I got horribly bug-bitten a few days ago, and was scratching scratching scratching. I’d turned patches of my skin into red, rough, hot, pimply surfaces with mutiple places I’d drawn blood…and still I couldn’t stop scratching.
Finally I checked all the medicine cabinets and found a bottle of Caladryl Clear (apparently like calmine lotion but clear.) I slathered it on, and blessed relief! That was in the evening, by the next morning the patches were much less hot and raised and even smaller. Mostly, no doubt, because I wasn’t ripping at them with my nails like a deranged terrier after a rat. So I retreated the sites, several times that day as directed, and the next, and the improvement was continual until my skin basically looked normal again.
Upon hubby’s return from a business trip I mentioned how wonderfully the Caladryl had worked. “Jeez,” he said, “I bought that stuff ages ago!”
So I checked the bottle. Expiration date was Febuary 1996*.
That OP is proof that hyphens matter. For a moment there I honestly thought it was asking “what is the largest amount of material from a date that you have ingested?” (presumably from the fruit and not from a prospective romantic partner).
I hate to think. I know my ex-MIL served salad dressing that was up to ten years past the expiration date, but that’s only because I could see the bottles to read the dates. I have no idea how old were some of the things she used in her cooking, but I do know there were substances in her pantry that she’d bought in America, and she’d been back in Australia for 15+ years at the time.
I can’t cast stones. I cleaned out my spice rack this week and threw away some herbs and spices with Best Before dates back to nearly the turn of the Millennium - the oldest bottle was BBE 2001.
I burned my finger once and the only ointment I could find was in a first-aid kit in my wife’s car. The expiration date on the tube was 1987. Mind you, this was about 10 years ago, so the stuff was really only 12 years past expiration, not 22.
The antibiotic was probably totally ineffective, but the petrolatum base worked just fine. I still have the finger.
I’ve got you beat! Recently moved to the woods, have been feeding the local population through my ever itching epidermis, and I reached for my bottle of Caladryl Clear, dated December '92. Didn’t work any better than the new bottle I got. Btw, I paid 4.89 for the old stuff. According to walgreens.com the new bottle costs $7.79.
After my mother passed away at age 92, I was cleaning out the medicine cabinet and discovered a partially-rusty metal container of “tooth powder” (toothpaste in powder form). I vaguely remember seeing her using this when I was a kid, back in the '50s. I decided to try it; it wasn’t bad. There was no date on the container, but it had the address of the manufacturer. It pre-dated ZIP codes. And judging from the graphics and type, I’d guess it was from the '40s.
Amongst other things of similar vintage, my mother still has about half-a-dozen tubes of Avon “Cucumber Cooler” lotion, dating from 1984. You never know when that’s going to come in handy.
Woo! I doubt (almost hope!) that no one can top that.
Actually, I helped clean out my grandfather’s house, and I bet one of the things I tossed was that kind of toothpowder. It was in a metal can, painted red & white, with ‘Colgate’ on it. I remember noticing it because the can was oval rather than round in cross section.
I also remember a fair number of things I’d never seen or heard of before. Like a small pot of a black gooey balm (?) labeled Iodex.
Sadly for this thread, instead of indulging I simply dumped everything from the cabinet into the trash.
After thought: maybe it’s time for us to do a cleanout of the medicine cabinets AND the spice rack? I suspect I have some spices bought for a single recipe ghod knows how long ago and left to languish ever since.
At my wife’s parent’s house, they have a bottle of crushed-red-pepper (happy, Ximenean? :p) that are more of a greyish-brown. Both her and her brother still use them (on pizza). They were purchased from K-mart, sometime in the 1970’s they estimate. Sadly, no actual expiration date.
I use about a half teaspoon of ground cloves a year. It was only last year that I used up the jar I bought circa 1983. It still tasted like cloves, so why mess with a good thing? The jar I bought to replace it is twice as big, so it will probably last 50 years.
When my grandmother died in 1994, my stepmom had to continually stop my dad from trying to eat all of the jams and jellies from her basement. Most had expiration dates in the mid-70’s, predating my own birth.
My mother still has spices in her larder with prices marked in shillings and pence. Decimalisation was in 1971. She still uses them. If I’m going to be cooking up there, I take my spice box with me!
We were eating a salad while “camping” out recently.
I noted that the newly opened ranch salad dressing tasted a bit off…hmmm, maybe it is one of those “special” mixes, extra garlic, onion, whatever…nope, its regular ranch, not even ranch lite…well, thats not good…hmmm, it sure looks way more yellow than I remember this brand of ranch dressing looking…I check the bottle…damn, this shit is 6 or 7 years old.
Not just not refrigerated for that time. Not even just not air conditioned. Noooooo, this shit has been sitting in an unairconditioned motorhome in FLORIDA that sits baking in the sun for nearly the whole day every day for the better part of a decade !
The SO got pissed when I refused to eat anymore.
I am sorry, but a dollar or two worth of salad and dressing are not worth the risk of getting really sick or an emergency room visit for that matter.
Of course, this is the SO that I got into a big fight over getting rid of 15 year old homemade jelly…of a flavor she did not even like…and I sure as hell wasnt going to eat.
billfish678, your SO sounds like my former SO. He had food in his fridge that was years old, and refused to get rid of it.
We were making dinner one night, and I pulled out a bottle of blue cheese dressing for salad. When I opened the lid, it actually popped off when I got it loosened enough and splattered out. I could tell by the smell that it had gone bad, but he stubbornly refused to let me toss it. I checked the date and it was 6 years old! I refused to eat it, but he did, claiming it was fine. He ended up getting sick later that night. The dressing was still in his fridge months later.
He also had spices that were ancient; some were rock hard, others didn’t even have bar codes on the jar, they were so old.
Eh, not impressed. The pyramids have been shown to have incredible preservative powers, so I’d expect a date left inside a pyramid to be as fresh as the day it was placed there.In fact, Edmunds Scientific Catalog used to even sell small pyramids so that people could preserve things.
I have a bottle of the same thing that’s at about that old and still sprinkle some on pizza now and then. There’s numbers and a price stamped on the bottom but the label is long gone.
I also have an unopened can of beer from about 1985 that’s been refrigerated continuously. I may get crazy and drink it (or at least open and sniff it) one of these days.
I found a few boxes of Macaroni and Cheese in the back of my mother’s cupboard when she moved.
One was 5 years out of date and tasted perfectly fine.
One was 10 years out of date and the cheese had turned from yellow to brown so I tossed it.