Breakfast has always been a non-existent "meal" for me. For many years, I subsisted on 4-5 cups of coffee as my breakfast. The last few years, I added energy bars with my daily coffee as the morning "meal." However, I've been consistently trying to make an effort of eating something more substantial for breakfast. The last several weeks I've been on an oatmeal kick, adding in fruits, raisins, and occasionally peanut butter to make it a bit more palatable.
This morning I was in a rush and running late. I had not made oatmeal the night before, so I just picked up an oatmeal raisin Luna bar. After doing the morning chores at the kennel, I went to sit and eat my energy bar. I noticed it tasted different, kind of stale which was odd. After eating about half of it, I looked at the wrapper and saw this:
If you can't read the date, it says: 07 JAN10
I was naturally kind of shocked. I know expiration deals aren't that big of a deal with energy bars and most do last longer than the best sell by date (one reason why many people sell them on ebay), however, over two years is a little old in my opinion. And on top of that, this was in a grocery store. How could an energy bar over two years old even be on the shelf? This makes me slightly paranoid that I'm going to need to check all my expiration dates now. (I do with refrigerated and bread items which spoil faster)
So you may wonder what I did with the energy bar. Yes, I confess, I ate it. It was the only thing I had, and I was hungry. I figured that if I didn't have any unusual symptoms within a few hours, I was probably okay. You also may being wonder what does an expired energy bar taste like? It's quite dry and stale and not worth eating.
EDIT: So basically, this energy stale bar tasted like crap and was not expired! I guess I thought since it tasted so awful, it must have been expired and read the label incorrectly. See this is what happens when you don't eat a good breakfast. ;-)
5 comments:
Glad I'm not the only one that does stuff like that. My brain seems to have gone on strike recently. Was trying to add up 12 plus 9 earlier, and was getting nothing. Must be old age!
Lola x
This could make for an interesting psychology experiment, would you really have thought it tasted that bad if you hadn't thought it was expired? It's impossible to know. I saw one study where people refused to eat cookies because the sealed cookie package had touched a sealed package of tampons (which were of course unused and sterile), just thinking something is associated with something that could ever possibly be unclean is enough to turn people off.
LOL. By the way, I hate it when candy bars use an indecipherable code to indicate packaging date instead of printing the damn expiration date.
No worries, I had to stop and think which way to read the label - very counterintuitive.
If it makes you feel better, the euro vs US style of day-month-year vs month-day-year causes problems all the time. Both of my brothers were born in Europe, and when we tried to register brother A (born on April 12) for kindergarten, at first they said he wasn't qualified because they read 12/4/93 on his birth certificate as December 4.
Thanks for the comments, though I'm still feeling quite silly for reading it wrong. Normally, I don't have that problem, but like Cammy said, I think there was something psychological with it. Had I not looked at the label, I probably would have brushed it off to a really crappy energy bar and not even thought about expiration.
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