"Sell by" to be outdated

Britons are said to throw away 30% of their food each week. To me, this says 'no freezer in the house'* and 'I hate leftovers'. But apparently some of it is due to the confusing labels on supermarket food. We currently have four levels of usage instructions:
"Sell by"
"Display until"
"Use by"
"Best before"

In this good news (ephemeral link below), the first two are exposed to be only inventory tools and have nothing to do with the edibility of the food. These are to be abolished! Hurray! It is stated that this will save 60% of food thrown out. The other two are for guidance only: "Use by" applying to perishable food like "soft cheese, ready-prepared meals and smoked fish", while stuff like "biscuits, jams, pickles, crisps and tinned foods [that's canned, to you]" get a "Best before" date.

Tinned foods? These are usually stamped with one or two years' usage. It took me seven years to eat the tinned foods I bought to see us through 2K. (Remember that? Turn of the millennium; computer clocks turning off the electric power stations, etc.? Never happened) My mother is still working her way through tinned dehydrated foods bought for the 1974 fuel shock, and I remember in my childhood eating tinned foods years old. That's what canning was for.

This all tells me that people have lost their senses how to tell if food is going bad. They have no concept of staleness or rancidness, or they would be able to tell for themselves whether the food is still edible. And there are no instructions how to avoid damaged or inflated tins. So even throwing out food by their "Use by" or "Best before" dates is a travesty if the food is still edible. 60% of 30% is 18%, so 18% more of food will be saved but 12% will still be thrown out. I say, use that freezer and eat leftovers!

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/tons-food-waste-marks-end-sell-date-000519400.html

* If I understand the DEFRA figures correctly, in 2010 there were about 30 million freezers (chest, up-right, fridge-freezers) in use in the UK among a population of 60 million. A Scottish survey shows this represents an increase of freezer ownership from 60% of households in 1990 to 94% in 2000.
efficient-products.defra.gov.uk/spm/download/document/id/826
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/01/19092748/21