1/9/19 About Expired Food Dates?

    How does food sneak and stay behind in the fridge for over two years?  We have re-introduced ourselves to eating salads and I thought we were good on the dressings.  I prefer Ranch, but will use anything in a pinch.  When we went to the Store this past Sunday we got a bunch of salad stuff and I assumed we would have a handful of bottles of different salad dressings to choose from.
    After our second little workout with Javalina and I, I made some burger patties but instead of eating them in burgers, we had the meat with salads on the side.  The package says you can do this too, go figure.  I always thought burger patties could only be eaten in between two pieces of bread, apparently not.  The only problem we encountered was not being able to find a decent dressing.  We had two bottles, one was onion mustard something or other and the other was kind of reddish.  I was willing to give Javalina first choice since both bottles were pretty low, but he was quick to notice that one of the bottles had expired Jan 2018 and the other like in May 2018.  They weren't really expiration dates, they were the best used by dates.  What if we go past it by a year, would we get sick?  I decided not to take chances and thru away the bottles, but now what?  I found a couple of bottles of Mango Habanero and BBQ sauce for making hot wings.  I told Javalina "you like BBQ sauce on everything, just go with it, you'll be fine."  I poured a little mango habanero sauce on my salad and then almost immediately, he told me "hey, that one expired Aug 2017."  It was already on my plate, so I suggested the hotness keeps anything bad from growing on it, it'll be alright.
    It has been long enough that if it was going to make me sick, it would have already.  I figure the scare tactic is mostly to go out and buy more of their products, but maybe a year past any date is long enough to avoid it.  I don't know how we got there, but maybe that is an indication we have gone a very long time since we were focused on eating salads at home.  This is one of the things I am trying to change.  You can be sure I will be stocking the fridge with a few new bottles of dressing, starting with some Ranch.