Does oat milk REALLY go bad in 7-10 days?

[Tyndmyr]

Who said anything about abusing anything? I'm saying it's a proven fact people will throw stuff way as soon as expiry date come up because well it clearly says this date right? Can't eat it after that.

In some cases, it's a liability concern. A restaurant doesn't want to be known as serving old food, so they will generally encourage workers to toss post dated stuff. Even my local food bank requires that everything be at least a bit before expiration, because they throw away expired food, and need a bit of time to give it out.

There are legal protections for things like charity in this case, but of course people want to err on the side of caution. You don't *have* to, and I casually ignore dates where I know they are off myself, but I certainly don't fault those organizing food on a larger scale for not wanting to check every thing, or have a risk of something being off. There's some inherent waste involved, but in service to keeping people fed and healthy, it's not the worst thing ever.

As for stuff expiring more rapidly than usual, that can be a result of supply chain disruptions, so something spent more time than usual in transit. Grocery stores do not generally want this, and neither do shippers, but accidents happen. Covid caused a lot of lingering complications here, and of course there are issues like the Ohio derailment that I'm sure also caused delays. Nobody really wants food to go bad, but life is imperfect. Sometimes you will see deals on food that is approaching expiration. My local supermarkets often do deals on meat that has been on the shelf a bit. It's fine so long as you immediately cook it up, but if you let it sit in the fridge, good odds at least one package will go off. It might be a good deal if you've got the time to do that right away, but it's a reasonable tradeoff, not any sort of conspiracy.

I highly recommend a garden if you want truly fresh produce. Nothing like it. Mine's cranking out food for me this year, and being able to just grab stuff off the vine is noticeably fresher and tastier than store stuff. I added some oddities this year, including a coffee bush that seems to be doing very well.

The way I read it wasn't policies of the grocery store chains or government policies. I read it as policies of the produce suppliers the grocery stores in that area buy from.

I would expect that chains are standardized, using the same suppliers for everything. Works better at scale, and it matches what I've seen. One Safeway carries pretty much the same goods as another Safeway for the most part. However, I wouldn't be surprised if poorer areas tended to have less upscale chains. Nobody's gonna put a Whole Foods in a low income housing area, yknow? Probably Dollar Trees and such instead. The Dollar Tree probably has cheaper suppliers, on average, than Whole Foods.

Just a standard economic effect, not really anybody setting out to do it. Richer areas tend to have nicer stores of all sorts, that's just the nature of wealth.

As for why a given chain runs out or not, eh, that really comes down to supply chain management. Walmart in particular, is notorious for focusing on this, and rose to power on the backs of an efficient distribution system. Not every chain controls their own back end. Some have long term contracts, others a patchwork of shorter term stuff. The truck driver shortage hit hard for a bit there, and I would hazard a guess that the companies with less stable arrangements suddenly noticed. This can affect suppliers, distributors, just all depends on the market how things shake out....but those with a solid in house system were probably least affected...even if they were not the most expensive location.