DailyDirt: How Long Can Food Last?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Preserving food in various ways has been a pretty important part of developing stable societies. Without a reliable food supply, it's kind of hard to move forward and to do anything other than creating a stable food chain. But with modern food processing, food can last indefinitely... though it may have gone a bit too far. Here are just a few quick links on a how a few foods stand up to somewhat extreme conditions.

• There's at least one Twinkie that lasted about 30 years with only a slight bit of mold growth. It's been a few more years since the last story on it, so maybe the mold finally finished it off.... Anyone have an update? [url]
• Happy Meals seem to be happy for a pretty long time, too. It's not like people *want* fast food to get moldy really quickly, but it'd be nice to find out which burger out there goes bad the fastest. (No cheating by humidifying them!) [url]
• A 20-day-old radish will last about 30 minutes in the vacuum of space -- and still grow after returning to normal Earth conditions. Unprocessed foods seem to be pretty tough, too. [url]
• For best results, though, food flavors are usually fairly sensitive to temperature. Cold tomatoes and skunked beer are just a couple examples. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: happy meal, mold, twinkie
Companies: mcdonald's