The father of a friend passed, and the friend just offered me his dad's store of freeze dried food. These are all professionally packed in #10 cans weighing about 7 pounds each.
My friend said he wasn't sure how old they were 'but they're old.'
Old shmold, I'm taking them of course. He's so far brought me two boxes of eight cans: The first has beans - lima, I think, and the second is milk. The directions on the can say that the beans hydrate to about twenty pounds.
Well . . . it turns out that the cans don't say how old they are but the boxes do. How about 37 years old? These things were boxed in 1980. That's a bit old even for me!
Properly freeze dried food should last twenty years. However, at that point, I don't think they're toxic. I think they just lose a lot of their nutritional value. Vitamins break down over time, and after twenty years, this food no longer has much of what the body needs. In an actual survival situation, however, I'm sure we'd not only eat the food but be really grateful to have it. It would, at least, fill us up.
I hope it doesn't come to that. My plan is to hang onto the cans until we have our own stockpile of newly grown stuff, then give this to the pigs. They're bound to appreciate it.
The twenty year rule isn't hard-and fast, btw. Wheat has been found in Egyptian tombs that was still viable after 2,500 years. That's amazing. Not only was it edible, but when it was planted, it grew.
So, there's no telling about this canned stuff. It might still be good, but I'm not planning on finding out.
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