I was helping my grandmother clean her kitchen today, and found a lot of cookies, crackers, and condiments that were very old. Some even dated back to the 50s! All day i had to ask things like “How long was this box of cookies in here?” or “Who was president when you bought this ketchup?” She lives pretty well and I know money is not an issue for her. Why would anyone hold onto stuff like this? We only started cleaning because when we had salad, she offered me some salad dressing that expired in 2000! Even if we hadn’t cleaned, I don’t think she would have actually eaten this stuff, and she does have fresh stuff. She had 3 open ketchup bottles, two were very old, and one was brand new.
Because you don’t throw food away!
Well, that was drummed into me by my mother.
Did your grandmother live through the Depression, survive the Holocaust, the Hongerwinter, or some situation where the government strictly rationed food?
I lived with and around enough people who survived the Holocaust in hiding, and the Depression in the US, that I also had it drummed into me that you don’t waste food. You learn to make things with leftovers and stale bread, and stuff that really isn’t edible, you put out for animals.
The indoctrination was very successful. I have moved food. I do manage to throw away stuff in the fridge that spoils, and if something goes way past the expiration date, I get rid of it, but canned food, that supposedly keeps forever, I have cans of that I have owned for more than a decade, and that have followed me from one residence to another. I have canned star fruit (seriously) that was in a gift basket I got so long ago, I don’t remember when, but it was a couple of cars ago, I think, and I don’t want to eat it, I don’t want to burden a free pantry with it, but dammit, it’s food; I can’t throw it away.
People sometimes have trouble making decisions on things that happen very gradually in imperceptibly small increments.
Today, the food is only a day older than it was yesterday. If there was no reason to dispose of it yesterday, there’s hardly any more reason to do so today.
Same things causes balding men to comb over - there’s never a day when they suddenly wake up bald, then decide to grow a ridiculous streamer of long hair, then plaster it down to their shiny cranium - it happens in tiny increments where each day, it just needs a little more combing and sticking down than before, but not noticeably so.
Because most packaged food nowadays doesn’t ever ‘go off’. 
And in my case, because I’m a total slackarse and only clean my cupboards out rarely…but I’m keeping the 30yr old bottle of saffron powder, 'cos it’s worth over a MILLION $ a kilo now!
I’m not great at rotating and my parents that had a large pantry were even worse. Omg fill it up! We’ll use it!
No. My mother hates to cook (but when she does it’s really good…unless she gives us(like back in the day) food poisoning–she was vegetarian but my dad and I weren’t and she kinda gave us horrible food poisoning b/c GREEEN CHICKEN MOM!!)
That was the 70’s.
In my early 30’s I’d moved back in and there was a day that not only did she find a store brand sauce of a store that didn’t exist in Houston anymore , but she opened the bottle and the smell and dust that came out was so bad.
I do hope you checked out selling the packaging stuff on ebay or something. I was born in '69, and I remember saltines tins, etc. They could help your grandmother.
My mother was born at the time of the Spanish postwar. Hunger years, all right, and her family better off than most thanks to having villager relatives: the relatives provided food that my grandparents sold in the black market, and some of it would even make its way to their own table.
I do her the service of occasionally going through her pantry; my cousin Ray does the same for my aunt. Several pots of the same preserved vegetable: which is oldest? One already (barely) expired, one close. OK, the menu for tomorrow just got changed. Pots of jam of a variety only Dad liked, and him dead in 2000: down the toilet you go! (It still seemed to be ok - ah the wonders of pasteurization!) Items that she doesn’t like and that one or another of her children or of our frequent guests do: “can of pimento olives seeks good home… here you go.”
The freezer can be almost as bad, to the point that when a recent blackout caused its contents to spoil, one of my brothers joked “you mean that piece of cod which had been there since before I shaved finally went somewhere?” Mom angrily claimed that there wasn’t anything that old; he granted this, but suddenly there was a need to find out just how old the oldest item had been. About three years, according to Mom’s inventory… we agree that she should never get one of the large freezers because, if she manages to have three-year-old items with a mini, what would she do with a walk-in? :eek:
Some of the posts above seem to suggest food goes bad when it reaches the expiration date; it doesn’t. It takes much longer.
