Slightly off topic, may I recommend the, sometimes, amazingly funny Steve1989 MREinfo?
A man who, almost, hasn’t met any long term storage food-stuff (MRE’s and life-boat rations) that he’s not afraid to try!
(Oft heard comment: This is the worst thing I’ve ever tasted :eek: . . . I gotta have another bite. :smack:)
Oh, and no cigarette to old to smoke.
CMC fnord!
In the late 60’s, Camp Pendleton, CA, I had C rations from 1942-1944. Taste was OK but the cigarettes burned down to the filter in about 2 puffs. (5 cigs in a pack)
What a colorful subthread. I’m really getting a charge out of it.
When I was a kid, on my way to school I walked past a sweet shop, run by a really old guy (until it suddenly closed without any notice when I was about 14). I regularly bought sweets there, because the prices were about 10 years out of date. It was some time before I realised that a fair bit of the stock was as well.
The bar of toffee that had acquired the texture of fudge was especially memorable; me and my friend thought it must be a new brand 'cos neither of us had heard of it before, it turned out it was only produced for about a year, when we were 2.
I’m sure I’ve eaten older stuff though, last time I stayed at my Great Uncle’s house, I discovered the price label on the black pepper was pre-decimal (so, before 1971). He said it was fine, they didn’t use best before dates back then :rolleyes: 
It tasted of nothing, mind.
I have a few spices from when we lived in Western New York (before 1991). It was only last year I used up the last of the ground cloves my mother bought sometime around 1984. It still tasted okay, but I had to use more because the flavor fades somewhat over the years.
Not me, but I believe some archaeologists have eaten honey - excavated from ancient Egyptian tombs - that is thousands of years old.
It wasn’t something I ate, or something I personally sold; let me back up a bit.
My dad was a prepper, back before that word was coined. Actually, he complained more than he prepped, but that’s a different story. One of his preparations was buying these huge boxes, each filled with a year’s worth of freeze dried meals for one person. This was some time between 1970 and 1973.
He bought one for each member of the family. They were stored in the eaves of the garage. After Dad retired, he and Mom moved twice. Each time they took the boxes with them. Since us kids had moved out, they now had enough to feed the two of them for two and a half years.
Dad died first. Mom died in 2012. There were a good many things to be disposed of one way or another. We held a weekly yard sale for several months. During one of those yard sales, my son found and sold the boxes of protective food. I was worried for a bit, but he said he’d told the buyer how old they were.
In the end I just shrugged. If they ever eat any of it, it’s possible that it will be as edible as freeze dried food usually is. And there’s a chance that they’ll just keep it the way Dad did, waiting for . If that’s what they do, the boxes could end up in another estate sale. I like to think that’s what will happen, that the boxes will pass from prepper to prepper as a shield against the end of civilization.
There is something poetic about the juxtaposition of tomb honey and prepper freeze dried meats in this thread.
Last night with our kids and their spouses together with us for a rare reunion, we cracked open some 21 year old cheddar to celebrate the occasion and their imminent departure home. In our tradition, the selected fromage is know as The Cheese of Farewell.
It was exquisitely sharp, bright, slightly crunchy with yummy protein crystals, and the half pound sample did not last long. Plain rice crackers were offered as an accompaniment along with many beverages of choice. But the cheese was deemed to need no other foodstuff with it.
Now I’ve got remaining some 18 year old cheddar, some 16 year old, and some nearly baby cheddar at a mere 11 years. All to be savored at future special events.
I had some M&Ms that were 10 or 15 years old, they were fine. On the other hand, just the other day at work I was fixing something and found some oyster crackers (the kind you put in soup) behind some drawers. They had to be 5-10 years old. They looked fine. I expected them to be stale so I popped one in my mouth. I’ve never spit food out right there, on the floor, in front of a bunch of people, in a place where customers could have seen me. They were that bad. They tasted horrible and made my mouth feel funny, almost like I was having some kind of reaction to them (I wasn’t). It was awful. The strange thing was, the taste, for as disgusting as it was, was strangely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
I tried to get some of the other guys standing around to try one, but none of them wanted to, finally some one else did and said ‘eww, tastes like wood’. Yup, that was it, it tasted like particle board. That smell when you first open up and start putting together one of those Office Depot type desks that weigh about 900 pounds, it tasted exactly like that, 'cept more.
