Post-Apo : Expired Medication & Food ?

[bocephus]

You said "years" but there are a few significant ranges in the question.

10 years (this has been covered)
25 years (mostly only raw products with specific conservation effort)
50 years (not likely in any situation except for a few outliers like salt, sugar, honey)
100 years (just ... no, except for those a fore mentioned outliers)

Medicines follow a similar scale, the more simple and stable compounds last a long time. Complex and unstable compounds probably won't last a year without proper refrigeration (and not being frozen).


A couple notes

1) Old foods even if they are safe loose their nutritional value regardless of "safety". Old MREs (those 30yr plus) while not toxic to eat, also have diminished usable calories or nutrition. That still breaks down even if safely preserved.

A Caveat to rule one has to do with how close to baseline the packaged product is....

Example:
Raw wheat stored properly will likely be safe and have nutritional value for 20-30 years, possibly more though Im not aware of any actual studies that checked for nutritional value after that age.

Flour is another step removed from the raw wheat having been ground and the usable life drops significantly (I believe its in the 3-5 years max but Id have to look it up to be sure).

Mixes that contain multiple ingredients are probably safe for a 2-3 years but will start to do strange things like not rise or fail to combine properly.

There are exceptions to this but it has to do with resources invested to preserve the product. MREs were (maybe still are) treated with some kind of radiation to eliminate the possibility of biologic contaminants.


In 100years 99% of food will have no value as fuel. Safe is relative, meaning it won't make you sick. But it will make you full without giving you any energy, like eating bags and bags of plain rice cakes.


2) "Does it taste or smell off", this requires some frame of reference. People a 100years from now will have no frame of reference for 'off'. It will just smell bad or not.

3) Some raw items like Sugar and Salt are literally usable till the end of time, but keep in mind these are closer to minerals than organic compounds.


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You have a break point around 25 years where you really aren't going to find much in the way of useful food or organic spices.

After 5 years (realistically 2-3years) even seeds are going to be useless unless there has been some sort of extreme conservation effort used like frozen in mylar bags in a glacier where they were encased in ice till they were discovered (IE once frozen they were never thawed).
With no effort other than "cool, dry, dark" conditions its rare than any seed will germinate after 4 years, and many don't go past 2 years old.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by bocephus

In 100years 99% of food will have no value as fuel. Safe is relative, meaning it won't make you sick. But it will make you full without giving you any energy, like eating bags and bags of plain rice cakes.

In both these cases you do get energy - the sugars, both simple and complex are still there, as is the protein (if that's gone off the food isn't 'stale' it's outright bad). The fats and oils have probably gone rancid and may or may not be digestible. But overall the energy is still there. What's probably not are the more complex micro-nutrients. So you can eat this old stuff, and it'll keep you going for a while, but deficiency diseases and loss of 'energy' in terms your body's ability to use the calories will occur.

2) "Does it taste or smell off", this requires some frame of reference. People a 100years from now will have no frame of reference for 'off'. It will just smell bad or not.

Sure they will - the small of rancid oils and fats, the 'stale' smell of old starches, and the rotten small of decomposing meat and fruit, and so on won't change. They might be thrown by highly spiced food if they're not familiar with the spices, but that's a dish by dish thing and most food intended for long-term storage by modern producers isn't highly spiced (traditional preserved food is another matter, of course).

After 5 years (realistically 2-3years) even seeds are going to be useless unless there has been some sort of extreme conservation effort used like frozen in mylar bags in a glacier where they were encased in ice till they were discovered (IE once frozen they were never thawed).
With no effort other than "cool, dry, dark" conditions its rare than any seed will germinate after 4 years, and many don't go past 2 years old.

That is hugely variable, depending on the plant in question (and even the variety when it comes to modern food plants).

[Farmer]

With medicines, excipients are a more likely source of concern over time. They are often used to help control dose delivery through disintegration time, dissolution rate, etc., and they help to maintain homogeneity in the active ingredient formulations. They are also the preservatives and other stabilisers in the medicine. Once they start to break down, then the medicine becomes less effective or, in rare cases, dangerous.

Although ideal excipients are pharmacologically inactive, non-toxic, and don't interact with anything else in the medication, this is largely not entirely possible to achieve, so they do become unstable and break down over time. Usually it's in the range of 5-10 years. There are exceptions, of course, and as others have stated the effects range from less effectiveness to toxic reactions (but usually just less effectiveness).

[(E)]

My 2 cents worth.