Okay, remind me to send you Eisenhower era cereal if I find any more.
I don’t know why many people think that herbs and spices stay good forever. After my mother passed away, I discovered spices that went back to the 60s, little jars that had been part of a set, but she had rarely used. She was a great cook, but never understood how much better fresh spices tasted.
And oh, medications! Addresses on labels from before there were zip codes! Some powdered tooth paste that George Washington could have used to polish his wooden teeth. Medications for every ailment my mother suffered from, throughout her 92 years. I even found half a bottle of children’s cough medicine (I’m the younger of two, and I’ll be 70 this year).
The oldest food I personally have is a can of escargot that I bought on my first trip to Paris in 1999. But I have no plans to open it.
How did you know how old some of it was? I thought the whole business of stamping “SELL BY: XX/XX” on foods started in the '70s or '80s. Anything older than that would be hard to pin down. And the really perishable things, like milk, have a month/day stamp, so finding the year would be tricky.
Or not. In the case of preserved food, it can be a case of “either it goes bad fast, or it goes bad after air has entered the vessel, or it lasts for a much longer time than the can says”. But still, if there is a small can of cherries in syrup which nobody in the family likes (it was part of a Christmas lot), what is it doing taking up space in the pantry? It doesn’t even matter if it’s expired, it shouldn’t be there! And if there are half a dozen pots of the same preserve, with different dates, getting rid of the one that’s about to expired and the one that just expired before they do turn bad makes a lot more sense than - buying another three “fresh” pots because she’s going to use two, and the third one is “extra”. Which my mother has been known to do, and that’s how we ended up with that collection of single-pots :smack:
My father was born in 1964, and she mentioned that she had a lot of this stuff since before he was born. There were a few things that she said she could tell by the design/logos on the packages that they were from the '50s.
It may just be good.
My MIL (Depression Era kid) had stuff when she died from before UPCs and some from before the Bicentennial. The odd item kept getting pushed to the back of the shelf until it was forgotten and then pushed back on purpose because “it may not be any good”. Mind you, not bad enough to throw away but --------------
And that was the canned and dry goods. I do not even want to discuss the 45 pounds of 1958 vintage chocolate in the freezer.
And in the back of the second pantry is a stoneware basin lidded with wax, with a label with 'Aunt Abegail’s befte Syllabube — Made in The Yeare of Victory’ in faded brown ink.
I don’t fancy Syllabub, so may order the butler to donate it to the Office of the Prime Minister for immediate consumption.
Back in the early 70s, I ate some ‘survival chocolate’ bars that my dad brought home (he was in the RAF at that time) - I am as certain as can be that these were actually D ration bars - which went out of production at the end of WWII, so I ate chocolate that was nearly 30 years old.
But the rest of us do. I am guessing that at some point since 1958 there must have been at least one prolonged power outage during a heat wave, no?
How was this packaged? I guess the largest individual unit of chocolate I am used to seeing is about two pounds.
Or was she storing 150 candy bars?
Nitpick, George Washington didn’t really have wooden teeth.
No, indeed; he bought them at top-dollar from his slaves whom he persuaded to part with their front teeth, had implanted for a few years, then rinse and repeat.
By top dollar, I mean a whole third of what he would have paid a free man.
Husband worked at Clark Candies and I am sure they were disposing of it for some reason. Dude was just too honest to have taken it any other way. I believe it started life at their house around 60+ (maybe even 75) pounds and was shaved here and there after that. I doubt that it was frozen at first since they were far from rich enough to afford a large freezer at that point. But from the time they got the first one (around 70/72?) and since my wife remembered it being there. Like an heirloom. And some being shaved off for sprinkling on a cake as late as 1976.
When we pitched it (a couple years back) it was wrapped in this old-style brown wax lined paper. And even frozen it did NOT smell quite right.
You should have been in the thread about the closet full of empty drug-store bottles and the 300 peanut butter jars. Odd thing – it didn’t look like a classical “hoarder home”. Everything was neat and neatly stored. There were just odd amounts of odd things. There was always a reason (FIL like peanut butter jars for storing off things and “a few extra could be handy” - you know how hard those new-fangles bottles are to open). But the end result was maybe 15 or more bags a week for almost four years and then the serious clean-out once she passed.