"best before date"

The *real* record probably belongs to things she's had in her cupboards before best-before dates were introduced. She's still using a big sack of cornflour which she inherited from her own mother, who died in 1983. Until the mid-90s we used a bottle of brown sauce whose price ended in a halfpenny; we didn't finish the bottle until about 10 years after halfpennies disappeared.

(she is also the sort of person who, if things like jam or cheese start to go mouldy, will calmly scrape the mouldy bits off and eat it anyway)

With canned food tho, the manufacturers err on the side of caution big-time and there are prolly few canned foods that can't be eaten several years after their sell-by date perfectly safely. I say few - I'd imagine condensed milk is one I *wouldn't* risk.

anyway there were a few left-behind tins in the pantry, including some fray bentos corned beef: which had been canned in zimbabwe, was attested taint-free courtesy a stamp from "meat-inspection station #7", and had a "best of" date of — that magic year! — 1996

to his credit, in respect of war on all cultural chauvinism, dad wz fairly gung ho abt trying it, but we persuaded him to wait till i had gone out to buy bacon instead

as it wz not our tin to throw away, we left it in the cupboard

Hello Lara!

Here in the States, our perishables tend to expire on any day of the month they wish -- this Dr Pepper I'm drinking, e.g., would have breathed its last on FEB 21 2003 if I had not killed it prematurely.

I have here a bottle of aspirin slated to expire on 3/3/2005.

Also I believe the Times Square subway station escalator repair project will be completed on July 10, 2004 (pardon the inconvenience).

http://ebay1.ipixmedia.com/abc/M28/_EBAY_c2c3790f4bd8b6d70fb6c8d74578e866/i-1.JPG

(Must by milk tomorrow!)

Vector to the totality = finding a trout in a fed-ex package five years too late

And I have 20+ year old spices that I bought to cook something that I never used since, but I guess the worst that can happen from that is stale food.

i wz just talking to mum on the phone and she said that yesterday dad asked for a piece of cake, and she said there isn't any

but then she remembered aunt penny had sent us a cake for xmas: which we had all larfed abt at the time as even still in the parcel it felt like the densest heaviest cake ever baked by ppl not born on jupiter

anyway mum got the tin out of the larder and tipped the cake out, and cut a slice and took it up to dad — warning him that it might be a bit stale, as it wz from xmas (but fruitcakes do keep well, and v.heavy surely means v.moist...)

so dad took a bite and declared it inedible (which is quite severe: he wz at school during WW2 and will eat anything!!)

when mum came back into the kitchen she saw a 'best before" date on the bottom of the cake tin: 1990!!

top present aunt penny!!

And, erm... never mind.

I can top all of you. When I cleaned out the dirt queen's kitchen, I found, like spices that had expired in 1987. Do you have any idea how long it takes spices to go off? So you can surely IMAGINE how old and nasty these things were. If you thought spices didn't go bad, well, let me tell you they get mouldy and yucky like everything else.

There was ketchup that expired in 1996 that was still in her "in use" pile. GAH!

I can't think of one conceivable instance in which this would happen any time soon, Tracer. I imagine you can get another canned water before then (!? canned water?!).

We were always finding mystery objects in my mom's fridge, things that got "hidden" in the back and you'd pull out and there was no way of telling what it formerly was before getting covered by mould and nasty. We'd try to guess but we never could. We'd usually end up throwing out the whole container with it, the tupperware. I'd tell her, there's no reason to have this much food, what are you stocking up for that you can forget that you have something so disgusting in there for god knows how long? I've still not gotten a good explanation as to why she needs to much food in her house. I think it has to do with preparing for the tilt of the axis, which is obviously coming very, very soon, like Tracer's water shortage. Maybe it had to do with mad cow disease, I can't keep track of which ridiculous thing is her new obsession.

I just found a tin of 'mackerel fillets in spicy tomato sauce' with a best before date of Dec 2003.

To eat or not?

Probably fine - the acidity of the spicy tomato sauce should give it a long shelf life.

i wouldn't eat those before a date

roffle. unless she likes to reenact two girls one spoon type of situation.

i feel extremely guilty: I didn't realize the milk we gave my eldest daughther had expired a month ago. :-(((((((((((((((((((((

I've seen reports that honey has been found in Egyptian tombs, and it's still edible.

Also a few years ago some liquor (whiskey, I presume) was found in a shipwreck that was sold at a premium. It won't go bad as long as the cork remains intact.

there's some wine writer I was reading who tried a bottle of 1542 german reisling.. he said it wasn't all that great but it was fun to 'taste the sunshine' from 600 years ago

And apparently I never posted this here, but I have plastic bottles of bloody mary mix from a party I went to in Sept 2001 (the weekend before 9/11). I keep them in the fridge, and have sniffed now and then and they smell (OK, and taste) fine. It's more of a science experiment at this point, since I really don't make bloodys at home, nor ever think to drink tomato juice. I hate throwing away "perfectly good" food.

lol i get "throwing away perfectly good food", but 20+ year old plastic bottles, may very well *not* be perfectly good and safe IMHO. honey wasn't in plastic bottles so it prolly poses zero threat of adulteration

Yeah, it's entirely "science experiment" at this point.

