<p>I once ate a five-year-old MRE that tasted decent. I’ll put it this way: If I were on a battlefield on the other side of the world, it actually would have been really enjoyable. The main course was franks and beans, and it wasn’t a whole lot worse than Franco-American, just drier.</p>
<p>The worst expired food item I’ve ever found was a Tupperware container with some milk in it, which had fallen behind my roommate’s stereo early in the school year when I was a freshman in college. It had a bluish-yellow tinge—not green, mind you, but bluish-yellow, however that’s possible—and when I opened it, we had to clear the room. It didn’t have an expiration date per se, but the milk it contained would have expired around seven months prior, even if it had been refrigerated, which it hadn’t. Horrible, horrible stuff.</p>
<p>^^^mantori, I think that’s how they make blue cheese. You should have given it another couple of months.</p>
<p>Speaking of spices, I have a stash of Herbes du Province from France that a friend brought me the year my D was born: 1990. Have never used it. Maybe I’ll have to borrow my MIL’s Julia Child and figure something out.</p>
<p>Hee-hee. Yes, it’s the expiration date. Find every expired bottle of wine in your home and drink them this very weekend, before they get any worse!</p>
<p>A definite NO, you can’t tell if something is dangerous to eat by the smell.</p>
<p>Some old wines are fine, they get better with age; others are best within a few years of manufacture- a good seller should know which varieties have long and which have short shelf lives. The year on the bottle is the year it was produced, not expired. Some beers have production dates, others “best by” dates. Then there are “sell by” dates-not as helpful as “use by” dates.</p>
<p>Some spices lose their flavor, hence the reason to dispose of them- but Indians do use theirs for many years (I checked with a friend from India as mine last a long time and wanted more than my inlaws opinion). </p>
<p>At first I thought the thread was about grocery store items for sale- there’s a local store that puts new merchandise infront of, not behind, old and I always need to check expiration dates.</p>
<p>Expiration dates can be for freshness, flavor, effectiveness, or dangerous changes over time. That bacon may have altered flavor but be perfectly safe…</p>
<p>Some cities have collection dates for old medications. The danger with using expired meds is either of them not doing their job or degradation products which could be harmful.</p>
<p>“The year on the bottle is the year it was produced, not expired.”</p>
<p>Thanks - I was kidding…</p>
<p>1982 Mouton Rothschild is considered by many to be one of the best French Bordeaux wines in 50 years. “Still tasting like a 4-5 year old Bordeaux, it will evolve for another half century.”</p>
<p>While cleaning out my MIL’s cabinets after she died in spring, 2007, I found a jar dated to expire in 1986. I don’t know what she was saving it for!!!</p>
<p>You guys are making me feel so much better! When I was a newlywed my mom bought me a spice rack that came with a bunch of jars of spices. I’ve been married 23 years and still have some of those jars, I’m not a very adventurous cook. I know I should throw them out, they’ve probably got ZERO flavor left, but I just haven’t done it. My kids were making fun of me, our grocery store has changed names twice and they found a jar of spices that was labelled from 2 stores ago, which makes it about 10+ years old. I was too embarassed to tell them that the other spices in the cabinet are even older…</p>
<p>This past summer, my inlaws were out of the country for a couple of weeks and my daughter did some house/dog-sitting for them. She’s great at organizing things so, while there, she decided to clean out their pantry. She called me at work to tell me she found a box of Uncle Ben’s rice that boasted they were a proud sponsor of the 1992 olympics. She found another box that was older than her and she was born in 1988! Yikes!</p>
<p>My MIL is terrible. Whenever we go to their house and eating is involved my H always has me secretly checking the dates. Last Thanksgiving we slept in their guest house. I had a headache and looked inside the medicine cabinet. Every bottle of aspirin or other pain medicine was expired. We are not talking recently expired. The aspirin bottle had expired in 1988.
Many, many years ago when my H and I first lived together she gave him a box of food from her pantry. There was a pizza mix box. We made it and I ended up very sick. After we looked at the box we realized it had expired 5 yrs earlier. That was my first indication that I needed to be careful at their house.
She also has assorted toiletries that are also many, many years old.
My H and 1 of my kids are particularly obsessive about expiration dates.</p>
Yes, it’s the expiration date. Find every expired bottle of wine in your home and drink them this very weekend, before they get any worse!</p>