By Annalise Kempen
Photos by Selby Bokaba (City of Tshwane) and RawPixels
When I buy fresh food, I pay specific attention to the expiry date of the food products to ensure that they will last a few days/weeks in my fridge. When I buy non-perishable food such as tinned, bottled or dried foods, I expect that the products on the shelves will have an expiry date which is not in the immediate future and that those products will only expire in a few months or even a few years’ time. In recent years, it has however transpired that many shop owners do not have the same policy about the food they sell. In fact, more and more discoveries are being made about expired food that are sold to consumers – and worse, in some cases only after children had become gravely ill or died due to the food they had consumed.
In 2023, children in Gauteng died in unrelated incidents after they had bought snacks from a taxi rank and food from a spaza shop. In the Soweto incident, two Soweto boys died on 1 October 2023 after they had eaten biscuits and drunk juice they had bought at a spaza shop in Naledi – two more girls who consumed the same food, were admitted to hospital (Sobuwa, 2023).
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[This is only an extract of an article that is published in Servamus: April 2024. This article is available for purchase.]