing I use dates on food for is to know which one to open if I have multiple of the same thing. I have no problems eating stuff that is past its' date if it looks and smells OK.

sorry, been away for a couple of days.

An example of this is where bacterial growth results in the generation of toxins in the food before spoilage of the food is noticeable.

This can happen e.g. with the growth of Staphylococcus aureus, this bacteria produces a toxin which is colourless, odourless & also heat stable - so cooking won't get rid of it.

I have a tin of Homepride Curry Cook-In Sauce in our main food cupboard. It's been in there for a while now. We got it
from my Aunt who was clearing out her cupboard for a kitchen re-fit, but even then, the product might have been past
it's Best Before Date. The actual date in question is on the base of the can, but it's badly faded and can't be read.

As the tin is unopened, but no way of knowing the Best Before Date, would you reckon it's still be OK to use?

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As a footnote ... we also have an unopened Bi-centennial bottle of Guinness in our lounge cabinet from 1959!

Here are the aforementioned items in picture form . . .

A Bi-Centennial Bottle of Guinness, and a (possibly out of date) tin of Homepride Curry Cook-In Sauce.

The 1959 Guiness is very likely a bit too mature for consumption by now, but what about the Homepride Curry sauce?

The Guinness is probably worth £25 to a collector -

Ebay listing

Doubt if anyone will buy the Homepride. Not sure their curry sauce was much good when it was first canned

Just rediscovered a gammon joint at the back of the fridge, dated 26 Feb, reduced from £4.65 to £1.00. Smelled and looked OK and is now sitting in the oven. If I never post again, you'll know why!