Food "safety" these days seems to be more about "liability" than about actual guidelines one can trust.
As an example, we've recently had a news story about a lady in my province who got sick after eating canned seafood that was 2 years past its "best before" date--she claims she had just bought it at Wal-Mart. She didn't check the can till after she got sick.
I think that because we've lost most of the generations who knew how to make food keep as long as possible, the average person really just doesn't know what fresh or safe is anymore--and charts like this can really be off and therefore deceive people into chucking perfectly good food, as can those "sell before" and "best before" dates. Common sense just isn't there when it comes to food anymore.
As an example, a week or two ago we finished off the last of our garden carrots that were harvested back in mid-September. They had been kept in cool storage in the coldest part of our basement (unheated bedroom in a house with central forced air heating set to a constant 68F) layered in a bucket of dampish sand. For regular use we always had a tupperware veggie keeper container of carrots in the fridge. No noticeable degradation of quality through those 6 months, the odd carrot grew a few hairy side roots, and they all still tasted sweet and fresh (Nantes variety carrots).
I can keep a box of apples on the floor in that same bedroom for 4 months if I buy them fresh in the fall. And I've kept nearly all of the veggies on that list in my fridge WAY longer than the times listed, on occasion when they've inadvertently been forgotten in the veggie drawers. And as everyone has noted above, the egg guidelines are ridiculous, as is the notion that a ham only lasts a week in the fridge.
One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that the best before date on things like salad dressing and mayo goes right out the window once you open them--once opened they are only truly good for about a month or so, and that's only because they are so chock-ful of preservatives. But I don't buy them for my family because of all the questionable ingredients, we make our own.
Acidic condiments like mustard, ketchup, bbq sauce etc. last much longer (and in other countries like England they often aren't even refrigerated, English people also don't refrigerate opened jams and jellies). I'm sure the bottle of ketchup and the jar of mustard in my fridge are both over a year old and are both just fine to eat, we make our own bbq sauce each time we want it so no idea on that.
If it has been frozen, we eat it up to two years old if it doesn't look or smell off. I mean, I do double check if it has been there that long, btu not like we're going to just up and waste it...we don't do that here. 
