You know all that dried stuff you have in cupboards (pasta/rice/biscuits etc), how long do you keep them for before binning them?

[BelleDeChocolateFluffyBunny]

I don't go into the depths of my kitchen cupboard alot , what is a 'reasonable' time limit to have before you bin them? (assuming they are unopened and have no insects crawling inside them) A few months after the best before? A year? 2 years? More then 2 years?

I mostly eat stuff months before it hits the best before date

Which is not terribly helpful!

I do normally have an ancient packet of dried beans/lentil soup mix lurking about somewhere though

I've got stuff which is 3 or 4 years old. It will be fine if unopened.

I tend to have in what I need tbh having wasted a load of stuff in the past.
I can honestly say there is nothing in the cupboards that has been there more than a few weeks.

Agggeeeesssss

I found a chocolate sponge thing, best before 2007 but it's sealed, it looks really tasty (this is why I'm asking)

Dried stuff I treat best before dates as advisory not compulsory. Not dead yet

Oh sealed - it'll be fine. And if it isn't you'll be able to tell as soon as you open it. Go for it (and share, damnit!)

It has belgian chocolate in the centre!! (yum!)

There's alsorts of stuff hidden away that's a tad (few years) past it's sell by date, rice/pasta/beans etc, what really should be thrown away?

If a best before date is a good few years after the purchase date, then it probably doesn't apply anyway. Manufacturers are bound by law to include best before dates on all food products' packaging now, so for non perishable products, they tend to stick a really long date on it and leave it at that.

Yes, is there certain things that should be chucked though? Do dried beans (for example) go really bad?

No idea about dried stuff. Crisps and biscuits and cakes etc tend to go weird.

They go soggy. I have some biscotti that looks normal

Here is the rule: if it's older than your latest marriage, it should be thrown away.

Otherwise ah it'll be fine

Um..... I'm single, never been married (so no one to test it out on)

Ah okay, does it have any dust on it related to any major world war?

Or does it has sticky price stickers on (that's a sure sign it's vintage?

Nope, the earliest thing I found was best before September 2006.

My excuse is that we eat alot of fresh food.

Yeah you see, it has best before dates, that's amateur food squirrelling Real hoarders can show you the big mustard powder tins not the piddly little ones from this decade!

Until recently sugar packets had a statement on them saying something like it would keep indefinitely if sealed and in dry clean conditions. I notice recently that they now have a best before date on sugar.

If stuff is completely unopened I would eat it say up to a year out of date. If flour etc has been opened then I worry that it might be slightly stale. I also heard on a cookery programme that pulses are no good once they are stale. Obviously with pulses you wouldn't know until you had soaked and cooked them, it's not like you can try them raw!

I once opened a tin of peaches from my Grandad's cupboard, an optimistic estimate was they were about 10 years old. They had gone a bit furry tbh. (furry as in gone off, not furry as in yummy peach skin)

p.s. the peaches had a label on saying something like four and half pence.

(at least they were in decimal I s'pose)

i clean everything out in the Spring and beginning of December if its still within sell by date and unopened ill keep it otherwise chuck it

Beans, pulses etc don't exactly go off, but they get so tough that they take forever to cook and they taste mealy and dry.

Canning things preserves them, as does pickling/drying/salting/freezing. I threw the flour (I didn't check for weevles), rice should be ok though, the risotto rice looks like it's been vaccum packed. The christmas pudding has alot of alcohol so this should be fine for another few years, it'll mature

We don't bin food, we eat it. Is this a novel concept?

I did once go through my mum's larder and bin a bunch of stuff that was so old it didn't have any sell-by date on it, ie. 20+ years old.

But in my house if stuff looks like it's on the turn I use it up pdq.

Dust off a selection of good soup/casserole recipes and use up all the stuff sitting in the depths of your cupboards. Then write a mealplan, make a list of the stuff you actually need. That way you'll find you always have the ingredients you need (so no last-minute corner shop runs), you won't throw away food or have your cupboards cluttered up with stuff you're not going to use. And by way of a triple whammy you'll halve your supermarket bills.

[simples]

It has always been the plan frogs.

MIL once fed the dcs sultanas with a best before date of Sept 1997. dd is 5, so you can work that one out...she famously doesn't believe in throwing food out. When they moved my SIL and I offered to help pack for the express purpose of ditching any food more than 10 years old. We filled a black bin bag. They're fine. And so are we - I'm not as bad as she is but still not a big believer in throwing out perfectly good food.