The date is March 28th. Sophomore Anakaren Baragan stares at her deli item with a confused look on her face. Her eyes spot a peculiar marking on the label of her sandwich, which indicates the foods expiration date. Under a thick streak of sharpie, the expiration date reads March 12th.

“I thought that they shouldn’t be doing [it], but I was hungry so I still ate it,” Baragan said.

Over the past month, several students have expressed concern over the marking out of the deli items expiration date labels.

“I was pretty shocked” Anonymous Junior said. “It was marked out but you can still see the numbers, and one of them was February 21st, and it [the date] was March 21st.”

When asked how she first reacted to the marked out expired labels, sophomore Hailey Potts said, “that’s disgusting.”

When asked about the situation, Cafeteria Manager Robbin Keen said, ”we have a new program this year, and we are supposed to [print labels] the day of, and there have been several times because of the busyness of our schedule… I tend to print them ahead of time.”

Keen later went on to say, ”Now, since yesterday [March 28th] we’ve got an upgrade on our label maker… there is going to be a different way to date everything.” The USDA’s Food Distribution National Policy Memorandum FD-107 held in 2010, asserts that,” ‘expiration’ dates and ‘use-by’ dates are the last dates that the manufacturer recommends a food item be consumed to ensure peak quality and nutrient retention.”