#470 – Curdled
Posted on March 24, 2008 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
I think some food has the ability to time travel. A few days ago I was looking for a midnight snack and decided to have a pickle. I pulled the jar out of the fridge and glancing at the date on the lid I noticed that they expired in 2005! How can we possibly have something in the refrigerator at eye level go for almost 3 years without anyone eating them? Do expired pickles taste bad?
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I suspect that an expired pickle becomes a cucumber. Which then proceeded to pickle again since you left in in vinegar for three years.
One must take great care in outsmarting one’s food. Overshoot by too much in outsmarting your milk, and you wind up in the pasteurization tank, which could sting just a bit…
@Sleepingorange;
Does that mean that if you time it *exactly* right, you might get cucumbers in alcohol, instead of pickles in vinegar?
Lol, just like biff to do somethng like that =p
The pickle jar must be a master of disguise.
You’d be surprised the junk you can leave in the fridge. In the door of our fridge we have asparagus, cherries, jalapenos, and various jams, all of which have been in there for 5+ years. And yet, they’re still all perfectly edible…
…At least, for now.
I hate anything expired. Even if it
still smells good, I’ll toss it. They
put an expiration date on milk for
a reason, right? Bacteria scares me.
ok hear is ware the the problim acures once you go back and drink the milk thare will be no milk to go bad thus no reson to go back in time, but a vary good reson to get mad and find out who drank your milk that you drank.
there’s a fish in the freezer that I caught 17 years ago…
I didn’t think pickles could even go bad, I figure the pickling would preserve it well enough, and they just put the expiration date on there in case the pickling goes bad or something…
you said “the” again after the first “the”!
Hilarious as always, keep it up Chris..
Just wanted to point out the typo, though:
“made the the time jump”
Typo is fixed! 🙂
I’m fairly sure they put narrow expiry dates on *every* food product for two reasons:
1) Litigation – they’re covering their buttocks in case of lawsuits. “He died from eating this pickle” – “I’m sorry sir, the label clearly states that the pickle expired 20 minutes after purchase.”
2) Making you buy more things – imagine the scene. You go to the fridge to have a yoghurt, but the date on the foil top states that it expired a week ago. Chances are you’d throw the yoghurt out and go and buy some more. As the yoghurt “lasts” for less time, people will buy more of it, through the simple expedient of putting a slightly earlier date on the packet.
Just my thoughts.
I hate expired milk. It sucks until it becomes cheese.
@Jake: I dunno, you may be right, but I know I’ve gotten sick off of milk that was two days past its experiation before. And it’s not the “Oh I think I need to stay home today” sick either… it was the “Oh God, why are you doing this to me?!” kind.
A couple of years ago I found a tin with papaya in syrup in my kitchen, it expired early in 1992.
I moved 1999, and for some reason someone thought it was a good idea to bring that tin along to the new house.
I still keep it, just for the fun of it.
Your pickles were three years old … amateur. I recently found a bag of M&Ms in a Christmas tin from 1993* . They’re still edible.
*That warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” has nothing on my apartment.
i tend to find things both in our house, and in my grandmother’s house especially, that expired in the early nineties, and sometimes older. there is a jar of jam of some kind on the top shelf, which i believe is from the eighties. she’s moved twice since it was purchased, and it still remains.
the expiration date is merely a guide, it suggests when the supermarket should rid themselves of it, however it’s usually still perfectly acceptable for home use, depending on the product.
@ birdie
Sometimes there’s a “Sell by” date AND a “use by” date….those are the more perishable things that you want to watch out for.
My Question is why does bottle water have and expiration date?
I was eating dinner at my cousin’s house and we were having hot dogs. We pull out mustard that expired in 1984. That was a shock.
@ Jeff : Bottled water can in fact get stagnant and go bad. Plastic is not completely airtight and some bacteria can get in. Case in point: I keep bottled water in my car and since I live in Idaho it froze over the winter, so one would think that would keep it fresh. It’s past the expiration date, and it definitely has a weird aftertaste.
Well my pickles don’t seem so shocking any more. 🙂
The bottle plastic will leach pthalates over time, and perhaps there’s legal limits on pthalate concentration. Something biological seems more likely though. Perhaps algae? I doubt it’s getting contaminated through the bottle though; air diffusing through plastic is one thing(i.e., why bike tires gradually lose pressure), entire microbes passing through the plastic is quite another. However, this would mean that they expect there to sometimes be at least one microbe left in the water or bottle when it’s sold, which doesn’t seem very reasonable.
On a happier note, I once took home a gallon of expired milk from the pharmacy where I worked. I had in my room at room temperature, saving it up for a prank. Unfortunately, after a month it built up so much pressure that it started leaking through the bottom. I noticed the smell first. It took me days to get it cleaned out of the carpet. My roomate and I took it outside and shot it with a pellet gun. The once-milk squirted out a couple of feet until the chunks clogged the holes. The best part? I’m vegan.
canned pears from 1950 any takers for a taste test
I think food should come with three dates on it.
A “This-Was-Packaged-On-This-Date” date,
A “You-Really-Should-Eat-This-Before-This-Date” date,
And a “This-Will-Kill-You-If-You-Eat-This-After-This-Date” date.
