Expiration Dates

by Morgan Ome

It’s the end of cherry blossom season in my neighborhood, which means ephemerality is on my mind. My mother tells me that when she lived abroad in Tokyo, hanami, or flower viewing, was a special time of year when people would flock outside to take in the blooms, knowing that their beauty would not last for long. During each spring that I’ve spent in Washington, D.C. I’ve also tried to adopt the spirit of hanami, feeling a mix of awe and melancholy as the last petals float through the breeze. 

Another motif of life’s fleetingness exists in a perennial form, in the numbers and letters printed on food, drugs, and cosmetics: expiration dates, sell-by dates, best by dates, and their myriad counterparts. Expiration dates serve a practical purpose, and yet they are also a stand-in for deadlines and predetermination. As a writer, defined and fixed periods of time are one of the most useful tools for structuring my creative practice. This syllabus is intended to use expiration dates as a metaphor for measuring time, for examining love, and for capturing impermanent states of being. When we buy packaged food, are we engaging in time travel by assuming our future selves will use it before the “best by date”? When something is past its so-called prime—whether a relationship or product—should we abandon it or trust our gut instinct? I’ve devised three units that use the expiration date as a jumping-off point for these questions. 

Unit 1: Expiration dates as pseudoscience

My mother’s fridge is an archeological site ripe for excavation. Odd sauces, pickles, and jams from the previous decade are scattered among tupperware and cartons. The produce drawers are a mix of fresh and wilting vegetables. On my last visit home, I wanted to make Eric Kim’s internet-famous gochujang cookies late at night, but the only butter in the house expired over a year ago. My mother and I got into a tiff about whether it was okay to use. “There’s no mold or smell. It’s unopened and still in its original packaging,” she argued, while I contemplated driving to the store and buying new butter. 

Food product expiration dates for consumers first cropped up in the 1970s. Today, however, they “are not standardized, and they have almost nothing to do with food safety,” Alissa Wilkinson of Vox writes. The USDA even states on its website that, “except for infant formula, dates are not an indicator of the product’s safety and are not required by Federal law.” The Atlantic’s Yasmin Tayag explains that while expiration dates are simply a “reference point” for most people, manufacturers continue to use them “because they don’t want to risk consumers buying products past their prime.”  While food safety is not something to take lightly—as anyone who has experienced food poisoning will know—it’s interesting how, when arguing with my mother, I wanted to trust the arbitrary numbers rather than my own human instincts. In the end, convenience and logic won out. I folded the expired butter into the dough and baked them. They were delicious. 

Recommended consumption

Suggested activities

  • Learn a new method of preserving food, such as pickling, canning, or fermenting. Label your jars with the date, and an “open by date.” Write a letter to your future self to read upon consumption.
  • Go to the farmer’s market or grocery store and buy several fruits that are in season. Select a range of bruised/soft/mushy and unripe/hard produce. Taste them and write down: how does the level of ripeness affect the taste or texture? What kinds of recipes would suit an overly ripe versus underripe fruit? (Overly ripe: as a compote on pancakes. Underripe: as a pickled garnish with curry) 
  • Recreate a bread mold experiment from elementary school. Take daily photos of your mold. Glue your results to a tri-fold poster board. 

Unit 2: Expiration dates as doomed love

Time is not always on the side of lovers. In the Black Mirror episode “Hang the DJ,” digital devices allow couples to check their relationship’s expiry date, creating a nihilistic numbness toward human connection; the main conflict in the film Like Crazy transpires after Anna remains in the U.S. past her student visa’s expiration date in order to pursue a romance; in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, He Qiwu buys a can of pineapple with a May 1 expiration date every day, in the hopes that his girlfriend will take him back by that date. An implicit ending makes it difficult to fully give one’s heart to another, and yet, even in its finiteness, time cannot limit or end love. 

A grid of shots from the film Chungking Express, that show the character selecting a can of pineapple from the store with the May 1 expiration date.
Image source

I reflected on this while visiting Glenstone, a museum in Potomac, Maryland, earlier this month. Although Glenstone is only 20 miles away from the heart of D.C., it seems to exist in a completely different world, with its sprawling woods and austere gray buildings spread across 200 acres. I was especially excited to spend the day there as a new exhibit was featuring “‘Untitled’ (Perfect Lovers)” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In “Perfect Lovers,” two clocks are synchronized at the start of the installation and hung side-by-side; over time, the clocks will fall out of sync. The work is believed to represent the artist and his lover, Ross Laycock, who died of complications due to AIDS five years before Gonzalez-Torres. 

I initially came across the work during an ekphrastic poetry assignment in college, but this was my first time seeing it in person. I thought of a letter that Gonzalez-Torres wrote to Laycock in 1988:

A letter with a drawing of two clocks sitting side by side in blue pen. The letter says: Lovers, 1988 Dont be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with thesweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain TIMEin a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit were it is due: time. We are synchronized, now and forever. I love you.
Image source

Recommended consumption

Suggested activities

  • Reflect on the following questions in your journal: If you knew when a past relationship (romantic, platonic, etc.) would end, what might you have done differently? How does that relationship still shape you? What would you tell your past self about the relationship? What would you tell the other person today? 
  • Host a Chungking Express viewing party. Buy one can of pineapple with the same expiration date for each guest. 

Unit 3: Expiration dates as time travel

In the worst bouts of depression I lived through, I would only leave my apartment to buy groceries. Once I saw the fully stocked shelves of colorful products, I would ambitiously fill my basket with ingredients to make nourishing meals for myself. And yet, once the products entered my household, my motivation levels would drop, and I would struggle to cook, just as I struggled to do many other basic tasks. I hoped that my mental health would improve by the date printed on a tub of yogurt or a bag of arugula. Often, I would feel the same, or worse, when that day rolled around. 

I thought about a book I read in sixth grade—Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver—where for one full year, Kingsolver and her family only ate food grown in their backyard or community, even preserving their own goods in advance for the winter. That was admirable, hard work, which also required time and money that not many people have. For those with less access to fresh produce due to geography or class (or both), as well as those facing psychological obstacles, stocking up on food with a longer shelf life can be a useful strategy. My go-to depression meals were instant ramen with eggs and frozen spinach, or fried rice with kimchi, Spam, and frozen peas and corn; perhaps not the healthiest dishes, but they were cheap, fairly nutritious, and tasty. Throughout my low periods, expiration dates often felt like reminders of failure. But the further-out dates prompted me to forecast the future, to imagine that better days (maybe not now, maybe not soon) lay ahead. 

Recommended consumption

Suggested activities

  • Find the oldest “best by date” in your fridge. Search it on the website “on this day in history.” Look up the closest date in your journal. Write a short story linking your personal goings on with the larger events of the world. 
  • Pick two days during which you’ll cook all your meals at home. On one day, only make “pantry meals”—no fresh ingredients. On the other day, only make dishes with fresh/perishable components. 
  • Start a recipe book of dishes that you enjoyed as a child, or that hold nostalgic value. Who prepared those meals for you? What did you like about those dishes? What emotions do those flavors elicit, even now?