After cleaning out my fridge I got to wondering if there are any foods that don’t go bad or spoil ever?
I’m talking strictly in terms of safety. In otherwords you can eat it. I don’t mean the food won’t tast good, but it would still be edible.
Like would a pepper or onion go bad? Or an unprocessed piece of wheat?
Honey and salt. That’s about it.
silenus beat me to it with honey.
Honey has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, still edible.
Unpopped popcorn has also been found in thousand-year-old Incan tombs. I believe that archaeologists have popped and eaten a kernel or two.
Peppers, onions, and any undried produce item will rot in a matter of weeks or months. Unprocessed wheat will rot, too, although drying it will significantly extend its lifespan.
Bacterial growth is the main thing that makes food unsafe to eat because of the buildup of toxins. As long as you can prevent bacteria from growing, the food will remain safe to eat, though it may not taste very good.
If you can keep dried or salted food in a dry climate it should remain safe nearly indefinitely.
How did they figure out that it was still edible? Did they open the jar and stick a finger in (nom nom) or did they run it through lab tests?
Somehow I have the feeling the answer is going to be #1… :eek:
What of foods that don’t last forever but rather for, say, 10, 20 years?
Would canned food eventually go bad? The cans be eaten through by whatever chemicals are in the foods in the cans? Or would canned food simply lose any real vitamin and nutrient value? Or would I be able to eat 30 year old Spaghettios?
And what about MREs? What’s the lifespan on those?
Could I put together a bunker that is cool and dry and keep food there that I could rush to at a moment’s notice without stopping in to restock it for a decade or two?
British Naval salt meats were often years old - hard and shriveled up. The hard tack and cheese were not much better - either tooth-breakingly hard or so full of weevils and worms that they were soft and mushy and eaten in the dark so you could not see.
Si
Twinkies?
How about chocolate bars?
I bought a LOT of chocolate bars from Europe last year; and they have gone expired in March 2008. I have stored all of them in the fridge since bringing them back.
How long will they last?!
I believe some of the food recovered from the supply dumps made by Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition was found to still be edible decades later.
Not sure if that counts though, since it was kind of deep-frozen…
Chocolate depends on the ingredients, mostly. All chocolate will bloom - get a whitish surface eventually. This is caused by fats migrating out of the chocolate, and does not impact the chocolate beyond visual appeal. However, some of the fats used in the chocolate can go rancid. Cocoa-butter is very stable, and will last for a long time. Dairy and vegetable fats in cheaper chocolate will not last anywhere near as long. The fat content also has an impact - high solids chocolate will last longer than low solids. And the sugar content can be an issue, too.
Your European chocolate in the fridge will last quite a while, but may bloom in the cold. It should be fine.
Si
What about kim chee?
Insane. I mean shelf-life is usually listed depending on temperature of storage as 5 - 10 years, but it’s based on taste. In dry adn cool conditions (like in bunker) they can last many decades easily and still be nutritious and non-toxic.
Yeah, but you wouldn’t actually want to EAT them. 
Si
More importantly than anything… what’s the NUTRITIONAL value of them at a couple decades? Is it worth munching on or will it have degraded to simply some off tasting carbs?
And wikipedia says 3-5 years depending on the conditions, for MREs… But I KNOW I’ve eaten ones in the several year range that didn’t kill me (though, again, I don’t know how nutritionally valuable they were)
Looking to prserve foods that normally have a pretty short lifetime has been a goal of humanity that spent most of its time living on the edge ofd starvation, only one bad harvest away fro m disaster.
Honey and cheese have already been mentioned. I’d also suggest nuts and grains (especially if they’ve beem roasted or otherwise treated to prevent sprouting).
I just finished Mark Kurlansky’s book Salt, which is more about food preservation , ut seems, than about salt proper. Salted and/or fermented products will also last a LONG time. Salt beef, salt pork, salt cod, pickled herring etc. will last longer periods of time, as will fermented fish sauces like garum, “buried” preserved fish, and pickled vegetables – pickles, saurekraut, kimchee. Exactly how long this will last, I don’t know. Worcestershire sauce is another foodstuff made with salted, preserved fish. Ketchup is a sort-of developemt from fermented fisg sauces, amnd will keep, opened, a long time (as will varuiations like walnut ketchup). Soy sauce is another fermented vegetable product that keeps for a long time.
And of course, wine, sake, distilled beverages. And water.
Smoked meats will last long, and dried meat products (jerky, pemmican), but not as long, I think.
And dried vegetables, like dried peas, dried lentils, etc. Dried apples and the like will last a long, but not very long time. But a moden wrinkle – freeze-dried fruits and vegetables – can last damned near forever.
Hasn’t Kim Chee already gone bad, by definition?
(I loooove kim chee)
When I was growing up, Mormons used to strongly preach about having a two-year supply of food to last out anytime. Almost everyone I knew had barrels of wheat, which will last a long time. We would seal them after putting in dry ice to displace all the oxygen.
Despite popular expectations, the end never came, so I don’t know who much of that wheat is still good.
Yeah, but it can always get badder 
Si