I tried a 1961 German white (maybe even a Reisling) at least 40 yrs after it was bottled. Not good, and after a few sips I dumped it. My father had bought it and stored it in a closet in our non-air conditioned So Cal home.

istr in Jane Grigson's Fish Book she talks about laying down tinned sardines like wine. you have to rotate them occasionally.

honey is a literally preservative, above all of itself (turns time into a flat circle)

it's where i store my crimson sarcophagus juice

can you go on a best before date with someone?

on the other side of things i bought a thing of tamari when i went gluten free earlier this summer... it has a best before date of february 11, 2026... if it's not gone by then, am i really going to notice it's expired? and is it _actually_ ever going to expire, or does it have an expiration date because all food products here are legally required to?

honestly a lot of the stuff i have in my pantry is there as a prophylactic. do i have any chinese five-spice? good, all is well with the world. have i ever actually used chinese five-spice in my cooking? no but goddamn i COULD IF I WANTED TO. unless i check it and find out it expired five years ago.

my knowledge of wine aging is limited to "day of the tentacle", where at some point you need a bottle of vinegar. the solution, of course, is to travel back in time to the late 18th century and put a bottle of wine where nobody else will find it.

i couldn't ever figure that solution out, myself. steven moffat probably had the solution within five seconds.

Egg Thread Noodles, best before 2018. yes, or no?

probably fine, you're gonna boil them anyway

they look like the dictionary definition of inert.

am more surprised i hadn't thought to use them in 6 years.

I'm saying yes

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/cheese-dating-back-3-600-years-found-in-chinese-tomb-researchers-say-13222530

How much they asking for it?

Need to poll “would you eat 3600yo old cheese?”

I can't cite the original, but a while back I read the phrase "cheese is milk's bid for immortality". This discovery backs that up in a literal sense.

California Just Became the First State to Ban Sell-By Dates

On September 28, California became the first state to ban “sell-by” dates, as Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation aimed at combating food waste. The law prohibits the use of consumer-facing sell-by dates, and also requires standardized language for date labels.

best before 12/06...

pva glue, seems fine

just don't eat it, you will get terrible constipation!

If it's a Best Before date it's edible til and nfinity anit's ok to. Hxhill the fuxk put

Sorry i tried my thi.bs are di kz

Still got my Best Before Dec 2003 tin of 'Mackerel Fillets in Spicy Tomato Sauce' safe in the cupboard.

hmmm i was clearly best before 7pm yesterday

I just threw out a baking powder (03/11) in favor of the other baking powder (11/14) I found in the pantry.

unopened jar of quince jelly from the back of the fridge - expired 12/2019

what's the verdict? It looks alright

sugar's a preservative, jelly's a preserve -- might have a furry cap on it, scrape that off it'll be fine

(eat the cap to cure pneumonia, lyme disease etc)

there is a YT genre of people opening up and tasting and smelling old food, like tins of creamed corn from the 1930's etc.

uh... listeria? that's seems like a really bad trend

it’s going viral

or bacterial i guess

Two tins of confit duck. One bbe dec 2015. The other, from the same era, no bbe, obvious dent in the tin. Chuck that one. First one should be ok? *googles botulism*

assuming "2015" is not a typo, pls throw away and do not eat

Found some lemon juice in the back of the larder that had been there a couple of years. Label said, consume within one month of opening. I was going to risk it but then noticed there was a mustard brown sediment at the bottom of the bottle, so my pancakes went unadorned.

yeah lemon juice is surprisingly perishable

assuming "2015" is not a typo, pls throw away and do not eat

the poor ducks died in vain ;_;

i know there are stories of decades old tinned meat being open and consumed but best not tempt the gods eh.

Tins of duck?!??

yes, i highly recommend it! if it's in date.

most duck from Chinese takeaways comes from a tin

anyway I'd still eat it if I opened the tin and there were no obvious signs of impending doom tbh

Today is the day I bring out the McCormick’s pumpkin pie spice (best sometime before Covid), use a teaspoon of it, and put it back to age (and improve!) until next year.

Over for dinner with Mom, went through her spices. You know it's old when it comes in a metal tin box. Particularly the mustard powder with the purple ink stamp that says 17¢.

Some of these date from at least the '70s.

Don’t ever eat from a can of cream of shrimp soup that was a movie prop from the 1950s

“cream of shrimp” - BLARGH TIL