The United States throws away between 30 and 40% of the food it produces every year. Much of that loss begins not in the field or the store but in the kitchen, with a date printed on a package. That date is about to carry a different weight.
California has enacted the first state law in the country to standardize the wording on food labels. That change arrives just as summer fills refrigerators with produce that spoils fast and gets tossed faster.
Under the new California law
For years, most packaged food carried a jumble of phrases: sell by, best by, use by, enjoy by. Few of them meant what shoppers assumed. The new law, which makes California the first state to act on the guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture more than a decade ago, cuts the options to two. “Use by” means a genuine safety cutoff, while “Best if used by” indicates peak quality with the food still safe to eat after the date passes. The “sell by” label, written for store inventory rather than for the people buying the food, is banned outright.
The stakes are larger than tidier packaging. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that food loss and waste amount to about 133 billion pounds of food supply, worth roughly $162 billion a year. About 20% of household food waste traces directly to confusion over expiration dates, Nick Lapis of Californians Against Waste told NPR. California alone discards roughly 6 million tons of food each year, close to a fifth of everything the state sends to landfills. Retailers pull products weeks before they spoil, and food banks turn away safe donations, all because a date on a label gets read as a deadline.
There is no federal standard forcing consistency, which is how the patchwork of phrases grew in the first place. Each manufacturer chose its own wording, and shoppers were left to guess whether a date meant danger or merely a drop in flavor. California’s version removes the guesswork within its borders, and because national brands rarely print one label for a single state, the standard is expected to spread to shelves elsewhere.
Summer raises the stakes
Produce is where the confusion does the most damage, and summer is when it piles up. Most fresh fruits and vegetables carry no federal date label at all, so the instinct to trust a printed date does not even apply. What shortens their life is heat.
Warm kitchens and warm transport speed spoilage. Ripening runs faster in heat, so a week of shelf life becomes a few days, and a bowl of tomatoes left on a hot counter can go from firm to soft overnight. The same heat is squeezing the supply; rising temperatures cut crop yields and raise prices, and the Harvard Salata Institute notes that a 1% drop in a major global crop can move prices several times that much. The USDA Economic Research Service forecasts grocery prices to rise about 2.8% in 2026, which means every wasted tomato or bunch of basil can cost more than it did a year ago.
Summer also invites overbuying, as farmers markets and garden gluts leave counters piled with more zucchini and stone fruit than a household can cook before it turns. A surplus like that becomes a 30-minute casserole or a compost. The waste is not a failure of willpower, but a mismatch between how much good produce arrives at once and how fast it goes bad.
New rules for summer produce
The first rule is to read dates for what they are. On packaged goods, “best if used by” is a quality note, not an eviction notice. On loose produce, there is no date to obey, only the evidence of the fruit or vegetable in hand.
The second rule is to buy on the season rather than the label. Produce picked at peak ripeness travels less and lasts longer once home. What is abundant in August, the corn, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and summer squash stacked at every market, is also what is cheapest and best right now, which makes the season a more reliable shopping list than habit.
The third rule is to store for the heat rather than against it. Basil and tomatoes belong on the counter, not in a cold refrigerator that turns them mealy. Berries last longer unwashed until the moment they are eaten, or baked into a strawberry spoon cake, the day they start to soften. Leafy greens hold up wrapped loosely and kept dry.
The fourth rule is to cook toward the surplus instead of around it. A pile of eggplant starting to wrinkle turns into baked eggplant parmesan rather than compost. Softening tomatoes becomes sauce. Cooking on the produce’s timeline instead of the calendar’s is what keeps a market haul from ending up in the bin.
The fifth rule is to use the freezer as a pause button. Berries, corn cut from the cob and blanched green beans hold for months, which breaks the link between a glut on Saturday and a bin full of waste by Wednesday. Herbs that are about to wilt can be frozen in oil and dropped straight into a pan later.
Where the cost lands
The California law will take years to move fully through the supply chain, and other states are watching before they follow. In the meantime, the arithmetic sits with the person holding the grocery bag. Much of what gets thrown out this summer will not have spoiled at all. It will have been misread, chilled when it wanted the counter or left on the counter when it wanted the cold. That is the one line on the grocery bill a shopper can still change.
Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju is a food and travel writer and a global food systems expert based in Seattle. She has lived in or traveled extensively to over 60 countries, and shares stories and recipes inspired by those travels on Urban Farmie.