By Walt Hickey Have a great weekend! Food Each year, the average American family throws away $1,365 to $2,275 worth of food, and while certainly lots of that is milk that turned or spinach that is no longer corporeal after a week too long in the crisper, a lot of that waste is driven by expiration dates. However, the thing about expiration dates and “best by” dates is that they’re fundamentally invented estimates, and the requirements vary state by state. Some states say milk labels are good for 21 days after bottling, others 14 days, and some states don’t have rules at all and leave it up to manufacturers. A 2013 Harvard study found that a federal standardization of expiration dates would provide an economic value of $1.8 billion a year, with 398,000 tons of unnecessarily wasted food diverted into mouths.