There is no actual science in the process of how expiration dates are used

[guidoLaMoto]

Originally Posted by bigpaul

canned food is only a stop gap in a SHTF event, depends how long the event goes on for.
all canned food is processed food and a diet of ONLY processed food is not good, in fact it can be very dangerous given all the chemicals and additives are in the modern ones.
fresh food home cooked is always best.

Please define "processed food." To me, it's just food that has been cooked in a facotry instead of your own little kitchen....It's not like they have a big, boiling cauldron being stirred by four evil witches throwing in magic dusts and plastic....Your liver processes all the food you eat, and has no idea whee it came from. One amino acid or vitamin looks just like another to your liver.

As TRex correctly notes- the problem with canned, or any stored food in a real SHTF situation is that it will eventually run out, no matter how much you stashed away. You'll need a continuing source of new food to survive (and a lot of luck).

[TRex2]

Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto

Please define "processed food." To me, it's just food that has been cooked in a facotry instead of your own little kitchen....It's not like they have a big, boiling cauldron being stirred by four evil witches throwing in magic dusts and plastic....Your liver processes all the food you eat, and has no idea whee it came from. One amino acid or vitamin looks just like another to your liver.

I think their objection is to ingredients which they cannot pronounce and don't know what the ingredient is. While this has been a problem for eternity past, it has been getting a lot more attention in recent years.

As TRex correctly notes- the problem with canned, or any stored food in a real SHTF situation is that it will eventually run out, no matter how much you stashed away. You'll need a continuing source of new food to survive (and a lot of luck).

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but others were pointing it out long before me. I was simply agreeing with them, and placing that info into a mathematical model. (My mind is geared to digest science and math, and to spit them out in simplified form.)

[TamaraSavannah]

Originally Posted by SilverBear

My mother made the best homemade bread ever.

I rarely go to town, commercial bread, even the stuff with all the preservatives, doesn't really work for me. I don't make great homemade bread, but I do make good biscuits and bannoks, and I can make those quickly and just enough for a meal.
Flour and lard store well, so that's what I do. No waste because the dog likes them too.

Homemade corn bread, no yeast, here, it will be consumed in a week to 10 days. Between that and making the bread is a weekly task, falls into when I watch my Western flick of the week, that's what decides its expiration date.

For many reasons, more things are cooked up at home than bought at the store here. Of course, there is still the need for basic ingredients like eggs and canned corn. To the former, if I am 2 weeks or so over the date on the end of the carton, I crack each egg into a separate bowl, look it over, smell it, and if that is okay, then into the mixing bowl. To the latter, well, used 10 year or so can of corn, can opener needed type, the other week without harm.

As to the buttermilk, used in the corn bread, well, that is a toughie for the bottle from the store seems to spoil so fast. There is the powdered stuff but now after using the bottle (because in the pandemic, the powder was not available), it rather pales in the recipe. The final option is the 2020 stock in the deep freeze......maybe it is time to see how it has fared.

Originally Posted by terracore

There is a youtube channel where a guy eats ancient preserved food. The oldest I saw him eat was a canned WWI ration.

It makes me wonder, a lot of Pharaohs were entombed with pots of honey and they say "the honey is still edible after 3,000 years". How TF do they really know that? Did somebody actually eat 3,000 year old honey?

FWIW, people have eaten food much older than that, like 35,000 year old meat mined from permafrost.

Knowledge like that kind of puts those expiration dates in perspective.

I remember a story when they brought ALVIN back to the surface after a year of being sunk (t'was very long ago, I don't think Robert Ballard even had his PhD then). There was a sandwich in the cockpit for the mission of that fateful day before it sunk. A tech took a bite of it, it was salty, but still edible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin#Sinking

[bigpaul]

Originally Posted by guidoLaMoto

Please define "processed food." To me, it's just food that has been cooked in a facotry instead of your own little kitchen....It's not like they have a big, boiling cauldron being stirred by four evil witches throwing in magic dusts and plastic....Your liver processes all the food you eat, and has no idea whee it came from. One amino acid or vitamin looks just like another to your liver.

As TRex correctly notes- the problem with canned, or any stored food in a real SHTF situation is that it will eventually run out, no matter how much you stashed away. You'll need a continuing source of new food to survive (and a lot of luck).

I defined processed food in my post, I suggest you read it properly.
stored food is merely a delaying process in a SHTF event, in a long term-read permanent- SHTF world this wont last long and we need to be able to access other sources of food, which normally means growing our own food, foraging, fishing, hunting and trapping and rearing our own meat animals or whatever else we can do.