Why Does Bottled Water Have an Expiration Date?
There's a simple answer as to why bottled water has an expiration date: lawmakers in New Jersey, as in all states, are idiots. Back in 1987 New Jersey passed a law requiring all food products to have an expiration date of two years or less regardless of the product (1). They should have excluded water - water in a closed plastic container should last a lifetime and in a glass container will last billions of years.
My wife and I have the exact same opinions on religion, child-rearing, politics, immigration, race, and all other important issues in life except for one thing: we simply do not agree on anything in the kitchen; for example, how to properly dry dishes, how to store items in a fridge, when fruit is suitable to eat, how to stir cranberry sauce, how to make a perfect hard-boiled egg, and we especially disagree the most about the meaning of expiration dates.
My wife likes to throw stuff out simply because it is past the expiration date. I tell her it's all a scam to make her throw out perfectly good food. Certain food products can last for years beyond the scam date. I tell her she should smell or taste the item before sending it into the trash bin. But she can't do it. I have had to resort to blocking out expiration dates when I buy groceries. This way she's forced to actually look at the food and smell it before throwing it away.
We have been eating expired foodstuffs for years and we're still here without a sick day in our lives, except for an occasional cold once every few winters.
ENDNOTES
(1):
Mental Floss, Why Does Bottled Water Have an Expiration Date?
A 1987 NJ state law required all food products sold there to display an expiration date of two years or less from the date of manufacture. Labeling, separating and shipping batches of expiration-dated water to the Garden State seemed a little inefficient to bottled water producers, so most of them simply started giving every bottle a two-year expiration date, no matter where it was going.
Now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has never established or suggested a limitation on the shelf life of bottled water as long as it's produced in accordance with regulations and the bottle remains properly sealed. Even Dirty Jerz caught on to this fact and amended the law a few years ago. But the expiration date has been an industry norm for so long that many producers have just kept it on there.
