Working at Manchester (England) Meat Market in 1968 we received 3 cans of corned beef which had been issued to troops in the trenches during WW1.
We didn’t sell the stuff but we did open one can and believe me the beef tasted just fine…I was only off work sick for 2 weeks :rolleyes:
My dad is like this too. They have spice jars in their cupboards that look like they’re from the 1970s. Once, I found an unopened bottle of ranch dressing in the cabinet. Except it was brown, not white. The expiration date was 1993. If I hadn’t thrown it away, my dad probably would have never noticed anything was wrong with it and tried to use it.
He also buys 2 liter bottles of soda when guests come over, then leaves half-full ones sitting out for months, and thinks they’re just fine to drink. First of all, they’re completely flat, and just plain gross. And who knows what kind of nasties are growing in there.
Oh, another story. Once my dad had gotten a nice pork tenderloin at Costco. It was raw and vacuum-sealed in plastic. He had it in the refrigerator (not the freezer) for at least a month or more, and thought it would be just fine to eat, because it was “hermetically sealed.” Heh. Once he cut that plastic open, the most horrible smell of rotting meat filled the house. I think he learned his lesson there.
Another thing he does which I think is terribly gross: he will let raw meat marinate all day on the counter in a baking dish (like a flank steak or chicken), take it outside to grill it, and after it’s cooked, put it right back into the same dish with the marinade that the raw meat was soaking in all day. :eek: I had to explain to him numerous times that you cannot do that! But he still does it, and acts like we’re crazy when my brother and I act grossed out by it.
When my wife cleaned out our cupboards last year, she found 2 unopened cans of ground pepper. Each had a price tag on them from the Fort Richardson Commisary. I left Alaska in 1982!
Now she makes me pitch anything I can’t remember buying. 
My mother in law still has foodstuffs with American price tags on them. She moved the family over here in 1991 and hasn’t been back to the US since.
I can’t believe that I forgot to mention that she served red wine on the same night, and nearly made her son throw up. It was wine from a cask (he’s a wine snob, so it was never going to impress him), and it was off. Despite everyone she served it to telling her that it had gone bad, she refused to believe them and put it back in the fridge. Later we peeked and saw that it was 14 months past it’s useby date. The indisputible fact that it tasted like toxic waste couldn’t shake MIL’s belief that it couldn’t go off because it was in a bladder. I have just realised that it must have been one of the casks left over from her 50th birthday party… she’ll be 53 next month.
I remember one of my history professors talking about the British Navy issuing a batch of hardtack 40 years after it was baked. Apparently one batch got lost in the churn of incoming and outgoing barrels of hardtack, a quartermaster checked and said “Ehh, still good.” and issued it to the sailors. No word on whether the sailors complained (or even noticed… hardtack is not particularly tasty, and already pretty stale).
About 10 years ago, I found a bottle of Karo corn syrup in my mother’s cupboard - where she kept spices and other rarely-used items. Above the stove, so anything there probably got warm enough regularly enough to be beyond edible anyway.
The Karo had found new life. I showed it to Mom, and she said “Oh, that’s probably left over from when I used to use that to make your baby formula”. In other words, it was probably 40 years old at that point (then again, so were most of the spices but they weren’t in clear containers so who knew…).
Typo Knig’s parents had numerous bottles of liquor, inherited from TK’s grandfather. When they finally got around to clearing things out in the late 80s, they found a) a bottle of Palestinian brandy (as in, over 40 years old at that point), and b) a bottle of Aquavit that had moss growing in it. I didn’t know mold could grow in liquor.
Not a food item, but a few years ago I found a roll of masking tape at work. It looked kind of old, but usable. It had a yellow core, and was manufactured by “Minnesota Mining & Mfg”. I wonder how long it’s been since 3M labeled their products that way?