We just returned from a meandering road trip in Wally, and I’m getting ready for a backpacking trip in Emigrant Wilderness, north of Yosemite. As part of that trip preparation, I was getting food together. I know from long experience that for me, 1.4 lbs. of good quality food per day backpacking is just about right, and I’ll probably still come out with an uneaten PRObar. I am a creature of habit, at least in long cycles, and for a while I’ve been taking Triscuits and string cheese for lunch when backpacking. Since you never know when a backpacking opportunity might suddenly come up, I tend to buy a large pack of string cheese individual packets, and put them in the fridge. When I went to take some out today, I noticed one had gone bad; in fact very bad. I made a post of it on Instagram, which unfortunately got my resident nurse, Francie, involved.
She is used to my somewhat casual approach to expiration dates, and I think generally shares in my thinking. At our old house in Carlsbad, I once when through our pantry and threw out anything that had an expiration date in the previous decade… it filled four large trash bags. She would probably not have thought much about the cheese, but I think an article she was just reading about spices maybe made her more acutely focused. The article was saying that McCormick was issuing a warning to customers that they should check their spices. What caught my attention was the two quick ways to find out if your spices were more than 25 years old. The first, no surprise, is if is in a rectangular metal container, and is anything other than pepper. The second was if it was in a glass bottle, and the address for McCormick on the bottle was Baltimore,MD, instead of the more recent Hunt Valley, MD.
So of course we had to check. We had a white pepper and black pepper in small rectangular containers, but since they were both pepper, I figured they didn’t make the quarter-century cut. Then I looked more closely, and the white pepper had Baltimore, MD on it! A review of our many bottles of spices turned up poppy seeds with the telltale Baltimore, MD. So we have two spices that are at least 25 years old, about as old as Gossamer Gear. So as I was sewing the G4 pack, Francie could have brought home this white pepper can and poppy seed jar.
As far as I can tell, both containers are pretty much full. It’s actually more likely that I may have bought the spices, as I’m a rule-follower, which extends to recipes. If for some reason the recipe for mashed potatoes says ‘white pepper’, I’m likely to go get some, where Francie is more likely to say “Black pepper, which we already have, is close enough.” As for what we would need poppy seeds for, I cannot imagine… maybe lemon poppyseed muffins? Or as an obscure non-essential ingredient in some complicated recipe. It’s astounding to me that we purchased these over 25 years ago, for what are now not obvious uses, and that they somehow navigated the TWO complete moves we’ve made in that time frame!
It turns out that in most cases, there’s no real health hazard posed by spices that you bought to prepare for the anticipated Y2K meltdown. They just lose their effectiveness, so won’t do their job in making your food taste better. Seeds though (like poppy seeds, for instance), since they contain oils, can go rancid. Still probably won’t make you sick, but they won’t taste good. I did verity this with our poppy seeds, they taste pretty nasty. According to the Texas Real Food site, poppy seeds, when stored unopened (then why buy them if you don’t need them, duh) at room temperature, can “maintain their freshness for three to four years.” Since our poppy seeds were bought the year they created the Euro, they are a long ways past freshness.
With the talk of ‘rancid’, Francie’s attention focused on the string cheese. I stated that while I wasn’t going to eat the moldy brown packet, I was planning on taking other sticks that looked okay on my trip. Francie starts checking medical sites for possible symptoms of eating bad cheese. She asked if I would let her take the cheese on a trip (which I would not), and therefor she didn’t want me to take the cheese. It’s not a big deal, I just hate to waste food.
Then she pulled the trump card, and threated to report my cavalier approach to food safety (only on a personal, never a professional level) to the Oregon Health Authority, who issued my Oregon Food Handler Card, the certification I need to wash dishes at Sparrow Bakery. To me, one’s personal habits can be separate from professional qualifications, but I guess you might not want a heart surgeon who gambles and is an alcoholic, just on general principle. So now I am thinking that I may have to just toss the expired cheese and buy some new stuff (a smaller package this time).
25 years ago, when I bought these spices, I was only 41 years old. In the intervening years, I for sure have lost some of my effectiveness, in so many ways. Unlike the spices though, I like to think I’ve picked up some things along the way, learned something about myself and others, and at least in some ways, become even better than I was when the Pokémon craze first swept the country.
So check your spices, let me know how many are more than 25 years old (prize for photo evidence of highest number). And keep growing, so that your own ‘best by’ date is still in front of you!
