I remember when my best friend got divorced, she cleaned out her house and I was the lovely recipient of her unused/unwanted things.

I came home one day to find a load of garage sale junk littering my front porch. Included were several boxes of food storage with vaguely-labeled, large, silver cans that looked like they had come from some stupid RS canning night.

I actually opened one can to see what happy food-storage lottery I had hit. Inside was a bunch of goop I can only describe as LARD. ugh!

I had to throw the stuff away a little at a time because my friend lived just down the street . . . and I didn't want her to know I had trashed her "gift."

Any other recycled food storage stories out there?

;o)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2011 02:27PM by shannon.

I had a bunch of dry pack stuff (parents were way into it), and when I sold my house to a ward member I asked them if they wanted it, or should I remove it?

Luckily they wanted it, and I didn't have to haul it all up the stairs.

I only made it once, but the fruit punch was pretty good, and the apples were pretty good. Never touched anything else.

Isn't that what goes to Haiti and such, followed by a big news release?

After Katrina when our parish (Houston) was collecting food and clothing in the gym we got a massive donation of dry packs from somewhere in the surrounding neighborhoods. Being from the Southwest and from a fractured family of TBMs and nevermos, I recognized them as something the Morg keep in their pantries so I suggested we check dates . . . sure enough, every last one was way out of date. Years out of date. But carefully dusted for donation, mind you.

We started double checking some of the canned goods and discovered some of them were home canned in mason jars and therefore not dated so we had to ditch those, too. Those were a little scary--had someone home canned yellow wax beans or had those things once been green beans, because they were now a most interesting shade of orange . . .

So let's make Katrina victims even SICKER than they are already from contaminated floodwaters, overflowing bathrooms, dehydrating conditions, and lack of adequate food.

Brilliant.

;o)

You could have re-gifted it right back the next Christmas.

We got my ex's parents' old food storage just after we married. We got married in 1984. The food was from the 1960s.

My brother's idea of food storage is meat. He hunts as many deer as he can, fishes at least twice a month, and comes home with hundreds of fish. He buys a whole cow once a year. He has almost filled the garage with freezers for all of his meat. He and my mom are the only ones living in the house. I was laid off in August and was struggling to buy groceries for a couple of months. My mom decided to help by sharing some of the extra meat and fish. My brother made sure I only got the crappiest cuts of meat and the smallest fish. And all dated from over a year ago. Needless to say, it went straight in the garbage.

He's going to be in a world of hurt when the power goes out.

My neighbor worked for a local dump. He said every year people would bring pickup loads of all kinds of canned and bottled items out to dump. The best for him was all the wheat and grain the had gone wormy. He took it home and fed his chickens and turkeys. Guess it helped some people.

and they would donate tons of home canned, dry packed or way, way out of date food to us. Of course anything that was not commercially packed and in date could not be used. We spent a lot of money to get rid of other peoples garbage.

And speaking of donating, every so often a ward would collect things for our shelter and donated incredibly overused and trashy items. I would never have given any of these nasty worn out items to anyone, much less someone who had just been through great trauma! 95% went in the trash. One lady told me, "when you have nothing, you are glad for anything."

Outdated, of course. The children and I couldn't budge the heavy cans, so we opened them one at a time, and shoveled as much wheat as we could into each garbage can once a week, to be picked up. By February, the wheat was gone, and we took out the car and bikes, and celebrated by playing music, skating, and break-dancing on cardboard in our clean, empty, heated garage. We were never going to be food-hoarding people.