Photo via Polish Sausage Queen's Flickr
A few years ago we dipped into the mystery of the New York City-specific expiration date on milk cartons, but what about our bread? Assuming you buy loaves at the market and not the bakery, you know the bags usually contain a sell-by date. But there's also a way of telling how long they've been sitting on the shelf. Wisebread has a breakdown of "the bread code," which is really quite simple! You know the hard plastic things that hold the bags together? The color will tell you which day of the week the loaf was baked on (and twist ties generally follow the same color code)—really, Snopes confirms! Here's what you need to remember:
The colors run in alphabetical order, so the earlier they appear in the alphabet, the earlier in the week the bread was baked. The site notes "as a general rule of thumb, you should only see two colors of tags on the shelves at any one time, or three maximum for those days when bread wasn't delivered. But that doesn’t stop the old bread from sneaking in though." [h/t Melissa Bell]
