12 Signs You Should Throw Out Your Food Before Eating It

To toss or not to toss? When it comes to food, this is a surprisingly controversial question. Savethefood.com suggests that 40% of the food sold in the US may be more likely to end up in a landfill than on a plate. Why such a shocking amount of waste? This may have to do with the fact that people tend to over-rely on the dates printed on food packaging, many of which actually have more to do with food freshness and quality than with safety.

Still, there's no denying that many foods, once they get past a certain point, can be unpleasant and downright dangerous to consume. So how can we tell when food is no longer safe to eat without erring on the side of overcaution and waste? The best way is to learn to trust our own senses instead of relying on what's printed on the package. Here are some tips to help you decide what foods are probably past saving, as well as a few helpful hints that may keep you from making the same food storage mistakes in the future.

Texture can also be a giveaway that food is starting to spoil. Unless we're working with a completely new ingredient, we generally have a pretty good idea of what our fruits, vegetables, and meat should feel like. So, if we pick something up and it feels too light, too heavy, too spongy, or otherwise odd, there may be an unpleasant surprise in store.

As Alton Brown told Today, "We all have the senses to know when food has gone bad." He advises using your sense of touch as well as those of sight and smell. (Your sense of taste can also be an indicator, but it's best not to let things get to that point.) If you feel something that seems, as Brown says, "slimy or sticky," this is a good indicator that you should get rid of it ASAP. If it's produce, you can compost it, but if it's meat or dairy, you'll need to take it right outside to the garbage can. Don't just let food sit in the kitchen trash since anything already spoiling may soon progress to super-nasty and stink up the whole house.

When you bring meat home from the store, it's tempting to throw it in the refrigerator, so it stays ready to cook. However, unless you're absolutely sure you'll be consuming it within the next few days, remember that the freezer is your friend. The USDA assures us that frozen meat will never go bad, at least not to the point where it can cause illness, although the flavor may go off a bit if it's been in storage for a long time. Zoologist Russell Dale Guthrie, author of "Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe," once dined on woolly mammoth stew. The millennia-old meat, he said, had a "strong Pleistocene aroma," so you should probably try to eat your frozen food sometime before the next Ice Age.

Once the raw protein thaws out, though, the clock starts ticking. Color changes may indicate that it's starting to go bad, at least in certain cases. Gray steaks or brownish ground beef may still be safe to eat, as this discoloration could just mean that the meat has been exposed to oxygen. However, if the ground beef has gone brown all the way through instead of just on the surface, it's probably best not to eat it, and this is also the case for chicken that is no longer pink. You should also say no to any green meat that doesn't involve food coloring, no matter what Sam I Am may have to say on the subject.

Nuts can be a great pantry staple, but not if you're just going to open up a bag, nibble on a few, then forget about them for months. While they are fairly shelf-stable, they'll eventually become rancid if kept at room temperature; rancidity happens when the fat in the nuts reacts with oxygen. Once these small morsels get to this point, they not only taste nasty but there's a chance they could also cause you some stomach discomfort. It's probably not the kind of thing that will result in a trip to the emergency room; still, the prospect of a few unpleasant hours in the bathroom is something best avoided.

The easiest way to tell if nuts have gone bad is to smell them. If you catch a whiff of paint or plastic or basically anything other than nuttiness, those morsels have sadly expired. However, sometimes the rancidity isn't detectable with your nose, so you may need to take a small nibble. If the nuts taste slightly stale, you can revive them by toasting them or using them for baking. If they are no longer good, though, your tastebuds will know. In this case, there's nothing you can do but throw them out and vow to keep your next bag of nuts in the refrigerator or even the freezer.

Sometimes fruits and vegetables can get kind of mushy and still be safe to use — case in point: brown bananas, which everyone knows are best for baking. Even slightly soggy spinach is fine for cooking even when it's no longer suitable for salads – spinach is mostly water, so it doesn't take too long before it loses its crispness.

Most types of produce, however, are fit for nothing but the compost bin once they start turning liquidy. Registered dietitian Theresa Dvorak tells University of Utah Health that any fruits or vegetables that get "oozy," meaning they're starting to leak or drip, are past the point of no return, and there's really nothing you can do to re-use or repurpose them. While drippy daikon and leaky leeks probably won't make you seriously ill, it's better to be safe than sorry, plus they'd be pretty gross anyway.

Dried white rice is sufficiently shelf-stable, so it never really expires, at least as long as it doesn't get wet or infested with creepy crawlies or otherwise contaminated. (Brown rice, which has more moisture, can start to go bad in just six months.) However, once the grains are cooked, you'd better plan to use them up as soon as possible. Prepared rice should be refrigerated right away since it can start to develop harmful bacteria within a few hours (via University of California ). Even when stored in the fridge, though, the prepared grains only last for a matter of days.

Additionally, according to the University of California, cooked rice should last for up to five days in the refrigerator, but only if it's been stored within an hour of having been cooked. To cool to a safe temperature before bacteria develop, it should also be stored in fairly shallow containers and packed no more than three inches deep. Leftover rice, if stored safely, can be reheated or used to make rice pudding or salad. Once the rice starts to smell a bit funny or develops a slimy texture or colored spots that might be mold, it is no longer safe and should be disposed of.

One of the most obvious signs of food going over to the yucky side is if you see spots of mold. Sure, there are certain edible molds, such as the ones used to make blue cheese, but these are more the exception than the rule; if you're not a professional cheesemaker, there's about a 0% chance that you're going to cultivate a gourmet delight from that blue-green yogurt in the back of your fridge.

There are certain cases where you can remove the mold from the item and salvage what remains — the USDA says it's okay to just cut the mold off of dry-cured hams, hard salamis, hard cheeses, and firm produce such as carrots or bell peppers. However, softer foods or basically any other kind of moldy product (including moldy blue cheese) is not safe to eat since even the parts with non-visible mold spores could still be contaminated, and there's a chance that eating moldy food could make you sick.