Belgh.
There were a bunch of crackers down there. Some that could have slid down there any time in the last 5 years or so, then some that had the old style label on them. I told my employee that cleaned them all out to toss them back in and drop a few more back each time the label changes. He’s too much of a perfectionist to let that happen.
I regularly use food coloring and spices that are a mix from probably the late 70’s to the present day. One of them has a price tag from a store that went out of business in the early 1990s.
About a month ago my father found in the garage a packet of Curry Marche (Japanese “European” style curry sauce in a sealed metallic bag) that had been scurried away and then forgotten about. The expiration date was from back in Dec 2012 (yeah, nowhere near as old as what others here have ingested).
I boiled the bag and poured the sauce out into a bowl to check it out. Curry Marche comes with mushrooms and thin strips of beef. The mushrooms were still intact, but the beef had all dissolved. The sauce tasted fine (a tiny bit more acidic?), so I added rice and finished off the entire thing. Yum!
I’ve had a few drops of 100 year old balsamic vinegar before.
Are your parents Mormon? They’re big on that kind of thing, BUT the ones I know about rotate and use their supplies.
I’ve got a couple bags of MRE’s in my Jeep, for, “Just In Case”. I figure there 30 years old at least. It being a Jeep, I fully anticipate being forced to eat these some day.
Holy Shit, Dude! You got a “new” piece. I’m pretty sure most of that stuff is from the Prohibition Era. 
Nope. Dad just sort of pieced his own thing together. Other than the boxes, they didn’t store food. Well, Mom did some canning for a couple of years. The jars sat on shelves in the garage for a good bit of time, but I don’t think they packed them and moved them, like they did with the boxes.
It was more prep theater than actual prep.
I’m pretty sure I’ve told this here before, but I can’t find it now so:
You see kids, back in the 70’s, there was this huge scare on that overpopulation was going to destroy our means of survival and we were all going to starve to death. People were desperate to find new sources of food to sustain us through the food-pocalypse.
The Smithsonian used to do this annual “Alternative Proteins” festival. You’d go in and buy toffee crickets on a stick, chocolate covered ants, crunchy meal-worm teriyaki snacks, that sort of thing. It was the first place I’d ever heard of spirulina, and of course, there were tons of soylent jokes bandied around with t-shirts you could buy and such. (Fun fact, I’m swigging “Coffiest” as I type this. LOL!)
One year, there were these guys selling bites of wooly mammoth for $50 each. It had been found frozen in a glacier. So my Dad and I each had a bite, just to say we’d done it. It tasted like the smell of a musty old freezer my Grandmother kept in her basement. Except more so . . . like the way vegemite tastes like Guinness.
Nasty stuff. My tongue still tries to curl up in my mouth and searches for a place to hide whenever I think of it.
We had stew one night, and a few days later I ate the leftovers for lunch.
That evening my gf was looking around in the refrigerator and freaked out.
“You didn’t give the red Tupperware container to the dogs, did you?!”
“No, I ate it for lunch”.
Turns out there were no leftovers from our recent stew. But there was a container of leftover stew from a looooong time prior. It had passed from “lunch leftovers” to “dog leftovers” to “throw away before fridge stinks” to “whatever comes next”.
It tasted great and I did not get sick!
On my birthday last year I had a bottle of 50-year old wine.
It was quite nice, I have to say!
If you really did eat woolly mammoth, you ate something people famous for having eaten woolly mammoth didn’t eat. (I’m not implying that you are a liar–I’m implying that “those guys” were liars.)