When Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, first began working on the issue of food waste a few years ago, she found that she had to offer up an explanation. “People looked at me like they had no idea what that meant,” she says. “Now, people are realizing that it has very real impact.” One example: unstandardized food labels—those muddy, hard-to-parse “use by,” “sell by,” and “best by” notices. They exact a toll on consumers’ purse strings and the environment at large. But a new bill proposed this week hopes to curtail it.

On May 18, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Congresswoman Chellie Pingree introduced the Food Date Labeling Act, which calls on the USDA and FDA to cooperate to standardize and regulate date labels, which are famously difficult for consumers to digest. In a recent national survey—which I wrote about on May 11—84 percent of respondents indicated that they at least occasionally tossed food that near the date printed on the label even when they weren’t sure whether the date related to quality or safety. With so many phrases used seemingly interchangeably, it can be hard to differentiate between a gentle reminder and an exhortation.

Tristram Stuart, the founder of the food waste advocacy group Feedback, draws this analogy: “Imagine every station had different words for petrol and diesel, and everyone was going around putting the wrong fuel in their pumps, and never knew quite what it was,” he says. “It’s obvious to everyone that we need to agree to common terminology.”

To rectify the confusion, the bill suggests streamlining the array of labels down to just two: “best if used by” would refer to quality, and “expires on” would be a safety precaution. The two phrases would make it easier to differentiate between items that pose a risk of food-borne illness and the nonperishable items—such as crackers or cereals—that are simply marked for optimal freshness.