It is past the date

Throw it out, or judge it — and how to tell which

How this list is built

Two questions, and they take opposite answers

A storage window is one of two different things, and the USDA does not label which. Some are a safety limit: past it the food can carry enough bacteria to make you ill while it still looks and smells fine, so it goes out untasted. Others are a quality window: past it the food is getting worse, not dangerous, and your eyes and nose decide. Which one a figure is follows from the food and from what the record says about that window — and where neither answers, this site prints a third thing, that it is not settled, rather than pick for you.

Every product page here says which of the two it is printing and why, in the sentence the rule itself produced rather than one written beside it. The rule, in the order it is applied:

A figure shorter than a day is a safety limit wherever it is printed, room temperature included: below a day the USDA is not giving a shelf life but the time food may stand in a warm kitchen. 5 figures in this snapshot are that short.
Where the record carries its own note about that window — that quality, not safety, is why a label asks for the refrigerator, or that the figure is for the product after cooking — the note decides, because it is the source speaking about the food rather than us reading its name.
A freezer figure is never a safety limit: food held at 0 °F stays safe for as long as it stays frozen.
A room-temperature figure of a day or more is a quality window, because the USDA rating room temperature at all is the USDA saying the food is stable there.
A refrigerator figure is a safety limit when the food is an animal food or made with one, cooked or ready to eat and still moist, or cut and ready to eat — or when the source files it under Meat, Poultry, Seafood and Dairy Products & Eggs, or another heading it keeps for food that spoils dangerously. What decides is the food, not the shelf: this data set files a tin of tuna and a tube of tomato paste on the same shelf and they are not the same question.
That limit stops at six weeks. A safety limit is a claim about bacteria growing, and bacteria in a refrigerator are a matter of days; a window longer than that is the source rating how good the food will be. Length is allowed to withdraw the warning and never to give one — “the window is short, so the food is dangerous” would be the figure explaining itself.
A refrigerator figure is a quality window when the food keeps itself: acid, dry, sweet, alcoholic or pure fat, or raw and whole.
Where none of that names the food, the page says so instead of guessing, and hands you the test we could not apply: you can see the food and we cannot.

Of the 302 food pages on this site, 93 lead with a safety limit, 181 with a quality window and 16 say the record does not settle it. The other 12 print no single figure at all, because the plain name covers several kinds or the source publishes no number for it. Those four counts are taken from the built pages and add back to 302.

It sat out overnight

This is the one case where the storage window on the page is beside the point. Perishable food should not stand at room temperature for more than 2 hours, or more than 1 hour when the room is above 90 °F, and the reason is the range between 40 °F and 140 °F where bacteria multiply fastest. Food left out overnight has been in that range for eight hours or more. It goes out. Refrigerating it afterwards does not undo the hours, and neither does reheating: what grows in that range can leave toxins that cooking does not destroy.

That limit is not our invention and it is not a rounding of one: the USDA prints it inside this very data set. 5 of the storage figures in the FoodKeeper snapshot this site is built from are shorter than a single day — 1 hour is the shortest of them, and Formula, prepared, Pies and Quiche carry one — and every one of those is a limit on standing in a warm room rather than a shelf life. This site never turns a figure like that into a date, and never divides by one to make a multiplier.

Do not taste it to find out

Tasting is not a test. The organisms that cause food-borne illness do not reliably announce themselves by smell, taste or appearance, and the amount it takes to make someone ill can be far too small to notice. The other direction holds too: food that smells sour or looks moldy is finished whatever the date says, and no published range overrules it. When the two disagree, the shorter answer wins.

Where this stops being the source's answer

Everything numbered on this site comes from one place: the USDA FoodKeeper snapshot named at the foot of every page. That record prints how long things keep and nothing else — it has no field for what to do afterwards, no disposal instruction, and no mention of the two-hour limit outside those short figures. So the answers above are USDA and FSIS guidance rather than rows we parsed, and we say so rather than dressing them up as data.

Where neither the record nor that guidance answers — an unusual food, an unusual illness, a household with someone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised — the authority is the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service and its public guidance at FoodSafety.gov, not this site. We would rather point at them than invent a sentence they did not write.

The foods this question is asked about most

Each of these pages prints its own answer to the same question, worked out from that food's own figures rather than from this page.

KeepsUntil is an independent reference built on public USDA data. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration. Whether a given window is a safety limit or a quality window is stated on the page that prints it.