Lileks: Is it best to ignore 'best by' labels?

Everyone who's dealt with an older parent about their cupboard hits this point: You find something expired.

Mom says it's fine.

You point out that these cloves expired the day before the first moon landing.

Mom says that if you throw it out, next week she'll be cooking something that calls for cloves. Maybe, Mom, but the recipe probably won't call for Nixon-era cloves. These are fossils now. There are bay leaves back here that need carbon dating to find out their age. There's turmeric whose label says it was packed in ancient Sumer.

You can avoid the conversation if you use your new-you January self-improvement energy to cast out the expired elements in your pantry with swift and pitiless determination. I do this every January. I find soup I bought last winter, thinking it'll be cold, someone will have a cold, or it'll be cold and we have colds, and everyone will thank me for having enough chicken soup to fill a bathtub. In fact, let's fill the bathtub with chicken soup. Topical Broth Therapy.

But dang our robust immune systems: never happens. So the soup is expired. It's probably still good, but do you want to risk noodle poisoning, or spend a night gripping the commode because the celery had turned?

It's not like you weren't warned. The date said "Best before 01 06 24," and what did you do, you said, "Well, its 12:05 a.m. on Jan. 7, so technically it's out of date, but it's not like the chicken in the can is hooked up to the national atomic clock and goes rotten after midnight."

In the pantry I found a bag of croutons that had an expiration date of 12/22/22. No doubt they'd gone stale.

But how could you tell? Croutons are born stale. It is their essential nature. You find croutons in a fifth dynasty Egyptian tomb, you can toss them with some greens and they're good.

Which leads me to another question that I hope will nag you for the rest of the day: Why aren't croutons a stand-alone snack food? You see someone digging through a bag and popping them in their mouth, and your first thought is, "Whoa, hold up there. Space them out with some verdant romaine, pal. Can't yin without the yang. What, you going to glug some 1000 Island straight from the bottle and call that a smoothie? There are rules! There are specific salad component guardrails, long established!"

To which one might say, "First of all, it's lo-cal 1000 Island, maybe 400-island, tops, and second, you won't raise an eyebrow if you saw me eating a piece of thick toast. Well, croutons are thick toast. They're like Texas Toast, except the whole is reconfigured to the dimensions of dice, and somehow that's supposed to tie them irrevocably to a salad context? Do you even hear yourself?"

Here's what I worry about: Does adding croutons that expired last year to soup that expires next year somehow average out, meaning you have to have the soup today? There's a 24-hour window.

Well, I tried one of the expired croutons, and it was perfectly fine. It would pair nicely with some soup.

If I hadn't tossed it all out.