7mo ago

Can I still use this salt?

58 comments

Some tourists in the Museum of Natural History are marveling at some dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, "Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?"
The guard replies, "They are 65,000,011 years old."
"That's an awfully exact number," says the tourist. "How do you know their age so precisely?"
The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones were sixty five million years old when I started working here, and that was eleven years ago."

Sometimes expiration dates refer to when enough plastic from the packaging has decayed into the food material that it might be a problem. Bottled water works that way.
I don't know:
How much science there is behind the dating
How much plastic you're consuming in your food anyway and so who cares what's the difference
Whether that's what's going on with this salt package specifically
But it's not automatically crazy for there to be an expiration date on an immortal product if it comes packaged up in plastic.
- I'm no expert, but I did watch a minidocumentary that explained that these best by dates are mostly arbitrary aside from perishable foods.
  For some products they'll have taste testers rate the same product packaged at different times from 1-10 with 10 being factory fresh, and when it drops below an average of 7, that's the date they put on the packaging
  
  Yeah. I feel like they probably just pick some random bullshit, and if people get botulism they look at reducing it, and if they throw away a quarter-million dollars worth of product that expired they look at increasing it, and if neither of those happens then they don't worry about it. I have no knowledge of it but even hearing that they do taste tests is a little surprising to me. But I am cynical.
  I did know some people who were once "employed" on a sort of temp job that was excising already-passed expiration dates from a massive number of cans of fish, and then stamping new later dates on them.
  ☹️
  
  Changes in texture are used for the best by dates too.
  
  Yeah a lot of the dates are just guesses that they know for a fact it will last longer. They are required to put a date but not required to actually test how long an item lasts. A lot of items last much longer than their expiration date. Salt should be good indefinitely.
  
  Yeah but this kind of salt they only taste test every half million years or so, so the expiration dates cant be trusted to be that precise.
- While I've always thought that, I've also heard that it's the point where the plastic may not be reliable enough to contain or keep the contents uncontaminated. Either way, it's the plastic.
  
  You would think that the abrasive nature of the salt would shave off more plastic than the plastic breaking down. I guess you need to keep track of how many earth quakes you get and how much you shake the container when you get salt.
- It's the same with packaged ice cubes.
  The main Danish "bag of ice" seller takes chunks of thousands if not tens of thousands of years old Greenland icebergs and put it in a bag that displays a best before date 1 year after the bagging 😄

You may have to wash the salt first

250 million years ago to 2019. This salt had a good run.

Yes, salt doesn't go bad
- But this looks like natural salt, so no preservatives 😁
  
  Maybe they used natural preservation like, let's say, salt? OP should check the ingredients
- This comment is absolute gold.
  
  Glad to be of service
  
  It's probably NaCl

From what I heard, salt is usually packaged with iodine or some substances that prevent clumping that expire over time. So after some time the salt won't have those anymore, but it should be safe to consume. Salt cannot spoil because bacteria cannot grow in salty places.
Don't know how plastic containers relate to that sadly.
- sodium iodide does not prevent clumping. typical anti-caking agents in salt are: fumed silica, potassium ferrocyanide, alumosilcate salts [Na+ | Ca2+ | K+] and sometimes, more frequently in organic products: simple carbonate salts (also [Na+ | Ca2+ | K+]).
  I know there are people who are afraid of anything with with the word "cyanide" anywhere in the description but ferrocyanides are really quite harmless. they are so harmless in fact that they are a common component of chemistry kits for little kids to make prussian blue.
- Iodine in salt is a health measure, people were not getting enough iodine, so they added it to the salt
  But that's not going to degrade.
  
  I get plenty of iodine, you just have to live in Pripyat and you can breathe the stuff!
  Just get a taste of that fresh, metallic air!
- The label says it's 100% uncontaminated though 😂

Well, I understand that with some years in an plastic bowl, the salt may absorb some substances and microplastics. But about Honey, what comes in glass jars? There they also put an expiration date, even though still edible honey has been found in several thousand years old Egyptian tombs.
- The expiration date - unless it's a different legal definition where you are from - is not really about being edible, but just signifies the guarantee the producer gives, basically "up until this date we will guarantee this product will maintain the expected quality". In this case, I think it will be them not guaranteeing that the salt won't have drawn water from the air and clumped up or something like that.
  
  i think what you are describing is the "best before date". the expiration date instead works as OP describes it: after the expiration the product should be tossed.
  i usually see expiration dates on fish and meat. afaik honey never comes with an expiration date; the best before date is probably only relevant for the taste of the honey, not for its safety.
- It's required by law so they have to put something.
  
  As weird as it sounds, this actually isn't true in general. Except on baby formula, it's not required by federal law. Some states require it and some don't, but it's more or less put there voluntarily by everyone because they don't want spoiled stuff going around with their name on it.
- As a plastics engineer, I would be more concerned with the heavy metals in Himalayan pink salt. Also, any microplastics wouldn't be "absorbed". If anything the salt would abraid the container through shaking which could scrape the walls and grind out some small particles over time. That being said, the plastics used for these types of applications are relatively virgin and frequently don't contain any additives aside from possible colorants or glass fill or something line that.

That's just the data after which the microplastics have aged to their finest toxicity
- Ahhh the 2019 coke bottle varietal, a fine vintage.

Anyone else hate it when products fluff themselves up with dramatically grandiose blurb? FORMED BY THE PRIMAL SEA shut the fuck up
- Part of my job is to write that kind of copy. If you take it seriously, you'll drive yourself nuts.
  
  You should start every one with "originally formed inside of an actual star" or something similar.

Possibly. Depends on what your use case is, perhaps the container it's stored in is degrading and putting some contaminants on the salt itself, microplastics and the like
- Do my microplastics go bad? I don’t want to get sick from expired microplastics.

More than 250 million years of shelf life, I think it can last a few million years more.

I would.

Lots of salty comments in this thread

if you think microbes got in that can survive in salt and are harmful to humans (which is unlikely), you can bake it in your oven a bit (without the container)
- Can any organism live on 100% salt? I was able to find info on hypersaline solutions, but I would think that existing on a pure polar solute would pretty much just kill by osmosis right?
  
  I guess a few spores don't mind salt, but i don't know for sure. That's why I wrote microbe.

For a proper answer you'd have to look up the plastic type and check for conditions where it would degrade. Plastics vary a lot by type and conditions of storage and exposure to sunlight.
As an example you could probably keep a container of polypropylene (code 5) or HDPE (code 2) with salt for at least 5 years in a dry dark place without any concern. Salt can still scratch the outside of the container and cause minor plastic pollution if shaken every now and then for 5 years.
However, if you want to make the salt last for your whole life then a glass/ceramic/stainless steel containers are the way to go. The life of the salt would then be mostly limited by moisture in the air so if you manage to make a design of the lid to allow airflow around a package of silica or rice you'll have your forever container.

Yes.

As a salt vampire, I will happily take any expired salt off your hands.
And off your face.

No sorry 250,000,005 years old is out of date.

Oh yeah, will my sea salt says it's GMO free.
No really, I have sea salt that said no GMOs.

No, you should absolutely not use it. Send it to me asap for safe disposal; I have a fully equipped facility to process it safely and thoroughly.
- Does that facility have 20 digits?

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