Shelf Life

Hi readers, Kerry and Emily here and this week I, Kerry am writing about a recent shopping trip!

Last week I bought a chicken as a friend was coming over the next day to make a chicken curry. However, when I got home and looked more closely at the packet, I noticed the ‘use by’ was that same day.

So, I went back to the shop, where a nice lady assistant replaced it without any problems.

This experience got me thinking about how long food sits around, say in warehouses, before it reaches the shelves; how long the shelf life is for different products; and how far some things travel before they even reach the UK.

Even when something is on the shelf, how long can it sit there? Obviously, some foods have a shelf life for years, but fresh foods not so.  Also, isn’t sometimes it less about the ‘use-by’ date on a packet, but more about using our common sense and simply smelling it - milk and fish being good examples of this!  

That got me thinking too. If you picked an apple from a tree in England, how long would it stay fresh in your kitchen or fridge? Compare that to apples travelling all the way from places like South Africa. How do they stay fresh for so long, and what do they put on them to keep them fresh?

All this made me wonder how supermarkets decide what to stock too – more stock on average days, less on sunny days when everyone is out having fun, or terrible weather when we want to stay home? If they do, well very good luck with planning anything around our British weather – like most of us, it has a mind of its own!  

The writers of the Our View column are supported in their editing by People First Dorset - a charity led and run by people with learning disabilities with support from staff