Expiration Dates on Trail Food

store it in the freezer and it will last a lot longer\

yeah, probably use it past expiration date and it’s okay.  Maybe consistency worse or vitamins will be reduced

I’ve never hesitated to use “old” trail food – both the specifically freezes dried stuff or super market items like Knorr’s soup mixes.  And nothing has ever tasted bad.  It’s hard to tell, though, if it would have somehow tasted fresher a few years earlier, or if it would tasted that way in its first year.  There’s a spot in my garage that stays cool without freezing and never gets hot (it’s Alaska).  I keep BPing food and wine there.

I’d go by color – if the peas aren’t the same shade of green, if the tomatoes are brown instead of dark red – I’d figure it had been oxidized to the point of tasting different.  Probably still perfectly safe, but would taste a little off.

Recently, I’ve been using a lot of dehydrated beans and veggies off of Amazon for a lot less $$ than Mountain House FD food.  Adding some curry powder, powdered coconut milk, etc, makes for a tastier meal (especially for my wife).  Nicely, they are in clear plastic, screw-top containers so you can easily see them.  And since I measure out portions for each meal in advance, it’s easy to rehydrate a bit of each ingredient at home before the trip and double check.  If you repackage your processed food into lighter packaging, you can also double-check it before you go.

John, in response to your PM, I went and looked at my stash of BPing bulk dehydrated foods.  Harmony House brand Lentils, Red Beans, Black Beans, Spinach, Diced Carrots, Tomato Dices (sic), and some mixed vegetables.  A one-pound bag of powered coconut milk, PB2 powdered peanut butter were also off of Amazon and I think it was all Amazon Prime with free shipping (important to us in Alaska).  Bear Creek brand soup mix, e.g. “Creamy wild rice” were from the warehouse store, but has been popular with both kids and grownups.

I’ve never used any recipes, but have used yellow, green, or red curry paste with the coconut milk powder to make the lentils and beans and quinoa a lot more interesting.  The peanut-butter powder can be used with any Pad Thai spice mix for a Thai-style peanut sauce on the veggies.  Dried onion flakes weigh about nothing but add taste to the entree.

The dehydrated beans reconstitute a lot faster than dried beans, but still take a while (15-25 minutes depending on your hunger).  So you’d want some sort of cozy scheme in which you set aside the hot pot under some insulation.  I didn’t find any drawback to starting the reconstitution in cold water and then bringing the whole thing close to a boil after the beans were mostly rehydrated, but it took a little longer and you had to be careful to not burn the pot.

All our dinners in NZ last year (a 4-day and 5-day trip) were that sort of thing after the first night out (which had more fresh food) and it worked fine.  Between the vegans, vegaquarians, and organic-food types in the two families along, it kind of got down to rice/quinoa and beans/lentils which, I had to admit, were tastier than I expected.  Perhaps TMI, but after being on that high-fiber, vegetarian diet for a day, it was the first time I could imagine going without toilet paper. Everything came out less like sticky carnivore poo and more like moose-pellets: cleanly and discretely.

Edited to add a dietary trick I learned on that trip which is very processed, but also as cheap, light and quick as any meal could be.  We stopped for lunch under a shelter and an Aussie family came up and each pulled out a “2-minute noodle” (Top Raman) package, and proceeded to eat the dry block of noodles between sips of water.  I’d never get away with feeding that to my wife, but the simplicity of meal planning, shopping and preparation couldn’t be easier: just buy a 24-pack case of it for about $0.22 a package.  380 calories per 3 ounce package.

I worked at a natural food store that sold a lot of Kind bars.   Two months past the date on most flavors they certainly started to suffer. Tanka bars I would give about 6 weeks before they started to taste a bit off. Jerky is the winner in my book for long life. Anything with nuts is on the shorter end of the spectrum.

Last year I had a lot of Pack IT Gourmet Freeze dried food at home that was about to be go out of date,  I called the company and they said it should be perfect for 3 months after the date, I offered it all as a PIF (rather than throw it out) and someone took the lot as I knew I would not get through it.

