There used to be a gun/outdoor store in this town that did a ”sidewalk sale’ every year. They would set up tents in the parking lot, put tons of merchandise out there, and have a sale. Problem was, when the store closed at night you couldnt just leave all that stuff out in the parking lot unprotected. Thats where I came in. I would sit out there all night in a lawn chair keeping an eye on the stuff in exchange for store credit. I then took that store credit and cleaned them out of some of their leftover Y2K Mountain House inventory. Mind you, this was all around 2000-2001.

So, I have a bunch of MH in #10 cans that I have been sitting on for about 25 years. In the time I’ve added to my MH stash quite considerably, so it’s not a hardship to pull out one of those cans, crack it open, and see how it fared.

I am not the first guy to do that. Friend Of The Blog(tm) [And friend of Gun Jesus] Joel, over at his blog, cracked open some old MH and had mixed-but-generally-good experiences.

I’ve no doubt that this stuff is going to be just fine but I have a chance here to do a little empirical data-gathering so why not? Lets go!

The sales tag on it indicates that it was put out for sale sometime in 1999, which makes sense since it was part of that stores attempt to cash in on the Y2K thing. The date stamping on the bottom of the can confirms that, yes, this stuff is a quarter century old.

Grabbing a can opener and removing the lid shows….ghostly white pasta. The pasta, being larger than the other components of this meal, sit on the top of the can and the smaller components have migrated to the bottom.

So, lets dump the whole can into a bowl and stir it up.

The contents of the can appeared just fine and smelled unremarkable. The powdered cheese and tomatoe mix had caked a bit at the bottom of the can but it broke up easily.

The instructions call for 3/4 cup of boiling water to one cup of food, and then letting it sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Okay, lets do that.

The final result, after five minutes, was this. I really should have let it sit for ten minutes but I figured I’d follow the instructions at their minimum.

The big question: how was it? It was fine. It wasn’t as spicy as the modern spaghett-with-meat-sauce that MH has out these days. It had a very faint ‘tinny’ aftertaste but I think thats actually the normal flavor. Was it edible? Yeah, as best I can tell. I mean, I guess I’ll have to report back in 12 hours. The taste was about what I expected… pretty much on par with your average Chef Boyardee product. After a long day of hanging looters, manning the roadblocks, and digging out of the rubble, this would be a fine meal.

So, yeah, it seemed to hold up just fine. The can had sat on a shelf in my basement since Y2K. The temperature down there was fairly consistent…never getting below freezing in the winter, and never getting over 70 in the summer. It was, pretty much, kept in the classic “cool dark place”.

The tag on the can indicates that it was about $32 for this can back in ’99. I’m an MH dealer, so I can see that todays dealer price for this same product is currently $29.50 per can. Amazon shows it for about $53, which is pretty close the 100% markup on MSRP for Mountain House cans. If you want to amortize it, it comes out to about $1.28 per year to have it sit there all this time.

What was i expecting? Actually, pretty much this. I’ve read reports from people opening even older cans of MH and finding it just fine. It really does appear that the 30-year shelf life on these products is pretty much spot on.

I’ve added more recent production MH into my supplies over the last few years so I have no probem ‘wasting’ this, one of my oldest cans of food. Its quite worth it to me to confirm what I’ve believed all along about the longevity of the MH products.

So, there you go, guys. Buy the cans and you can be pretty certain of at least 25 years of life…although I have no doubt that it’d be just fine for at least another five or ten years on top of that.