Paris English Forums

According to the sanitary legislation, the products with expired dates are subject to immediate removal from the store's shelves. The expired products are often given to animals/pets. What really happens is that supermarkets don't hasten to give them to animals. In most EU countries, about 4% of the products in markets are expired.
If the herring is expired, it is frozen, if chickens expire, they are given to gastronomy. It's an ordinary practice. The most often expired products are diary products. Usually the consumer takes them without paying attention to the date. For selling it quicker, the expired production is placed in front of all products, while the fresh production stays behind.

Another way for selling the expired production is to change the production date. Many stores have in their cellars special devices for counterfeiting the production date by using special ink. It doesn't take much time to clean the former stamp and put a new one.

The product packed in polyethylene are easy to put in a new pelicle with a new label. If they don't manage to clear the production date, supermarkets are simply covering the date with their bar code.

Expired production is a real threat for the man's health, sometimes ever for life. You may have a food poisoning, which will appear from various bacteria that form inside an expired product.

All this is pretty worrying. How can you avoid all these frauds? By going to the local markets?