Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy, and generate 34 millions tons of food waste every year. One way to reduce these numbers is by not strictly adhering to "use-by" dates found on food products. Scott Hurd, the director of the Food Risk Modeling and Policy Lab at Iowa State University tells LiveScience.com, "Officially I have to say, 'Don't use it after the use-by date,' but that's stupid. I use lots of food after the use-by date."




Even the USDA agrees with Hurd and says that use-by dates refer to best quality rather than safety.



There are many factors that can contribute to why a use-by date may actually be different than the date the product should actually be used by. A big factor is how much the product is handled and processed, and this varies by company.



The website Still Tasty, "your ultimate shelf life guide" allows users to enter thousands of products to see about how long they are good for in the refrigerator, freezer and pantry.



The charts below are USDA suggestions for when products are typically good for.

















Story continues below

So, if the dates are just a guideline, how does one know when to eat and when to toss? Well, the powers of sight and scent are good ones - if the product looks okay, and it smells okay, it probably is okay.

Why the Modern Tomato is Flawed: Inside Tomatoland

First let's get one persistent canard out of the way. Yes, the tomato is technically a fruit, not a vegetable, but for purposes of economics the USDA classifies it as a vegetable, and as such it is the second most popular vegetable in the nation after that other burger staple, lettuce. This is surprising in only one respect: A vast majority of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. every year ($5 billion worth), are devoid of the flavor and nutritive value they once had.

Sure, that plant your neighbor gave you that's just beginning to enjoy the summer heat will produce lots of delicious, succulent tomatoes come August or September. But in his new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit, two-time James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook tells us why the modern factory-farmed tomato in most grocery stores is a poster child for nearly everything that is wrong with industrial agriculture. A recent USDA study, he points out, says that the average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has "30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But that modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much sodium."

This is because the tomatoes grown in the fields in and around Immokalee, Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it's not flavor, and it's not nutrition. It's shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder unscathed.

That truck was likely headed to one of the many enormous warehouses in the area, which "force-ripen" the fruit by smothering them with ethylene gas. This process does make them red, but it does not truly ripen them. Thus the sugars are nowhere near as developed as the ones in your back yard will be and the result is the mealy pink baseballs in your grocer's produce section right now.

Our enormous appetite for having pretty much any food available to us at anytime of year has led to a system where yes, you can have a tomato in February, but the cost is a lot more than the $1.25/lb you're likely to pay at your local Wal-Mart. It comes at the cost of enormous environmental damage and shocking worker abuse. It utilizes thousands of migrant workers, some of whom are undocumented, and many of whom live and work in literal slave conditions. And since the muggy lowlands of Florida are not native habitat, a tomato plant there can fall victim to as many as 27 separate insect species and 29 different diseases, necessitating a plethora of chemicals that are as hard on the workers and the land as they are on the pests. Then there's the 31 different fungicides in use. The list goes on.

Tomatoland is based on Estabrook's James Beard Award-winning 2010 article "The Price of Tomatoes," and is an in-depth investigation of what's wrong with the modern tomato (and by extension, modern agriculture). It is vital information that every conscientious eater-and parents of eaters-ought to know. Hopefully, as more people read the book, they will begin to look beyond price, and start considering cost.

I did it again!

Congratulations on completing Century in 30!


You've been awarded a trophy for completing this challenge!

The goal of this Challenge was to travel a total of 100.00 mi..

View this goal/challenge here:

http://classic.mapmyfitness.com/fitness_goal/century_in_30/2011020503

Keep training strong!

-The MapMyFITNESS Team

Why big isn't always beautiful

Here are my thoughts on this subject. When it starts affecting your health, you need to do something about it. You are sore when you walk, your back hurts or you can't walk without breathing deep, something is wrong.

The idea that ‘big is beautiful’ has been adopted by some individuals to celebrate the fact that, by society’s standards, they are considered fat. They don’t accept the negative connotations of being fat and are proactive in their stance that it is possible to be both big and beautiful, as they are not mutually exclusive. It is clearly a positive thing that fat people are fighting back against the discrimination and bullying they often face, rather than simply accepting their victim status. However, in being so accepting of their weight, obese individuals are less likely to do something to tackle their weight, and thus could find their health suffering as a result.

Consequently, it is clear that big isn’t always beautiful, especially when it becomes harder for a person to leave the house because they are carrying too much weight. When an individual’s weight renders them immobile they won’t be able to go to work or socialise with friends, and thus it can be an isolating experience. If a person lets their weight reach such a stage it is clear that how they look isn’t as of much importance as their physical health and mental well-being. If they are isolated they may stop caring about their appearance, anyway, since they have no reason to even bother getting dressed. Indeed, the heavier an individual gets the more difficult it becomes to find clothes that fit, and often the clothes that they can fit into tend not to be the most flattering styles.

Western society may be somewhat obsessed with skinniness, but this doesn’t alter the fact that obesity is actually on the increase. More and more people are developing a weight problem and finding themselves being labelled as obese. It is therefore not such a bad thing that some people who are carrying extra weight reject the negative labels placed on them, as doing so can help them build self-esteem even when they are continually being told that they should lose weight.

However, propagating the notion that big is beautiful does not address the health implications of being obese, and thus it may be good for people’s mental health to come to terms with their weight and to value themselves more, but it doesn’t alter the fact that being obese means a person is more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, and is at greater risk of developing cancer and diabetes, as well as gallbladder problems and osteoarthritis. Being obese can put a great deal of strain on an individual’s joints and make walking painful, and if they are unable to do any exercise this could simply exacerbate their weight problem.

Big can be beautiful in the sense that a fat person can be just as attractive as a skinny person, even in a society where being slim is regarded as the ideal, but it isn’t always the case when it starts to affect their ability to socialise and their mental and physical health. It is for this reason that perpetuating the idea that big is beautiful doesn’t really help those struggling to keep their weight down.

Summer is here!

At least the temp feels that way. I've been putting in some big miles and weight is dropping!