Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here .

Dear Prudence,

My in-laws are obscenely cheap and often keep food that has expired well beyond the “best by” date. I wouldn’t care about this, except my kids go over there after school, and I never know how fresh the food they are being served is. Trying to speak to my in-laws about this myself has gone nowhere; my husband is no help either—he says his parents did this when he and his brother were kids, and they were fine. We rely heavily on my in-laws to watch our kids during the school year while we are at work. Short of packing food for the kids to take from home (which I cannot be certain they will eat), what can I do here?

—Expiration Anxiety

Dear Expiration Anxiety,

Experts tend to agree that most food is

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