Expiration Dates

No matter the item, anything ranging from food, medicine, creams (i.e. Neosporin), tea, flour, etcetera, how do you feel about expiration dates? Meghan is neurotic about sticking to expiration dates, on everything! Should anything be expired, she is not at all merciful on keeping that expired item around. She rarely makes exceptions.

Last week Jeff was out of town and Meghan went on a rampage around the house. She took the time to clean out anything and everything that was expired. Crazy enough, 24 things from our medicine cupboard alone (everything from old Rx's, OTC, Cough Syrup, Neosporin, sunscreen...list keeps going) were expired and therefore thrown out. We're talking things from 2005 and others that just barely expired. As you can tell cleaning out that particular cupboard was long overdue. This is the one area of the house Meghan has neglected. Now of course she hasn't used anything that has been expired but would simply put it back because she knew this was going to be a major project area to get it all "up to code" by her standards. It's now been de-cluttered and everything expired is gone. Feels good to finally have that all cleared out. After that project was completed, Meghan preceded to continue this task and go through the kitchen. Normally with her being so exact when it comes to expiration dates, our kitchen is always up to code. However, the day before, her mother gave us some food items since she is moving. Meghan decided to go through everything in the kitchen again. Did you know Tea has an expiration date? There were about two dozen boxes of tea that were expired. This was tea Meghan's mom gave us. Her mother is a tea fanatic. If you ever need tea and are at their house, you can usually do your tea shopping there because there is just about every variety in stock in her pantry...not exaggerating here. Back to the topic at hand. Seeing that her mom is moving out of the country in three weeks, one person cannot go through the amount of tea she had on hand, so lucky us, we got it all. Perfect timing too, because our tea stash was almost completely out and it was time to replenish. Unfortunately come to find out, it was all expired, as was everything else she gave us. Of course, what did Meghan do with all the goodies? That's right folks, she threw it all out!!! This is something that is normal for Meghan, but Jeff, is still working on getting used to process because to him it is wasteful. Megs does this though because 1) there are expiration dates for a reason, that date is when the manufacturer considers the product to be unsuitable for consumption and 2) when something is expired, the product may become ineffective, the taste can be compromised and things may be growing you don't want to consume (i.e. mold). Therefore we throw out anything once it has reached its expiration date if we have not used it all by then. I mean hopefully you all have heard how important it is to throw out boxed cake and pancake mixes if expired because if you use past expiration date, consuming it can be very dangerous. A particular mold has been found to grow in those expired products and it can cause life-threatening allergic reaction. Craziness, right? Please go check your kitchen to make sure you don't have any cake, pancake mixes that are expired in your pantry.

Is anyone else this exact about getting rid of products once they've reached their expiration date?