For foods that have a multiple decade shelf life (under the right conditions anyway)

Crackers combined with vitamin fortified hard candies was the best you could hope for during most of the 20th century.

Freeze dried food becomes available, theoretically at least, at the end of the 18th century and becomes more common from the 1950s. Individually packaged ingredients would likely last the longest.

Something based on food with an inherently long shelf like dried beans or legumes might work best.

A sci-fi option might be a two-part food ration pack that requires a chemically fairly inert compound that when combined with a separately stored activator ingredient becomes digestible after waiting enough time for the reaction to take place.
This is likely a paste or watery product when ready to be consumed.

For higher TLs there is the Nanofarm

[pawsplay]

Stuff in cans could theoretically last a long time. However, after just a few years, the material used to line the cans will start to break down. At first, this will be unappetizing, gradually becoming gross. At some point, the food will be tainted by decomposed plastics and resins. If at any point, the decay penetrates the coasting and reaches the metal, the product will become swiftly toxic and unappealing.

Things in glass jars might do a little better, if they have really, really good lids.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

Things in glass jars might do a little better, if they have really, really good lids.

In the "Mason" jars of my grandmother's time (whose brand name was actually 'Ball") the lids had rubber seals on brass lids. You could reasonably hope they were lead-free but they actually weren't intended for the sort of extreme timespans we've been discussing. I don't think we ever saw any "edible" (or at least edible-looking) preserves that were over 10 years old.

Also, if it's not obvious the lids were never even intended to be reusable. A prepper/survivalist would be out of the home canning business when he ran out of lids.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

In the "Mason" jars of my grandmother's time (whose brand name was actually 'Ball") the lids had rubber seals on brass lids.

When we were making preserves long ago, I recall sealing the jar with a layer of wax; the brass lids with rubber seals were later (and far less annoying).

[pawsplay]

My grandma used to seal her jams with paraffin. Assuming the top lid was vacuum tight, it could keep a long time. I don't know about commercially jarred foods; those pop tops aren't something I would trust five years out.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by pawsplay

My grandma used to seal her jams with paraffin. Assuming the top lid was vacuum tight, it could keep a long time. I don't know about commercially jarred foods; those pop tops aren't something I would trust five years out.

If they haven't popped, they're still airtight. That's the point of them.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

In the "Mason" jars of my grandmother's time (whose brand name was actually 'Ball") the lids had rubber seals on brass lids.

Mason was the first manufacturer of mass market home canning jars (in 1858). After the patents expired, their designs were duplicated in the U.S. by Ball, Kerr and other competitors.

The original jars did have lead in the lids and seals and food from early canning jars and cans could be toxic if consumed in large quantities. It's believed that lead from canned goods contributed to the failure of the Franklin Arctic expedition, since bodies of expedition members autopsied in the 2000s showed high levels of lead in their blood.

The threaded rings used to hold the jar seal in place never contact the food and can be made from any material that will withstand the heat of canning equipment. The actual jar lids might have been made of brass with a small amount of lead in it, but the paraffin used to seal the lid to the jar formed a barrier against immediate metal contamination.

I believe that modern lids are made of aluminum lined with heat stable can liner material. It's probably the same stuff that's used to line bottle caps. If properly stored, there's no metal contact, even after years of storage.

If you're very careful, you can remove a canning jar lid without bending it or damaging the seal material, but you'll always get some wastage with modern style lids.

It wouldn't be too hard for a post-apocalyptic community to create equipment for straightening and refurbishing lids, however. Manufacturing the threaded rings and jars would be more challenging. It also wouldn't be too hard to manufacture jar lids made from thicker material that could stand being pried off the jar top without bending. I'm not sure if that was the case for early 20th century canning lids.

With tougher lids and beeswax or paraffin to get a secure seal like they did with old school canning equipment, canning jars and their seals can be reused indefinitely.

It's possible that along with ammunition and refined fuels, canning supplies are highly barterable items in an ATE campaign, if less glamorous.

As to sensory thresholds for contamination, it's possible to have dangerously high pathogen levels in food before the odor of decay becomes detectable to the human nose. It's also possible to have dangerously high levels of metal contamination below the human taste perception threshold. That's the reason that poisons based on heavy metals are effective.

The Smell/Taste Test works to detect obviously contaminated foods, but not all contaminated foods.

The traditional way to detect low levels of poisoning was to use food tasters or animals. Their job wasn't so much to detect poisons in foods before they ate it, but to indicate if the food was poisoned by getting sick or dying. Even then, only chemical tests are truly reliable methods of detecting contaminants.