salt cod?
A whole ham, smoked & salted country style (like proscuitto, or Virginia-style) will keep almost indefinately and room temps… mold forms on the outside but it doesn’t harm the meat inside. Scrape it off and… dinner! (A virginia smoked ham is so salty you have to soak in water for 24 hours to make it edible and even so its VERY salty by most people’s standards.)
Once you cut it, though, I dunno.
Once you cut it, you bought yourself a one-way ticket on the putrefaction express.
How long is indefinitely? 10 years? 100 years? (I don’t know what the purpose of the OP is)
I was thinking about cheese. A wax sealed cheese still dries and even gouda becomes a parmesan-like rock of saltyness. Would something similar happen to ham? Would it turn to jerky?
How about a Wooden Taco ?
Navy Beans.
Well, depends on how big you’re willing to go and what your definition of “food is”. Does it all have to be food? Cause I nominate a forest.
Those of us saving for the apocalypse prefer flour and honey.
Rice. Vegemite.
The OP did specify food.
I hear the tastiest part is the head.
OK then, Marmite.
Dwarf bread?
I second plain old sugar. Energy-dense and lasts indefinitely. Especially in loaf form, sugar can sit out for a loooooong time and won’t spoil. In very humid conditions it might go a little sticky after a while though. If plain sugar is too dull, how about Kendal mint cake? (Yum!)
If you’re not somewhere too hot, chocolate lasts for ages. It tends to go white but doesn’t go bad AFAIK.
Although the honey exposed to the air would crystallize, wouldn’t it just form a “crust” on top? So, you could break through to the good stuff beneath?
Some of the products could be protected from bug infestation by putting them in a jar and covering the opening with a wire mesh or cheesecloth; it’ll still be “exposed to the air” but protected from visible nasties. That’d surely take care of rice and beans, and still technically satisfies the original criteria.
we are still not sure of the original criteria. I say that if a lid is off-limits, then the whole jar is. Honey needs to be suspended mid-air by a powerul fan. It would then crystalize in spheres.
A hermaphrodite?
I’ve had honey that was decades old and crystallized completely throughout a 3L jar.
It was actually quite good.
This makes me wonder, if I may piggyback a question onto this thread:
Can someone get nutrition from dried beans, more or less ingested like pills?