Study: Ignore Milk Sell-By Dates

It happens in kitchens across America: You pull out a carton of milk, glance at the sell-by date, and see that it’s passed. Erring on the side of caution, you drain the milk and toss the carton.

But that date is really just a guideline, not some hard-and-fast moment in time at which the milk goes bad. Often, the milk is very much drinkable after the date and throwing it out is a waste.

And now food scientists at Cornell University are trying to take some of the guesswork out of the process by developing a predictive model for the emergence of spore-forming bacteria that causes milk to go bad. They hope the model will help create guidelines for what date should really be on a carton.

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