The coke machines in my dorm were always EMPTY! Or out of all the good stuff. Grape Fanta — bleh!
I recently found a case of Leinenkugel in the basement that my husband bought for our housewarming party in 2003. I don’t drink beer but I was tempted to sneak one into his current stash and see if he noticed.
Eh? :dubious: I have bolded the applicable sentences below.
I agree with your general sentiment, though, and I only wanted to do my part to dispel the fairly common myth that eggs become dangerous after their sell by/use by date and must be immediately dumped into landfills. (I also want to express my delight that much of our egg information has been provided by Dopers named pullet and Dr. Drake.)
Final egg-expiration trivia: I recently saw a profile piece on TV station about an artist who decorated eggs in the traditional Ukrainian manner (using melted wax and dyes), and she said she never blew out the eggshells as most people do. She just sets the eggs aside and lets them dehydrate for up to a year until all that is left inside is a tiny piece of mummified yolk. She said they don’t develop odors or signs of bacterial growth and she decorates the shell around that remnant of the contents.
The reason that old eggs float is that the air cell is relatively large. The air cell is usually filled with, well, air, which isn’t dangerous. The shell is permeable to gas, meaning that water vapor can escape and be replaced with air. If there’s enough hydrogen sulfide to to significantly change the buoyancy, you will smell it as soon as you crack it open.
When I moved in to my first solo apartment, my dear mother gave me boxes of food from her pantry.
There’s no telling how old most of it was; how many 21yo boys look at expiration dates on food?
How many of them ***know ***there’s an expiration date on food?
Anyway, I was going to impress Mrs. Ducati by cooking at home one night, and broke out a can of La Choy Beef Chow Mein.
Yeah, it smelled a little funky while cooking, but it’s Asian, right? I fixed our plates and sat down and we both realized that the dead skunk/whale carcass/paper mill smell was the meal I had just prepared. We dumped it all in the trash and headed out for dinner.
Mrs. Duc was kind enough to point out the expiration date was 4 years before…:eek:
I thought canned goods lasted forever, don’t they?
They are guarunteed fresh until you open them - not afterwards.
How long have they been putting dates on canned food, anyway? I only started noticing them in the last few years (although, given my age, “few years” can mean up to ten) when I was selecting food to donate. I’ve always cleared out my pantry this way, but food pantries won’t take canned goods that are past their sell-by date. So nowadays, I go through the non-perishables when there’s a food drive - but I end up using the oldest stuff, donating the things that are still good, and shoving the newest stuff to the back of the shelf.
And where do things like canned baby corn come from, anyway? I swear I never buy them, but there always seems to be a can in there, lurking. That gets thrown out if it’s anywhere near its sell-by date.
We have a mysteriously appearing can of deviled ham. I throw it away and months later, there it is again.
Baby corn comes from baby cows. Well, not exactly baby cows per se, but there are fields in Chile where they raise these little six inch tall cows. The cows are adults, but they eat the stalks of the corns and leave the ears. Chilean farmers pick up the ears and sell it as “baby corn”.
So if our respective families ever get together for brunch, it will be at my house.
Gotcha.
I heard a rumor once that the entire ‘sell by’ date thing was a marketing ploy invented by a British grocery store chain. Makes sense to me. If you can get people to throw away their ‘out of date’ stuff, they’ll buy more. And it fools people into thinking the stuff on your shelves is ‘fresh’. I’m willing to bet the supermarkets have negotiated a deal with the suppliers to take back ‘expired’ stock.
FYI, the manufacturer, not the FDA, is the one who determines expiration dates on products. Many people do not know this. The key is that whatever date they stamp on the box, they have to back up with testing and data.
As you can imagine, many manufacturers/distributors will use a relatively conservative expiration date. For all they know, the product might be good for 3 years, but they put 6 months as the expiration because that’s as far out as they’ve bothered to test.
My grandmother died when I was 17 years old. Not long after my dad had cleaned out the house, we found him eating some of the jams and jellies that grandma had. When we looked at the package, some of them had expired before I was born. According to my dad, it’s fine, the sugar just crystallizes a bit. We still made him throw it away and we just bought new jars at the store for a few bucks.
Not in my experience of working in a chain grocery- it’s chucked, or even goes in a crusher to stop people from nicking it. The only thing that got returned was one make of bread, and magazines.
I remember having a school friend who was utterly convinced that even a day after the date meant inedible- her parents ran a pub, and she always got some bar snacks (chocolate, crisps, peanuts… ) that were just out of date with her lunch- and gave them to me, every time. 
I’m not dead.
That’s what all the zombies think.
Filbert, that reminds me of a friend at school who always used to come in with lots of boxes of Mr Kipling cakes to share around the class at break. He got then from the bin at the back of the supermarket where they were dumped, sealed and undamaged, when they passed the sell-by date by one day. Yum.
Over here, we have “sell by”, “use by”, and “best before”. All are pretty self explanatory, consequence being that it’s only the “use by” you have to be careful with. Some stuff even a day after the use by can be going rotten.
Last summer we got some jam from my father in laws place. It had been made my my late mother in law, who I never met, who died of cancer several years before I met my husband. And she had been too ill to do preserves the summer before she died. My husband didn’t know weather to keep this as a sentimental souvenir, or eat it. Two jars were moldy on top, we pitched the jam and saved the jar with his mom’s handwriting on it, and a few others seemed ok. I love home made jams and jellies (much more than my husband does) and I refused to eat them, and I wouldn’t let my then 7 year old eat it either. (particularly since the jars were not standard mason type jars, but recycled supermarket store jams jars, relish jars etc. I didn’t trust the seal. Hubby survived fine.
I see well fed dead people.
Really depends on the product.
Eggs, for me I will go a week or so. I know they are fine long after that but they are so damn cheap why bother.
Soda, no go. That stuff gets nasty.
Beer, never in a can (see soda) in a bottle is possible but only after checking for yeast sediment.
Okay, all canned goods are a no go.
I have eaten plenty of expired salad dressings at my parent house, never been sick but wouldn’t do it in my own home.
Why canned goods? Unless it is years past the expiration date, I doubt you would ever notice any change in taste. I recently ate a can of mixed fruit that expired a year ago but still tasted perfectly fine and for all I know still had the same nutritional quality; since, after all, that is what canning is for, this page talks about canned meat, canned when the technology was in its infancy, lasting 118 years:
(although, some of the other examples say that the food no longer smelled or tasted fresh and lost nutrients, depending on the food and probably canning process)