Keeping Food for Years

Reported February 2007

PROVO, Utah (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- The next time you find forgotten food in the pantry, don't just toss it. Keeping food past its expiration date may not seem like a good idea, but certain foods last a lot longer than you think -- years longer.

Food scientists now know that, when properly sealed, some dried food that's been sitting on shelves for years, could still be OK to eat.

"It lasts a lot longer than we thought," Oscar A. Pike, Ph.D., a food scientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, tells Ivanhoe.

That's good news for Leslie Probert, who joins the rising number of people stockpiling food for emergencies. "I'm just writing the date on these cans so that I can remember when they were purchased," she says. "This is a year's supply of food for a family of five."

Scientists have known certain foods like sugar and salt can be stored indefinitely, but wanted to learn the shelf life of other food like dried apples -- stored since 1973 -- tried by taste testers.

"I like to call it the emergency shelf life of the food, food that you'd still be willing to eat in an emergency," Dr. Pike says. "It's not as though it were freshly canned, but it's certainly edible."

He says the best foods to store are low in moisture, like wheat and powered milk. But keep all foods away from heat and light to stop it from going stale and losing nutritional value. "All the foods that we've tested have been stored at room temperature or below, so you want to avoid attic and garage storage."

In the study, researchers taste-tested rolled oats that had been stored in sealed containers for 28 years. Three-fourths of tasters considered the oats acceptable to eat in an emergency.

The American Society for Microbiology contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Oscar A. Pike, Ph.D.
Professor of Food Science
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-6671
oscar_pike@byu.edu

American Society for Microbiology
Washington, DC 20036-2904
(202) 737-3600

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