My first full article in The New Leaf Journal covered the story of a certain incident which occurred on December 12, 2018. I purchased a Chobani Flips yogurt at a Brooklyn grocery store. When I arrived home with said yogurt, I discovered that the yogurt container – which had separate compartments for the yogurt and crunchy toppings – was missing the crunchy toppings. How did I miss what was missing? Someone had carefully peeled the top of the crunchy compartment without disturbing the yogurt, removed the crunchies, and then smoothed out the top to make it look as if all was well.
Now let us skip ahead exactly six years later – to December 12, 2024.
At about 6:10 P.M. on the 12th of December, 2024, I arrived at the same grocery store at which I had purchased the ill-fated Chobani Flips yogurt. I needed a few things – but only one of the things I needed had to be purchased that day. It was Thursday. This grocery store has new sales every Friday, meaning that Thursday was the last day for that week’s sales. Earlier in the week when I was buying whole milk for coffee, I noted that there was a two-for-seven sale on Silk non-dairy milk. I like almond and cashew milk for drinks (not tea and coffee, however, those demand real milk) and cereal – and to be sure, the store had in stock both almond and cashew milk. I had my eye on the unsweetened cashew milk, but I decided that I would purchase it later in the week, after I had finished my outstanding unsweetened almond milk.
After adding everything but the cashew milk to my basket, I reached the Silk milk section. There were still many cartons of unsweetened cashew milk. I planned to purchase two. None of the grocery stores I frequent have a tendency to have items that are past the sell-by or expiration date available for purchase, although there have been some occasions where the date is a little bit too close for comfort. The reason I know this is because I always check the date before spending money on things. Had I been as good about checking the foil on packages of Chobani Flips yogurt, my first New Leaf Journal article would have been very different from what it was. But I digress.
I looked for the date on the Silk cashew milk carton. I figured that there would be nothing to worry about – the nut milks tend to have use-by dates well off into the future. Finally, I found the date. What was the date?
11/02/24
I did a double take. Some of our non-American readers (hello foreigners!) may be wondering why I did a double date. Us Americans like the mm/dd yy way of writing dates. With that in mind, I note that the sell-by date on the cashew milk was November 2, 2024. Had I been looking at the date in August or September, this would not have been a problem. I suppose that October would have been context-dependent. But it was neither August, September, nor October, nor was it even November.
It was December 12, 2024.
Exactly six years to the day after I had inadvertently bought half a Chobani Flips yogurt, my designs on a nice carton of unsweetened cashew milk were thwarted by a sell-by date more than a month in the rear-view mirror. History may not repeat, but it rhymes.
(Aside: The Chobani Flips, which are visible from the Cashew milk area with a 2-to-3-’o-clock head turn, were on sale. But sale these days is $1.50 instead of $1.00. Yogurt inflation.)
Fortunately, my past-its-prime cashew milk story had a quicker good ending than my Chobani Flips story. In 2018, I had to return to the grocery store to receive a yogurt refund. In 2024, I avoided purchasing the aged cashew milk, so no return trip or refund was needed.
After confirming that every carton of Silk cashew milk had seen its best days in storage, I opted for a carton of regular almond milk, also on sale. I prefer non-sweetened, but at least the almond milk is good for the rest of 2024.
The cashew milk was not the worst case of pushing shelf life past its limits that I encountered. I recall sometime in the last year or two, I encountered a yogurt at a different grocery store that was in the neighborhood of two months past its shelf life. That one I reported. In the case of the cashew milk, I did not encounter anyone to report it to through my checkout, but I hope that someone notices when he or she removes the sale sign.
Now let us skip ahead a few days. I wrote the foregoing on the evening of December 12, 2024. In the course of writing my article, I wrote that the date on the cashew milk was 02/11/24. Now when I say “evening,” I mean that I drafted that first part of the article close to midnight and after I had done other work in the interim. I had most likely just written the cashew milk date wrong. But still, I was concerned that maybe I made made a mistake that evening. Because this is an honest website, I could not publish the article without double-checking my work. On December 15, 2024, I returned to that same grocery store to check in on the new sales (there were not many, unfortunately) and to reassess the cashew milk situation. The Silk non-dairy milk sale was gone, but the cashew milk was not. What was the date on the cashew milk?
While my having been correct was bad news for the grocery store, it was good news for me. I like this article – especially its poetic call-back to my first New Leaf Journal post. I would have been sad if I could not publish it. There were more managers milling around on the 15th than there were on the 12th, so my Mom reported the cashew milk to an understandably troubled manager while I checked out. The manager proceeded to remove the cartons, which were understandably not selling like hotcakes in any event. Let us hope that in the future the grocery store remembers to put the cashew milk out for sale before its sell-by date.
