That's great. I could see it was a 3 but I couldn't explain how I knew until I scrolled.

The pattern that the 7 above was also clipped revealing the edge of the 3 also was missed made it click.

Neat!

I wouldn't have caught the 6 over there was clipped though. That's some analysis right there. Thorough.

I think you're right.

The 2's, 7's, and 8's, as well as the letters B, C, D, and L are all 5 dots wide. The 1 is only 3 wide, and the 0 is only 4 wide, but each seems to have a larger gap to the next number. The punctuation (colon and period) seems to be 2 dots wide with significant spacing around them. That suggests this font is a monospaced font with each character 5 dots wide, spaced 2 dots apart.

So it makes sense for 3 to use all 5 dots of width. And the one unambiguous 3 we see is 4 dots wide, placed in a spot approximately one dot too far right. The way you've filled in the 3 makes the most sense, and leads to the straightforward conclusion that the unidentified character is a 3.

...I'd hope you'd be just as curious as me as to the mystery digit!

I still vote for 3.

The 7 above is also missing some dots on the right, so there's an entire vertical strip of erased ink. The numbers are up to 5 dots wide, but the existing 3 only has 4 dots on the bottom. It's possible that a fifth is supposed to be there one spot higher, matching the missing number, but it just got clipped by the erased part.

Ah yes, I'd say 2 is the most likely candidate

Edit: I'm on team 3 now thanks to radix's comment

My vote is to taste and smell the fucking thing. This is what every chef in every kitchen you eat at has always done. That will tell you if it's edible. BBD is a suggestion, so a few months out of date means wildly different things if it's been kept at an average of 20c or 30c.

I've tasted shit that was 5 years past BBD. Didn't taste good, but didn't cause any harm. Trust your taste and smell to tell you what's bad. Evolution spent millions of years tuning your senses.

There are no 5s shown, but I’d expect a 5 to have the same bottom curve as a 3 (i.e., flat).

I can narrow that down to 1 and 9, because it's definitely not the month of nontober

But look at the 3 closer. It's 4 dots wide. It's missing the leftmost column of dots.

who cares!

Well, me

2 could match if the digit in question is missing dots within the visible columns, and 3 could match if the existing example is missing a leftmost column.

9 wouldn't have a flat top

Ah yes, the 29th of OJ

My guess too, but it doesn't match the 3 above

Lol it doesn't match the 3 above it at all.

3 doesn't fit because the lower left dot doesn't match the position of the same dot in the 3 above it.

But another 2 Pixels would be missing. The 7 above seems to show that the first two rows of those digits were printed completely.

The 2 doesn't have a flat top. I say 5.