I had some Pack it Gourmet food that was a few months past its dates and figured it was OK – but although it wasn’t bad in the sense of my getting sick, the taste of the Chili was not that great and the beans were kind of tough and mealy.  A few of the other meals also didn’t taste nearly as good as they usually do…….

I’m now extra careful with the dates on at least my Pack it Gourmet meals

It depends on the type of food. Meat I am way more careful with, as I am with higher fat foods. Freeze dried meat in commercially sealed bags has more leeway (think Mt. House meals, not repacked FD meat).

If you make your own meals, and they do not contain meat or dairy in them, you’ve got at least a year after you bag them. They might be on the stale side, but are fine.

Do non-meat energy bars ever go bad? Lol…..

I’ve eaten MT House beef stew and spaghetti expired over a year and it looked / tasted absolutely no different from the way I remember them. I prolly wouldn’t try that with non freeze dried foods.

This summer my wife and I found some old Richmoor (!) and Mountain House meals from about 2009 in the back of a closet.  They took a long time to rehydrate but tasted OK (or as good as they ever did) and we didn’t get sick.

Important note though – the packaging was in really good shape.  One pinhole in the packet would likely have changed the story quite a bit.

So here’s what I’ve learned from years of storing food.  There are three basic ways for dry food to spoil if kept cool and dry:

1) Chemical changes to flavor (i.e. rancid fats).  A taste issue, not a safety issue.  Common with nuts.  I’ve actually experienced this personally with Kind bars (from the nuts in them).  Rancid fats give your food a “Play-doh” flavor.  This is also how cured meats with nitrates will go off if left for too long as well, at least initially.  I had a friend who peanut butter go rancid too (and didn’t notice until he was in the backcountry with no choice but to eat the PB).

2) Over-drying.  I’ve experienced this quite a bit with dried fruit, and it makes them much less appealing.  With dried vegetables they will become harder to rehydrate.  I haven’t experienced this much with freeze-dried dinners, but they can also become harder to rehydrate over time.  I use a cozy system for rehydrating (which retains more heat in my dinner than the normal freeze-dried bags).  I think that may be why I haven’t experienced this, even though I buy mountain house by the #10 can and take as long as several months to use up a can.

3) Weevils, mealworms or other bugs.  I think this is pretty darn unlikely with prepackaged foods.

If you add moisture or heat to the equation you’ve got other options:

4) Mold.  Even without added moisture, I have friends who had jerky get moldy when left in a cache bucket in the sun (really the fault of the folks who left the cache bucket in a poor location).

5) Botulism.  This requires moisture and an absence of oxygen, so not super applicable to backpacking food storage.  But that said, there is a real (but still extremely low) risk in eating expired canned food.  It’s much more likely for expired canned food to still be safe but have a reduction in quality over time.

6) Other bacterial insurgencies.  Fermentation.  etc.  Again, this requires moisture (and sometimes oxygen).  Not likely for backpacking food storage.

I think that covers everything, but I could be wrong.  Also, there are two easy ways to improve the shelf life of backpacking food:

1) Store it in the freezer.  I used to store my opened #10 cans in two gallon freezer bags in the freezer, which works quite well (although it’s best to let them warm up before opening to prevent condensation from forming.  This will do a lot to help prevent fats from going rancid.

2) Get a vacuum sealer.  I use a Foodsaver with the wide-mouth mason jar attachment to seal my opened packages now in mason jars (you can get 1/2 gallon mason jars at most ACE hardware stores, as well as quarts and other useful sizes).  Much more convenient than taking up freezer space, and the jars and lids are 100% reusable.  You can also get the foodsaver jar attachment and a ziplock hand-pump sealer and be able to seal jars for a $15 investment (although I don’t think the vacuum is as strong as that from a machine).

Only two foods are required to have expiration dates, baby food and baby formula. Dates on other foods are totally up to the manufacture and are actually advantagous to increasing sales because so many anal housewives throw out perfectly good food because it is past the date. The US Army ran ads on military bases to convince housewives that the dates on food have nothing to do with safety.

You’ll notice that use by, sell by, and best used by are how most things are labeled. Expired has fallen out of favor.

I ate a couscous dish the other day….from a flavored box I found floating in the back of the pantry. It expired in summer of 2014. Still alive ;-)