JOHNSON – International Date Format Standards … and My Cup of Tea

HERE’S A LEFT FIELDER, firmly entrenched in the ‘what the …’ category.

Recently I reached for a box of tea from the cupboard, and noticed the ‘best before date’ was listed on the bottom of the box as; 27/12/22.  That’s all that’s there.

Now … hang on.

Looking at the date above does this mean December 27, 2022 or December 22, 2027?

Is it supposedly expired or not?

Now, its tea, so the answer lands heavy in the zone of ‘whatever … it’s tea’, and ‘best before’ we know full well only means a marketing ploy to get us to buy more tea.  Manufacturers of long-term shelf life products learned long ago, that if they come up with ‘best before’ dates, they simply sell more product.

But that’s not the question today.

My tea freshness needs are obviously purely semantic, but it does point out a written date norm that is at the very least, elusive to first glance considerations.

How many times have we in our wandering come across the need to read or write the date numerically with two digits each … like 27/12/22 … and stopped to wonder just what order they are supposed to be in.  Often if the day or month is a single digit – 01 for example, then through a process of elimination we can figure it out.

But for the date on my tea … not so easy.

The thing is … even though there is actually a correct standard, it gets messy.

In Canada the stated standard our illustrious government follows, is the ISO 8601 standard … gobbledegook for the International Standards Organization for Gregorian Calendar Representations (no idea there was such a thing), and that’s as deep we are going to get into that rabbit hole.

In Canada this means the written standard is YYYY-MM-DD.  Which is fine in itself, but unfortunately for reasons unknown the first two digits of the year are commonly dropped leaving us with YY-MM-DD … like my box of tea, creating the moment of which way to read it.

Oddly, China also follows this YYYY-MM-DD format, but this doesn’t follow any ISO format, but the Chinese hierarchical system that is all their own.

Just to leap off the Buffalo jump with this and really make you wonder why you’re reading into the weeds of this; the UK uses the standard of DD-MM-YYYY, as do most post Soviet states and many middle eastern countries like Bahrain.

The U.S. commonly uses the format of MM-DD-YYYY, even though the U.S. professes to follow the ISO 8601 standard … it’s just that in practice they don’t bother.  For some reason, France also follows this routine.

Soo … at the end of the day, we in Canada are supposed to follow the rule of YYYY-MM-DD… but don’t, and our product shipping neighbour to the south is firmly entrenched in MM-DD-YYYY … even though they shouldn’t.

Further, unlike Canadian language and nutritional facts labelled required by law, there is no required standard to change or alter packaging between Canada and the U.S. regarding expiry or best before date formats.

Ya git what ya git.

The question remains … beyond the toss up as to the best before date with my tea, I also have to wonder where my tea was made, to try to figure out if I should throw it out and make the manufacturer happy by going to buy more.

Maybe I’ll just capitulate.

Or maybe I’ll sit down with a cup of tea and think about it.

Now I have a bit of a headache.

David Johnson is a Kamloops resident, community volunteer and self described maven of all things Canadian.