Paul Collins, author of Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World and speaker at the upcoming meeting of the Athanasius Kircher Society (he will be introducing the first ever dramatic performance in Solresol), recently published an article in New Scientist on the edibility of very old foods:

Oscar Pike, a food scientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, would probably not have been surprised. “Food quality is always declining,” he says. Just how quickly it declines, though, remained anecdotal until Pike and colleagues put out a call to local households: bring us your tired, your stale, your undusted masses of tins and sacks. In short, empty those basement pantries.

Utah was a good place to try this. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for many years has counselled church members to store a one-year supply of food,” Pike explains. The inevitable result: absent-minded Mormons with basements full of wheat and instant potatoes that date back to the era of… well, Brown Sugar and Meat Loaf. Having conducted taste and odour tests on everything from 30-year-old dried milk to oatmeal, Pike’s results are in: the oatmeal’s not all that good, but not all that bad either. At a pinch - and with perhaps more than a pinch of sugar - 30-year-old oatmeal will do for breakfast. It helps that the fats in quick-cooking oats do not readily oxidise into hexanal, the unpleasant-smelling fatty acid that serves as an off-putting indicator of rancidity.

…

Hulled grains last remarkably well over the years, and this gives old food a political dimension: during 1992 talks to negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the prospect was raised that the US government could flood markets with wheat surpluses dating back to the Cuban missile crisis. Nor was this the only legacy of the cold war, as every decade uncovers more US civil defence caches of vitamin-fortified survival crackers. Though they are veritable museum pieces now, in the 1970s local governments struggled to decide what to do with their vast stores of still-edible crackers. The Hawaiian island of Oahu puzzled over how to dispose of a staggering 505 tons of the stuff, and Baltimore residents tried to convince farmers to take their supply as hog feed. Though some crackers were donated to Bangladesh, most cities eventually tossed them out. “Detroit to Dump Crummy Crackers”, one unsentimental headline announced in 1977.

There may well be millions more “servings” still secreted around the US; just this March another 352,000 crackers turned up in a forgotten vault below the Brooklyn Bridge. A New York bridge inspector, sampling one, charitably described it as having “a unique flavour”.

The oldest of all edible foods might be a 5,600-year-old ear of popcorn that archeologists dug up in New Mexico in 1947 (though it may date back as little as 1,752 years). It still popped. More recently, researchers in Utah found 1,000-year-old popcorn that was still perfectly fluffy and delicious.

(The image above is of a box of 106-year-old Cadbury bars)

[acknowledgments to Weekend Stubble, Paul’s blog]