Five years ago, I created a disaster kit for the twins and me. Since the shelf life of emergency rations is 5 years, and it would only be fair to have some supplies for Venessa and Lillia.

It seemed like a shame to let MREs (which should last a couple decades) go to waste, just because they might be bad, so I decided to eat some of them and see how they are.

Survival calorie bar
I decided to start with what I assumed would be the least palatable item, a calorie bar. They're in the emergency kit for in case we run out of MREs.



Here's what each bar looks like. They were surprisingly good, with a taste of honey. They were very dry and crumbly though.



Millenium Bar
Made around the beginning of the millenium. Expired last year.



Not so bad, but not as good as the calorie bars. Also very dry and flakey.



PB and crackers
How bad could these be?



Looks and tastes like matzoh. The PB tasted like your average Jif or Skippy



Pears
The datestamp says 5321, meaning they were packaged on the 321st day of 2005, or Nov 17, 2005



They don't look very good, but maybe nothing looks good in a foil pouch



As with everything else, it tasted better than it looked



"Mexican Rice"
Packaged on Oct 31, 2005. This one scares me the most.



The rice is in a solid block, so I didn't even need a fork. I just squeezed it up the tube and took a bite. It tasted ok, but the texture was so rubbery I had to stop eating it



Pumpkin Pound Cake
For tasking dessert, I enlisted the help of real life pastry chef, Venessa Goldberg, from Infamous Pastries.

By the way, this is the oldest item in the kit. Packaged on Oct 07, 2004.



It had something like the opposite of a desiccant inside, designed to keep moisture in but remove oxygen.

Venessa immediately described it as "dry", but went on to describe the genuine pumpkin flavor, with notes of cinnamon and cloves.