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I read an article a month or so ago about some canned food retrieved from a shipwreck that had been underwater for ~100 years. The food was tested and it had not spoiled. Nutrition wasn't all there, but it was edible.

I have a lot of MH FD food - pouches and cans. I also have some dried food (lentils, etc.).

I have always considered my canned food as short term (less than 5 years) and to be rotated, but 20 or 30 years? Not so much.

I know the nutrition would probably degrade over time, but the calories would still be there and in a pinch it is the calories that count - you can always take some vitamins and eat fresh food too.

Thoughts?
 
Yes - three things destroy foodstuffs (and other things):

Oxygen
Light
Heat

Note: MREs are just as susceptible as canned food. MREs stored in a hot car trunk can go bad in 6 months.

The down side of off-the-shelf canned foods is that cans can bulge and split when frozen.
 
I have had condiments - such as mustard - stored in "clear" containers go bad in a year or two, but I have not had problem with metal canned commercial foods. I do store that food in relatively dark temp stable areas.
 
Go down to your regional friendly wholesale canned good store and check the expiration dates on the case lots of pork and beans and mixed vegetables. Probably will state ... "Good Until January, 2022".

Yep; if kept in the cool dry basement the stuff will keep quite awhile. You will get tired of it but the combination will keep you going. Fairly nutritionally correct. Yumm yumm, then yuck yuck. :)
 
Heretic,
Yeah, the calories would be there and I believe your correct in that the nutrition wouldn't be. Off the shelf I'd only go two years for canned items, therefore I would rotate that out more often. Now, it doesn't mean I wouldn't eat it if I were forced to, though I would be looking/smelling for signs of spoilage. But since I have a choice in the matter I'd rotate it out as much as I could so I never got close to two years.
 
I'd be more concerned with "modern" cans - those lined with plastic - leeching contaminants into the food over long periods of time. Glass jars with metal rings and lids and wax gaskets seem a whole lot less scary than some synthetic petrochemical nightmare.

Supposedly BPA free products, when tested, have shown to be BPA plastics n them.

I would be more inclined to store home canned items, rather than store bought. May not be optimal, but I grew up raised by a set of grandparents - depression era kids - and we canned vegetables and other foods every year, and ate through rotation. Sometimes we'd have stuff sitting on the shelf in our pantry for years without getting touched, and most was still very edible. I'll say that canned pears don't hold up much over 5 years - not in a sense that one may want a semi-solid pear, anyway. Pear puree, it more closely resembled at that point -but our pantry wasn't climate controlled either. Never ever got sick from any of it.
 
If you eat canned stuff on a semi regular basis it would be stupid to not store 3-4 years worth of the stuff you eat and rotate it. There's no downside besides the space it takes or maybe you have a wife like mine that wants to throw away stuff when it hits it's "Best By" date.
 
is it safe to ignore those "best buy" dates? I know it doesnt mean expired or bad on exactly that day, but when I think of long term storage I think of putting it away indefinitely.
 

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