Just tonight I bought a bunch of UHT boxed milk that was on clearance really cheap, this is the shelf stable stuff that is unrefrigerated. The check out lady tried to warn me away saying it expires tomorrow! I was like meh, even if I don’t leave them in the pantry they freeze fine and we have an empty chest freezer. This is like months of milk supply for a little over 10 bucks, I’ll ignore exp. dates for a deal.
I don’t even pay attention to exp. dates on cans unless we’re talking decades or bloated rusty cans.
c1970, when I was a child - living in Cyprus when my dad was stationed there with the RAF - he gave us some D-Ration bars to try (‘survival chocolate’ enriched with oat flour and vitamins).
They stopped manufacturing these shortly after the end of WWII - so the product I ate was probably more than 30 years out of date.
After my mother passed away, I inherited her kitchen and everything in it. I decided to go through her spice rack and toss whatever was unusable. Some of the spices were too old to have expiration dates, but they had addresses with “Zones” instead of ZIP codes. The U.S. transitioned from Zones to ZIP codes in 1963.
Then I realized that I had used some of these spices in my omelet, the day before.
Wow, that’s amazing. In my part of the country/world anyway, it’d be nigh impossible not to have endured at least one power outage/blackout in that time span, which is what would really worry me about a frozen turkey with a “Perot in '92” sticker on it. I know I’ve had to empty my freezer due to losing power for 24+ hours at least twice in just the past ten years, never mind twenty.
Some of the other responses in this thread are really great too. Eating stuff that “expired” before my kids were born is one thing. Eating stuff from beore I was born, even as far back as WW2 rations, that’s awesome!
The best I can offer is a little bottle of Listerine (3 fl. oz.) in my drawer at work that I keep in a small box of “emergency sundries” like contact lens solution and case, aspirin, a small eyeglass repair screwdriver, a few Band-Aids, and so on. I noticed the other day the Listerine expired in Jan 1999. I don’t see why it would have an expiration date, obviously I don’t use it very much, and by now it’s kind of a curiosity, so there it will remain indefinitely.
At the other extreme, my foster daughter will not eat dry foods (for instance, saltines or boxed mac-n-cheese) that is even a week past its “best by” date.
I once noticed a bottle of International Delight creamer that had been sitting, unopened, in the fridge for a very long time. Decided to open it and take a swig to see if it was still good.
Did you know that when ultrapasturized creamers go bad they taste like clay that has been partially dissolved in milk?
Why DMark cannot even walk into a Mexican restaurant, let alone eat there:
I was about 10 years old and in school they were talking about foreign foods. I was pissed off that I had never tried any of them! (Granted, we lived in a small town in Illinois, and back then there was nary a recent immigrant for 100 miles, but I didn’t think of that.)
Went to the grocery store with mom and there, on the bottom shelf, with layers of dust, was a single can of tamales!
Now I cannot be sure how long it was there, but I do remember the label had almost rotted off and there was indeed lots of dust on that can. I insisted mom buy it.
At home I made mom open the can and heat those canned tamales up!
Oddly, nobody else in the family wanted to go near it.
Stubborn little kid as I was, I dove in and at almost all of it alone!
Dry heaves for days! I don’t think I have ever been that sick. Botulism? E. coli, listeria or salmonella? Combination of all? Whatever it was, it was not pleasant.
The problem is, there was some spice that was quite strong in there, and if I even get a whiff of it today (many, many, many decades later), I want to put my head in a toilet again! So - I cannot get near a Mexican restaurant. No fun living in LA and friends would go out for Mexican food and I had to pass and meet up later for drinks. Often, even when walking down a street past a Mexican restaurant, I can get a faint odor of whatever that spice is and have to go to the other side of the street. Even at work, if someone pops in some Mexican food in the microwave, I have to leave the kitchen area pronto.
This spring I cooked & tried to eat a box of Kraft macaroni & cheese that had expired something like 6-7 years earlier. “What could go bad in there?” I thought. Dried macaroni, powdered orange cheese-flavored substance. I add my own milk & margarine, right?
The finished product was orange-brown. Not the bright tell-tale orange of Kraft Mac & cheese, but a dull, orangey-brown. And it tasted more like the box than like cheese. Ick.
I got two bottles of Worcestershire sauce shortly after I moved into the apartment in 2005. I’ve never refrigerated either of them, and I’m still on the second.
I consider those dates guidelines, especially on things like that.
This is the best laugh out loud thread I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of enjoying. I wish I had my own story to share, but as much as I use best by and expiration dates as mere guidelines, I don’t think even I have ever eaten anything that was more than a year past the printed date.
No. I have cumin in my spice shelf and that is no problem.
Also, I don’t think is is cilantro…I have sampled that (don’t particularly like it) but it doesn’t send me running to the bathroom and wanting to wretch.
So - not exactly sure what the spice is, but I sure as hell know it when I smell it from afar.
When we moved out of our house last year we threw a lot of stuff out that expired in the 90’s. My worst real eating expired stuff experience was eating my then favorite sandwich: bologna on white bread with miracle whip. It tasted a little funny but since I always read while I ate I kept eating and reading. Finally I came to the end of a chapter and looked at what I was eating: blue bologna on green bread. :smack: I haven’t eaten a bologna sandwich since…at least 20 years. I also gave up white bread and miracle whip.
How old is she? My daughter, who is 10, is a “best by” fanatic. We’ve tried telling her that “best buy” is not the same as “turns into poison immediately after”, but she starts giving things the stinkeye when they’re even approaching their best by date.
