Digging in the pantry for a snack… what do you know, an unopened bag of dates! I love dates. They look disturbingly like cockroach husks, but they’re very tasty. Open it up, munch away – nice, chewy, sticky sweetness. Good dates. Into the fridge for future snacking.
Then I look at the expiration date – Aug 2013. That probably means I bought them in 2012 or even 2011. And they were fine.
What other foods (besides canned food, dry rice, and other obvious long-lasting foods) seem to last forever, as long as they’re unopened?
Voila, a website that addresses the consuming question of when a food goes bad:
*although I can’t tell who the site proprietor(s) are. Maybe they also run the American Ptomaine Association.
**I question the site’s advice on when horseradish goes bad. They don’t seem to differentiate between “prepared horseradish” (judging by the photo and the description of preservative content, they’re talking about horseradish sauce) and simple horseradish in a jar (that contains only horseradish root, vinegar and salt, the way the Great Creator intended). I imagine the latter would last a long long time, but I generally consume it long before it attains antiquity. The bug that could grow happily in that kind of dynamite has my respect.
A friend of mine owns a well known honey brand (at least well known around here, but it is in stores all across the country). He’s trying to get some kind of certification and as part of that he has to put an expiration date on the bottles so his dilemma is…how far out should he set the date?
Too close (say, a year) and he’ll have to pull product back if it expires. Too far off (maybe five years, I mean, it doesn’t ever really go bad) and he runs the risk of people looking at it (that don’t understand) and thinking ‘this doesn’t expire for five years blah, I wonder what they did to it to make it last that long, I’ll just get a different brand’. I don’t know what he ended up doing, probably something in the middle, he also does actually want to make sure that it does get returned to him before it starts to crystallize in the bottle since then no one will buy it anyways. We all know it’s not bad, but you might as well just buy the one behind it that doesn’t look like that.
I once found a Little Debbie snack cake in the back of my fridge. It had probably been sitting there for close to a year. I was half tempted to eat it but I chickened out and threw it away.
Canned foods properly canned are basically immortal, I recall reading about people finding some early arctic explorer’s camp and opening and eating a can of beans nearly a century old.
Veggies can lose their color and texture but as long as the seal on the can isn’t breached they are still edible.
I’ve eaten canned foods that expired ten years prior that tasted fine and didn’t even have a texture change.
This is what bugs me about post apoc stories, if 99% of people die before the first month is up there should be enough canned food that even the kids of the survivors would not need to farm or resort to cannibalism.
I remember when Krispy Kreme first opened in Australia one of my son’s friends bought some. He ate a few and then the remainder disappeared under things in his bedroom. Some weeks later he discovered them and tried them and thought they were no worse than when he first ate them. He was horrified by this and insisted that it was “unnatural,” that if they were really food they should deteriorate. So he never ate them again.
Some foods are in a natural state that prevents decay under the right circumstances. Put a McDonalds hamburger and fries on a plate and leave it in a dry location, it will dry out rather than rot. High fat, high salt, it has natural preservatives. Put it in a plastic bag and seal the moisture in, it will turn into a fuzzy mass in a few days.
We’ve pulled a couple of things from the back of our pantry that were beyond the sell by date, and didn’t have good experiences. Tartar Sauce and Clam Chowder, they sure looked like they weren’t as good as new, and went right down the drain.
I’ve noticed canned meats have surprisingly long best-before dates.
Canned ham, canned corned beef, anchovies, etc.
It is probably because of the low water content & salt-o-plenty.
There are two cans of fish in my pantry now (herring fillets and King Oscar sardines) with 2017 dates. The herring actually has 12/31/2017 which is all of three years from NOW. I don’t even remember when I bought these, certainly not within the last six months and it could easily have been more than a year ago.