The 7 Day Rule

It's May 8th, 2014. In a favorite grocery store, a little while ago, I picked up a package of deli-prepared bean casserole. Bean Casserole is one of my favorite dishes, and I was very excited to find it already made and ready to eat. Then, as always, I checked the label for the expiration date to know how much time was left to safely eat this dish.

Pack Date instead of Expiration Date

Instead, I found a Pack Date. That's the calendar date on which the food was cooked and packed into the container. A Pack Date is as good as an Expiration Date, although it reads differently. It's part of one important rule about food life-spans : The 7 Day Rule.

The 7 Day Rule is not like the 5 Second Rule. Using 5SR is playing pathogen roulette with your food. There's really no amount of time so short that pathogens can't grab on to dropped food. Never rely on the 5 Second Rule. Always rely on the 7 Day Rule. This rule is an official guideline implemented by every Department of Health in the United States and many foreign countries.

It works like this : All recipes prepared in-house, meaning within the kitchen of a restaurant, facility, or a private home, which combine ingredients, whether raw or previously cooked, have a maximum storage life of seven days from the date and time of the preparation of the first ingredient.

For example : if Bean Casserole is the dish, and the green beans were cooked on May 1st, then May 1st is day one of seven, even though the final assembly and cooking of the casserole doesn't occur until May 6th.

It seems as simple as starting with the Pack Date of May 1st, and adding seven 24 hour increments, yielding an expiration date of May 8th. Get it? From May 1st to May 2nd is day #1. From May 2nd to May 3rd is day #2, and so on until May 7th to the end of May 8th is the seventh and last day. Since I was in the store on may the 8th, there's no problem, right?

But I said, "It seems as simple." It's not. In addition to an expiration date, there's also an expiration time, a specific moment signifying the death of food. There's one more part to the 7 Day Rule. In addition to the required Pack Date, another requirement is the Pack Time.

The Pack Time is the exact time, to the second, at which the proper cooking of the food was finished. The 7 Day Rule begins it's countdown at the Pack Time and ends at the exact same time on the seventh day. In the absence of a Pack Time, like my Bean Casserole, the official policy is to presume the most strict interpretation of a possible preparation time for the given day. That means, for my casserole with no stated pack time, the officially recognized moment of birth will be May 1st, 2014 at 12:00:01AM. Even if the cooking time was late in the afternoon on the 1st, if it didn't get written down, it did not happen.

That really changes things. From 12:00:01AM on May 1st to 12:00:01AM on May 2nd is day #1 and so on until we get to 12:00:01AM on May 8th, the end of day #7.

I was in the store on May 8th at 4PM, hours past the officially recognized last second of the food's lifetime. By the time I got there, the bean casserole had been dead for sixteen hours. Sadly, I did not buy the product.  So, why was it still in the store?

My grocery store of choice is a good one, well managed, well stocked, and the stock well attended. I'll give leeway to the deli manager for being in the process of policing expired stock. The expired casserole just hadn't been removed yet, but by now, at this writing, it probably has.

The point is that we all have to be aware enough of the condition of the food we consume to watch out for ourselves. Deli managers, or any managers, can't do it all for us. At least if we know the 7 Day Rule, and Pack Dates, and Pack Times, an expired bean casserole won't be the reason we expire.

Thanks

Andy Bozeman

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