Eye drops - Expiration date 05/02. After I squirted it in my eye, it felt thicker than usual, but still worked. I never would have used them if I had noticed the date first though.
Our pantry is just a converted walk-in closet with no light and deep metal shelves. Things get pushed back and never discovered until years later, all the time. Lastweek I ate some 2 year old couscous. I had a craving and new I had a box in there. by the time I found it, I wasn’t going to let a past date stand in my way. It was yummy.
Spice jars might not be reliable indicators of age.
I have spice jars that are far older than the spices contained within, since I keep the jars and just refill them with bulk spices packaged in plastic bags.
My grandma loves shopping, especially if it is a “bargain”. I would put it into the category of well she’s old and entitled to spend her money however she wants, but her bargain shopping also includes food. Way more food then she can ever eat, and she refuses to throw any of her “bargains” out. I refuse to actually eat anything at her place, but it is always fun to go through her pantry and see all the labels from 20+ years ago. She finally was forced to clear out some of the older stuff when quite a few of her canned goods started exploding.
And here I was worried about the Kraft Dinner in my pantry that expired a year ago!
The last friend who moved here from Canada 3 years ago brought me 14 cases of Kraft Dinner (!) but I wasn’t able to eat it fast enough and still have 4 left. That still sounds like that’s all we eat but it takes three boxes to feed all 4 of us and we only eat it on the weekend.
We had friends over and at one point, I said something like “oh please stay for dinner, we have plenty of food” and then after I thought about it, I realized I needed to stretch the menu a little bit. Digging around in the pantry, I found one of those Uncle Ben’s rice dishes, I think the broccoli au gratin kind (I don’t know if it was that particular brand, but it was that type of thing). I did notice the expiration date was 01-08, and this was around March of 08, so I figured they probably give you a little wiggle room on that and that it would be okay to eat it as the date was only a few months past.
Later, when I was cleaning up, I looked at the package again and realized I had read it wrong, it was 08-01, AUGUST OF 2001. Well, no one died.
Since then I’ve noticed that almost all food has stamped dates that include 2009 or whatever, instead of just 09. It makes me wonder if the food industry got a lot of complaints early in the decade from dumb people like me who read the dates wrong.
In 2005 I was looking through the bathroom cabinets at my grandmother’s house for hydrogen peroxide to treat a scraped finger. Instead, I found a small vial with a yellowed paper label that read “Mercurochrome Antiseptic” in blocky, all-caps lettering. I had read about the stuff, but had never seen it in person- so I painted the cut red/orange and applied a band-aid (to no ill effect).
I remember my mom applying mercurochrome to my skinned knees as a child. Even then, I thought it was mildly gross that you’d dab the glass wand across your broken skin, and then put it right back in the bottle, for the next injured kid.
When several years ago after her death I cleaned out my mother’s medicine chest I found a small prescription bottle filled with green pills about the size of an M&M. The bottle, which I remember seeing when I was a little kid, was not labeled as to contents; it simply said"Take One As Needed." The date on the label was “June 4, 1937.” That’s roughly a year before I was born. I kept the bottle. I have no idea what the pills are or what they were for, or what they have turned into during the past 72 years, but someday a doctor is going to say to me “You have a few weeks to live.” At that point I am going to take those pills on the theory that they can’t hurt me and who knows, maybe they will cure me.
I had a can of green beens from 1993 and I found it in 2008. It was in a box I had packed when I moved from Florida in 1993 and I hadn’t opened the box since.
I said “What the heck I’ll eat one.” So I did and it tasted fine. So I heated them up and ate them. They tasted fine and no ill effects
In 1998, my mother moved from the house where I grew up (she’d been there nearly 30 years), and when she cleaned out her linen closet, she found a bottle of the stuff way in the back. It still had a price sticker on it from a store in another state. We’d moved from that place in 1970.
My ex-SO (mentioned in post #17) still had a bottle in his medicine cabinet. I was appalled at first, and tried to get him to throw it out, but he refused. It was at least half-full.
In the early 70s my grandfather used to sell chocolate (big blocks) to people for extra money. Now my grandfather was born in 1912, lived through the depression and in those days you never threw away anything. When he found some of the chocolate in his home after 30 years he just cut off the parts that did not look so good and ate the rest. Yes, he ate 30 year old chocolate, it did not do him any harm and he lived to 93.
30 year old cinnamon. I found it in the cabinet of the house I was staying in It was only when I noticed that the tin looked a little out of date did I bother to check the expiration date on it. I should’ve figured that since none of the guys at the house cooked it was probably something left there by their grandmother. It tasted fine and I was lazy so I just used it.
