Interim Order on Expiry Date Inspection
Expiry date inspection, once incorporated into the unloading routine, cannot be suspended without producing an anxiety that exceeds the cost of the inspection itself.
Consider the person who never adopted expiry date inspection. This person unloads groceries without checking the dates printed on packaging. This person has been eating from their kitchen for many years. In the available counterfactual, this person has consumed no detectably expired item. Or rather, they have consumed items past their printed dates and experienced no outcome distinguishable from consuming them before those dates.
The counterfactual person is fine.
The Interim Order in Practice
The person who did adopt expiry date inspection adopted it following a single incident involving a dairy product that was, on reflection, probably fine but smelled uncertain. The incident occurred on a Tuesday. By Friday, expiry date inspection was part of the unloading procedure. By the following month, it had expanded to cover dry goods, condiments, and a box of baking soda that had no printed date and therefore required a separate investigation into when baking soda expires.
Baking soda does not have a standard expiry. The investigation produced conflicting information. The box was replaced.
Three Consequences in the Adopted Timeline
First: the inspection adds approximately ninety seconds to the unloading process. This is not a burden. It is the sort of duration that does not register as a cost while in the act of performing it and does not register as a savings when skipped, because skipping it produces the anxiety referenced in the subject heading.
Second: the inspection has never detected an item that was both expired and purchased that day. The items flagged as near-expiry have been consumed ahead of schedule by a margin that, in retrospect, would not have caused any harm.
Third: the counterfactual person, who never started the inspection, has a cleaner procedure and a kitchen that is managed by a different set of standards. The standards are not lower. They are merely calibrated to actual outcomes rather than to the anxiety produced by unknown outcomes.
What the Interim Order Cannot Address
The interim order cannot address the question of whether the inspection is responding to real risk or to the representation of risk printed on packaging by manufacturers whose expiry date methodology is not disclosed and is not uniform across product categories.
The item is fine. The check was performed anyway. The interim order remains in force pending no new evidence, because evidence in either direction would arrive too quietly to trigger a revision.