Good News For Girls Who Don't Grocery Shop
Like me. It seems old food still kinda works...even after decades. Joanna Glasner writes in Wired:

Next time you feel compelled to clean out the pantry, don't feel bad about putting it off.

A lot of the old food that's gone beyond the manufacturer's expiration date could still be edible for years or decades longer.

Such are the findings of food science researchers who recently subjected a panel of human tasters to samples of really old food. They discovered that artifacts like 20-year-old dried milk and 28-year-old rolled oats were still perfectly edible and sometimes even tasted OK.

"You'd think that shelf life would be much shorter," said Oscar Pike, one of the professors of food science at Brigham Young University who conducted the study. "But that's not the case."

Food scientists have long maintained that certain foodstuffs, like salt, granulated crystal sugar and wheat kernels, can be stored indefinitely at room temperature or below. But Pike said he was uncertain whether a more processed grain, such as a rolled oat, would also stand the test of time.

To find out, researchers prepared oatmeal from 16 samples of regular and quick-cooking rolled oats that had been stored up to 28 years in sealed containers. A panel of tasters rated the oats on aroma, texture, flavor, aftertaste and overall acceptability. Scientists also analyzed the samples' nutritional quality.

The conclusion? Tasters rated the quality of the old oats from 4.8 to 6.7 on an ascending scale from 1 to 9. Three-fourths considered them acceptable in an emergency.

Makers of long-lasting food products aren't surprised that people weren't keen on the taste of 1970s oatmeal.

"Palatability will decline before edibility vanishes," said Gary Hansen, owner of Pleasant Hill Grain, which sells food packages for emergency stockpiling.

Properly stored food, Hansen noted, can be edible longer than one might infer from manufacturers' expiration dates, which typically indicate when a product starts to taste worse or lose some nutritional value.

The other day, I even took Sudafed that expired in 2002. Worked just dandy!