During the height of food shortages last March-ish, people panic-purchased foods they'll never eat, including dried and canned beans. My husband and I do eat a lot of beans (no meat or dairy) so seeing those shelves wiped out was quite bizarre.
My pantry was well stocked then and remains so. Like others here, I worked in a grocery store for a time and rotate my stock.
@hollydolly, I freeze whole wheat flours, brown rice, quinoa, and other grains that might get rancid after a while. I buy all-purpose and bread flours in 25 pound bags. They keep for at least a year without being frozen and I go through about 75 lbs of each per year, so no issue there. The bags get dumped into large airtight containers in my garage.
Expiration dates are a joke. As it happens, there are no guidelines anywhere... each manufacturer decides what date to put on their products. You can Google it...
Food producers try to figure out when the product might suffer some erosion of quality, but it's just a guess and isn't an indicator of safety (though that's how people interpret it). Let's face it, food producers benefit when consumers repurchase foods because their own supply is past those dates.
I've eaten plenty of food past expiration date with no health consequences whatsoever. Meat or dairy are a different issue, but canned goods, pastas, and other packaged goods are fine well past their "best before" dates. Obviously, anything we eat should pass the appearance, smell and taste of both packaging and product before consumption, but that applies regardless whether it has passed the stamped date.
