'Sell By' Dates Aren't Set in Stone
“Clearly nothing bad happened on the "sell by" date... Change the little date counter on the machine and they'd live longer. It was that simple.”
I was explaining my recent procedures to a friend of mine the other day, and she said, "So you're going to live?" I think I mumbled something like, "Yeah, at least for a while longer." Her question caught me totally off guard. I guess it shouldn't have. But I just hadn't been thinking about last week's procedures in that way, that they would decide life or death for me. I just thought of them as another part of the process. I'd have them, recover, and then deal with the next round. One step forward, two steps back, three steps forward, it gets confusing after a while.
Back in high school and college, I worked summers in a big commercial bakery for one of the major supermarket chains. I would take my friends into their stores, point at the hamburger buns lined up in their golden glory, and say proudly, "I made all those." As I remember, they were all singularly unimpressed. It was hard work, actually more like manufacturing than cooking, but it paid for college, and that counted. What does this have to do with cancer? I'm getting there.
When some items like sweet rolls or muffins were packaged, the bags were sealed with a little plastic clip. You still see them on baked goods at the store. They were color-coded, telling what day the item had been baked, and had a date stamped on them. That was the "sell by" date, the day after which they were supposed to be removed from the shelves. No one really knew what would happen to them on that day if they were still sitting there. Spontaneous combustion? Dissolving in smoke like a Mission: Impossible tape?
Every once in a while I'd fill in at the warehouse, if the hamburger buns were done for the day. And that's when I learned a shocking secret. OK, not that shocking. If some products didn't make it out fast enough, and their shelf-life expired, we'd simply take off the old clips, run them through the machine again, give them new clips of a different color and extend their life by a couple of weeks. Just by passing them through the clipping machine. Clearly nothing bad happened on the "sell by" date, or apparently even weeks later. I remember doing this to one batch a couple of times. Change the little date counter on the machine and they'd live longer. It was that simple.
So that's closer to the way I look at the procedures I just had. They didn't decide whether I'm going to live or die. They just extended my shelf-life a little bit. Gave me some more time. And I can live with that.
7:05 AM ET | 08-15-2007 | permalink
