October 23, 2013 — Nine out of 10 Americans discard food unnecessarily thanks to a nonuniform labeling system that blurs the relationship between food safety and dates listed on food packaging. That’s one of many sobering food-waste facts found in a new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, The Dating Game: How Confusing Labels Land Billions of Pounds of Food in the Trash. The report, released last month, looks at the dysfunctional evolution of the current food-dating system, discusses how current practices cause billions of pounds of edible food to be thrown away every year, and proposes three concrete solutions to reducing one of the major sources of food waste in America: 1) make “sell by” dates invisible to the consumer, 2) establish a uniform dating system for consumer use, and 3) improve the use of safe food handling instructions.