h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>> 'Best Before' does not mean 'Deadly Poisonous After!
>But 'Use By' does.

Umm, I'm not convinced by that. In my experience 'Use By' can mean anything from 'Went grotty two days ago' right through to 'fine a week later'. Very much dependent on the item in question, I find. Granted, I have been known to take a steak, sniff it, wash it, cut the really green bits off and add extra curry powder, but still. Your eyes and your nose should tell you whether food's fit to eat, not the label (if your ears get involved it's definately had it).

Anything in a tin or an unopened jar should be fine long after the use-by date. Just make sure it's not bulging, and heat it through!

That said, near the town where we used to live, an entire family of 20 or so was killed by home-canned beans. Someone brought a bean salad to a family reunion; the only survivor was a picky kid that refused to try it...

There's a moral to that story...

Home canning is wrong.

RF

From Mrs Zen's link,

'...hovering indecisively before the open fridge, weighing up whether or not to play the culinary equivalent of Russian roulette with the last bacon rasher ...'

Could make an excellent surrealist short film.

"But, remember to spread out the wiping rags/paper towels, or wet them thoroughly, else risk spontaneous combustion."

Are you sure you've got that the right way around, Rod? Spreading them out would increase the surface area in contact with oxygen, making it more likely to burst into flames spontaneously. Otherwise, the most likely place for it to happen would be in the bottle!

Yes, that's right. They need to dry quickly, and the fumes need to be carried away. It's when they build up that you get problems.

But drying *too* quickly is precisely what you don't want.

Bacon. like cheese, doesn't go off or out of date.... it just matures I just cook the bacon a bit longer if I think its started developing its own culture and sense of baconality... Waste not want not... Mind, not much lurks about mine long enough to actually go out of date... or if it does its stuff I decided I didn't want to eat anyhow
Having said which... I opened a jar of mustard today... no... that didn't*smell like mustard to me... totally wrong... in teh bin... Now I have only powdered mustard... I guess*that doesn't have a best before date, I hope not, I've had it over a decade

The best bargain I've encountered is on top of my fridge. It's a large bottle of vanilla essence which I found in an elderly relative's pantry in 1990. I don't know how long it had been there, but there's a big splash across the label that says '1/9d OFF!!' That dates it to 1965 at the latest, as we went decimal in February 1966.

It's a bargain because there's still a bit left. It's good for wiping out the fridge (diluted, of course).

(Would I cook with it? Hell no.)

Wipe out the fridge? I'd even try dabbing it behind my ears!

Ivan, that's fantastic.

Parents are quite good for some economies, especially in the drinks cabinet. Last year my parents very kindly gave me their bottle of ginger wine, which saved me the trouble of buying my own to mix up whisky mac. The special offer on the label dated the bottle to 1984.

Mol

Ajax scouring powder at 74p is good value as as a powder there is less waste and it works well where other methods fail.

>> The special offer on the label dated the bottle to 1984. <<

better drink it up quick, before it goes off.

RF

"an entire family of 20 or so was killed by home-canned beans."

Perhaps it wasn´t the canning. Certain beans contain toxins, so they need to be boiled twice, with the water replaced in between, before they can be eaten.

No, it was botulism toxin; they weren't canned properly. It even killed a nursing baby who picked it up through his mother...

Well, that is indeed a very deadly toxin.

Ok, I looked it up, it was 12, not 20 - the story probably grew a bit with the telling. But there were still a lot of them. An entire row of the graveyard filled with headstones for that family, and all with nearly the same date of death...

Would you write it up for the EG, Mala? It sounds like something that needs a wider audience.

Home canning is killing music.

RF

Hmmm, maybe I will. From what I've read, it happened in 1924, and was a huge incident at the time - the headlines about it bumped the death of Woodrow Wilson onto the second page of the local paper...