The author came across a yogurt that had expired months ago in the office fridge. She found: The dairy product is a food Methuselah.
Symbolic picture: A boy eats a yoghurt in front of the open refrigerator door.www.imago-images.de
I’m one of those people for whom sustainability doesn’t stop at the expiry date. While my children always want to throw everything that has expired, as they call it, in the garbage, I say: First of all, see if you can still eat it. You believe any data imprints, I trust my senses.
These days, I was plagued by a thirst for coffee in the office due to tiredness. Since I’m only able to drink coffee with milk, I opened the office refrigerator. The contents: a half-empty and unfortunately open Cremant bottle, a bottle of kefir, several beers. And a Greek-style yogurt flavored with blackberries. My eyes stayed on the yoghurt. It had expired in mid-July, now it was mid-October. That settled the ownership issue, I thought. Anyone who neglects their yoghurt in this way has forfeited the right to it. Anyway, I didn’t see anything wrong with owning it.
The touch of nausea after eating the yoghurt was of an intellectual nature
More difficult is the question of perishable or shelf life. What would happen to me three months past the best-before date if I pulled off the lid? I was ready for anything.
But it looked good, it smelled good and, yes, I have to admit, it tasted good too. Or at least completely normal. After consumption I had a touch of nausea, but it was purely mental. After all, I had been eating yogurt well over three, maybe four months old, counting the time between when it was made and when it reached its sell-by date. But I was plagued by completely different thoughts: What kind of poisons do you have to treat food with so that it doesn’t spoil after such a long time? A quick internet search taught me otherwise and questioned my approach: Yoghurts, if they are unopened, can last not only for months, but for years – up to five! – survive before they go bad. Yoghurt is, so to speak, the Methuselah of food – if you let it. The rightful owner should get in touch if he hasn’t long since decomposed.