I currently have a pack of dental floss from 1991 in my cabinet. It’s not what you think, though…it’s just that it’s for backup when we run out of our preferred brand…I used some the other day; it’s still minty fresh!
With a raging headache and no painkillers in the house, I dug through my father’s old office room looking for drugs. All I could find was a 10-pill blister pack of Paracetamol (Tylenol) from Brazil, 750mg apiece, expiration date of June 1997.
You’re darn right I popped a few of those suckers, and perhaps it was placebo effect, but 12 years and 4000 miles away, I swear I felt better. The rational part of my brain knows that they probably had no painkilling properties left, but I suffered no obvious ill effects.
I ate a spoonful of 17 years-past-use-by-date jam.
Hey, it was a preserve!
I’ve eaten some charred grains of wheat that were 3,500 or 4,000 years old. Since they had been mislabeled and without context, I thought I might as well try snacking on them. They tasted like charcoal.
Well, it wasn’t too long ago that I decided to reach to the back of our rather deep pantry and pull out dear dad’s long forgotten can of lima beans. But, I must say, if you’re looking for a refreshing accoutrement to your latest gastronomical extravaganza, you can most assuredly do better than choosing legumes, circa 1945. You would think the shrill sound of air exiting from a K-ration tin, sealed during the Roosevelt administration, would give one pause to consider any number of possible unanticipated consequences. But, then again, one therefore would not be privy to firsthand experience of fulminate vomitus and projectile diarrhea—two of anthropological biology’s more spectacularly colorful side shows.
I was making a loaf of bread a little while ago and used some yeast that was seven years old. It didn’t rise as much as I’d hoped but still tasted fine.
Also, years ago, probably in the late 80’s or there abouts, I was making something with my dad (probably fruitcake or fudge, that’s all he makes) and I seem to remember using a dry ingredient that was about 15 years old (we found a whole series of ingredients dated in the early to mid 70s stuffed at the back of our cabinet). I’m afraid I can’t be more specific than that as the only part that stuck with me was looking through the ingredients and noticing that I wasn’t even born when they bought most of these things (born 1977)