- Are you eating this? This food is over a thousand years old!
- This is the food of the ancients, it does not spoil! Previously, they knew how to do it conscientiously!
About such a dialogue flashed in the rather old (well, by today's standards) film "Chronicles of Predatory Cities". Recently I looked at it with one eye (well, as I did, my son watched, and I listened with the corner of my ear), and thought: is there really, now food that can be stored indefinitely?
Preservatives, of course, work miracles, but it seems to me that even their miraculous abilities have limits. So you shouldn't count on thousands of years, you don't even need hundreds of years ...
On the other hand ...
Take honey, for example. Having bought them once, it is quite possible to bequeath the stock to grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. From time to time I come across publications that ancient honey is found almost intact.
In the village of Sakire, in central Georgia, German archaeologists have found a 4,300-year-old container of bee honey. There is also information that honey was found in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, who ruled from about 1333 - 1323 BC. e.
But here it is worth remembering that honey is well stored only in a certain temperature range - not lower than minus five and not higher than plus twenty, and not during any container (here it is stored in clay), tightly sealed, without exposure to sunlight, without access to water and, preferably, as understood, without access air ...
Then the sugar contained in it will prevent honey from spoiling.
So in theory, yes, honey can last forever.
Sugar and salt, if there are no other additives in them and without exposure to moisture, too.
Most likely, a very long shelf life (beyond the official one) without spoilage for freeze-dried foods with a low fat content (nothing to go rancid).
I came across statements that instant coffee can be stored forever, that is, it will not deteriorate, it will simply lose its taste - while, again, it must be protected from moisture.
But the pasta spoils, and the cereals spoil, almost everything except rice (white, polished), which can be shoved into the freezer and stored there.
As for the "food of the ancients", which has not been spoiled for millennia, I suspect in the "Chronicles", but the next once we remembered Twinkies biscuits (for example, one of the heroes “Welcome to Zombieland "). There were jokes that "twinks" are entirely made of chemistry, so they can be stored for as long as necessary, despite the fact that the shelf life is 25 days.
Only there is no evidence of this ...
So there is no food that can actually last forever!