I feel like you can generally tell if things have gone off. If they haven't, I'm going to keep using them regardless of what the use-by says.
Here, literally everything that's consumable has to have a use-by. New Jersey, for some reason, mandated that any edible product--up to and including *bottled water*, for god's sake--have a use-by date on it, despite the fact that it's expected that most of these foods could be shelf-stable for years and suffer no ill effects. Since obviously no one's going to go to the trouble of making special labels for Jersey, everything is marked as "use by [two or three years from now]". Drives me crazy.
Regarding the pine nuts, it'd depend for me on how they were kept. I keep most of my nuts in the freezer, and have no problem using them a year, two years, four years later. If they're in a cabinet that has wide swings in temperature or anything like that, I'd expect that they'll go off faster, but you'd be able to taste one and tell they were rancid.
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Date: 2009-09-21 02:33 am (UTC)Here, literally everything that's consumable has to have a use-by. New Jersey, for some reason, mandated that any edible product--up to and including *bottled water*, for god's sake--have a use-by date on it, despite the fact that it's expected that most of these foods could be shelf-stable for years and suffer no ill effects. Since obviously no one's going to go to the trouble of making special labels for Jersey, everything is marked as "use by [two or three years from now]". Drives me crazy.
Regarding the pine nuts, it'd depend for me on how they were kept. I keep most of my nuts in the freezer, and have no problem using them a year, two years, four years later. If they're in a cabinet that has wide swings in temperature or anything like that, I'd expect that they'll go off faster, but you'd be able to taste one and tell they were rancid.