Honest, I’m not trying to be cute on a GQ question. Seriously, don’t fruit cakes fall into this category? I saw a show on, maybe, the Food channel or Discovery, about them, and I think they had examples from 50-60 years ago that were still not bad.
Leaving out the obvious jokes about their being the only thing left of our civilization millions of years from now.
But maybe the flour/cake base would eventually be unsafe to eat at some point in time, I dunno.
Mormons always try to have a two year supply of food, it’s true. I think it’s based on their own experiences on the move West.
The managers of my apartment house in Salt Lake City had a tiny apartment to themselves, but damned if they didn’t have their two-year supply, neatly packed up in consistently-sized boxes and jammed into the back room of their already too-small apartment. A lot of LDS families also have things like wheat grinders for making their own flour.
In theory, they’re supposed to eat the older stuff at regular intervals and replace it. Salt Lake cartoonist Bagley has a priceless cartoon of an LDS family eating stuff out of a box labeled “Watermelon Rinds”. With no enthusiasm on their faces.
I’ve thrown out honey that solidified into something immobile at the bottom of a closed jar after about a year. How’d the Egyptian honey manage to be edible? Or is there a standard way of re-liquefying honey that I’m ignorant of (maybe adding a bit of water and heating it up)?
The norwegian military used to have a kind of canned meat casserole as field rations*.
As far as I know, the youngest can in existance is over 25 years of age. You can still eat them. They aren’t expected to start loosing flavour for another 20-30 years. They canned a truly ungodly number of them, too.
*They are usually reffered to as RSP, which is short for the norwegian phrase Rester av Sprengt Personell = Leftovers from Exploded Personell. No idea what the real name is. Only ate it once, it was good. Although it was slightly weird eating food that was older then me.
Yup, or just pop it in the microwave. They ancient Egyptians frowned on the latter.
Your honey crystalized, but it was still edible. I love crystalized honey, but it takes a long time and my honey doesn’t usually make it that long. From this site:
I love the episode of Good Eats where Alton lines the bottom of a grill pan with salt and comments, “It won’t burn … it’s a rock.”
Matzah. It’s too dry to go moldy.
From this site:
They also have nice chart of MRE storage life depending on temperature, it’s like 55 months in 90 F or 130 months in 60 F.
Pyramids. Good for razor blades, honey, and the undead.
Si
When I was in the Army from 89-91, the MREs we had at my post had expired in '83. They didn’t tasted significantly different any other MRE’s I had, and I lived on them for weeks at a time with no problems.
What about sugar? Is there any way for it to go bad? It’s antibactierial because of it’s osmotic properties.
Hot sauce has a long shelf life.
Maraschino cherries?
As long as it remains too dry for bacterial growth, it should be OK.
Heh, up at our family cottage in the far north of Quebec (originally built by my grandfather) we’ve begun taking the step of putting year dates on non-packaged food, because there were containers of beans and pasta and the like in glass jars we couldn’t date to the nearest decade. :smack: Some dating back to the 1950s (we assume).
Most of which seemed perfectly edible, BTW.
Yeah, dried pasta should last pretty well indefinitely IF it’s kept dry and ideally sealed.
My grandmother died in 2003. When we cleared out her house we found sealed jars of her home-made pickled onions that were carefully labelled with the date they were bottled. Dates in the early- to mid-1980s.
Damn those were some strong pickled onions, but they were good!
One word.
Spam.
Dehydrated foods packed for long-term storage and properly stored can get a 10-20 year window without any degradation in taste, quality or nutritional value. See these guys for some products.
<Rodney Dangerfield>
{Adjusts tie …}
Have you tried my wife’s cooking?
</Rodney Dangerfield>
Thanks for saving me the trouble of starting a GQ thread. I was going to ask about this.
I just (re)read a book* where after a rather major disaster, our plucky heroine conveniently gets access to a recently deceased Mormon couple’s huge food cache. I was wondering whether this was an actual LDS practice or if it was just something the author threw in there.