In the UK at least we have 2 types of date other than the sell by (which is when shops laglly have to take it off the shelves) date on food. First is the “Use By” date- for perishables like milk and yogurt and meat which can make you ill if you eat them after they’ve gone off. The other is a “Best Before” date- for foods that don’t go off but don’t taste as good if you leave them a long while (i.e biscuits and chocolate). The difficult thing is trying to decide if somethings good to eat if it’s been opened for a long while (this happens a lot with pringles in our house)
Ha, We raided granny’s cupboards when we were looking for something to eat one lunchtime on a day off school, I think what we found was pre-WWII, and we definitely found something that expired in the 80s. I found a tin of condensed chicken soup one weekend that expired 1980-somehtng and ate it with no ill effects. Of course, sugar and honey never expire, neither does salt, and vinegar or preserves shouldn’t either since they’re preservatives, so I’d say the pickles are safe to eat as long as none of them are above the surface of the vinegar and there’s no mould elsewhere in the jar. Cut one on half just in case.
My dad cleaned out a friend’s freezer as a kid and found a fish wrapped in tinfoil stuck in the ice in the back. Not only did the family not know about the fish, they had lived in the house for fifteen years and the freezer was there when they moved in. I didn’t know pickles could expire. On a related note, I’m currently conducting an experiment which shall hopefully turn pickles into massive gherkins. Those are sweet pickles, for those of you who may not know. If it works, I’ll post the recipe on this comic when it’s done.
Hmm. I had expired water once. You know how bottled water companies advertise a “crisp” taste? I would describe the flavor of expired bottled water as “crunchy”. Also, ever seen blue wheat germ? I have.
Apologies for the double-post.
milk makes me feel sick, whether its off or not. unless its on cereal. i eat so much cerial anyway, that i get a months worth calcium every day.
sunny delight has so many preservatives in it, it will never expire. there’s gonna be nuclear wars, and the whole of the earth would become a desolate wasteland, except for thousands of bottles of sunny D scattered around the place.
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Damn british weather.
we once found a bottle of blackcurrant squash that had been left so long it had turned alcoholic.
sorry about the double post.
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Damn british weather.
A pickle couldn’t possibly last that long in my house — I’m lucky if a jar lasts two weeks around me.
I did, however, find a jar of homemade chili sauce in my fridge last time I cleaned it. I don’t make chili sauce. My ex — who moved out a year and a half ago — was the one who did that. And he hadn’t made any in at least 8 months, probably closer to a year, before moving out. So that was definitely some 2005 vintage chili sauce.
Never had too much expired stuff, but I do know we have some stuff in here that’s been in the fridge since before I can remember, and I’m 21 now, lol. On a side note, expired Mountain Dew tastes like….salt…ish? kinda hard to describe, bit it’s definately off. Had stuff that was about 1 year past the “best if by” date. Needless to say, I still drank it. Heck, when you’re staffing Scout camp, and it’s the cheapest (and darn near ONLY) soda you can get, you’ll drink it.
Yeah, I have some of my mom’s home-made chili sauce that dates back to the late 90s, I believe. I haven’t had it in a while, but I think it is still good.
It dates back that far as to when she made the jars of it, not when it was opened. Opened was probably a year and a half or so. If I was still living at my parent’s, I’d probably have polished it off a year and 5 months ago, but I don’t tend to use it with the stuff I make. Even though I love it.
Rumour has it she is making more this fall (she does a big batch every 7-10 years). It is great stuff, but it is soooo much better within the first year after she makes it.
I think the most disturbing expiration I ever encountered was a case of cola. Apparently if soda expires, you get a very, very metallic flavor – I guess the acids leech the can or something. Either way, yuck.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in Finland the food has a “Best before date”, that means that the food or whatever may very well be edible even if the date has “expired”, especially if the package is unopened and was stored properly. Besides you can usually tell if the food has gone bad by looking at it or by smelling it.
Artichoke hearts can stay in the fridge at eye level for about a year, before you start to notice an odd baby-blue color on the top of the juices.
Several years ago, I lived in a house where we had a refrigerator in the garage as well as in the kitchen. We frequently used the garage fridge to store “overflow” foods during holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas being the most prevalent holidays for leftovers). We also had a bad habit of not cleaning it out for months at a time.
One time, I realized the garage fridge hadn’t been cleaned since the holidays and it was now June… suffice to say, I had never known mold came in such interesting… colours. (No, I’m not British, but occasionally I affect the British spelling of words.)
I have also run across canned preserves where the seals on the jars failed and the preserves no longer lived up to their name.
Kimchi sold in the U.S. has an expiration of ~3 years printed on it… should’nt that actually be the “manufactured on” date?
Nah they taste fine but they’re typically soggy as hell
One time in middle school I somehow got a carton of chocolate milk that had expired 5 years earlier. I knew something was wrong when I took a sip and it tasted like fruit punch.
I wish my cafeteria food was expired. At least then I would know what I was getting.
My friend got a carton of Strawberry Milk which happened to instead be white milk. It was an interesting mix-up. In any case, pickles don’t go bad. Vinegar is too acidic for microbes to proliferate in it, so pickles don’t mold. However, after a few years they get kinda gross tasting.
i only have one tip regarding fridge cleaning. if you open the door and somthing plops off the shelf and procceds to slither and/or skitter away , LET IT! and if possible keep the dog from chasing it trust me that stuff looks gross enough BEFORE the dog yarks it back up on the carpet…..