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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Going through the similar events sections shows that massive volcanic eruption -> famine -> political unrest has happened multiple times throughout history!

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Yes. In the pre-industrial era, civilizations tended to balance precariously on a Malthusian knife-edge, growing right up to whatever maximum population their food supplies could support. So all it took was one freak climactic event to tip them over into famine, and famine has always been a fertile breeding ground for political unrest.

Isn't the issue more that they had limited means of long-term food storage so there was little point in growing more food than you could eat in a year?

Canning, dehydrating, pickling, curing, making alcohol...

Also, smoking. Worth bearing in mind that salt, one of the primary means of storage was a precious commodity often shipped to the north of Europe from salt pans in the med.

Another issue is that when labor is cheap and plentiful one is less likely to invest in technology. There is a thesis that the Black Plague broke Europe out of a 'Matlthusian Deadlock' that size of the population made labor cheap enough that investing in agricultural technology had low returns, at the same time that same size led to everyone constantly being on the razors edge of famine.

People have regularly stockpiled multi-year food supplies going back thousands of years. It's just a matter of whether or not there's a political will to do so.

That said, obviously, thanks to refrigeration and freezing, we have the capability of storing a much broader range of foods in a healthier way for longer periods of time, assuming that whatever disaster we face doesn't cause the electrical supply to become transient.

I am extremely skeptical that we'd deal with a similar event any better. We've optimized too much for efficiency and just-in-time delivery.

Storing grain for multiple years was possible for a long, long time. The Bible story of Joseph is perhaps an exaggeration or an extraordinary event, but storing grain from "good" years in order to consume it in "bad" years is something we've been doing since prehistoric times, we have archeological evidence that this has been done in Egypt before writing was used.

And the reason that this doesn't happen anymore is that governments, through farm subsidies, now pay people to grow more food than we need, and to let fertile agricultural land lie fallow.

We also managed to start mass-producing canned goods with effectively indefinite shelf lives at some point, and figured out freeze drying, and figured out nitrogen flushing, and industrial autoclaves became standard, and ...

I would love to read about the actual safe shelf life of common foods. Being from a diary region of the. US, I have no faith in the stamped on dates

Far longer then the dates! Food spoilage is often aesthetic before it becomes a health risk.

You should be able to eat most canned goods multiple years after whatever their date is.

A good rule of thumb is if the can isn't deformed as a result of the volume of its contents changing as result of a chemical reaction then you're good to go. As far as rules of thumb go this is a pretty good one because a chemical reaction is a necessary perquisite of food spoilage (if the food doesn't change it doesn't spoil) and said chemical reaction will almost certainly alter the volume (at STP) of the contents of the can thereby deforming it. You can also use your nose which has millions of years of incremental improvement making it good at telling you what is and isn't edible.

I wouldn't compare dairy dates with canned good dates. There is a significant difference there.

Of course. That said, it’s common knowledge here that dates on dairy date are - in no small part - influenced by the dairy producers need to milk their cows on essentially a constant basis. If milk stays on the shelves, there will be a glut of milk that needs to be stored/disposed. To avoid this, shorter than necessary dates are put on dairy to keep it moving off the shelves.

I don't know about that. My milk pretty consistently goes bad within a day or 2 of the date on the can.

OTOH I've cooked and eaten eggs 3 weeks after the date, with no noticeable difference in taste or texture.

Milk goes off mostly based on 'time from opening', if you're using milk at the estimated rate that the supermarket uses to set their best before date, then it's no surprise that it goes off at around the right time.

OTOH, if you buy a bottle of milk and let it sit unopened for 5 days, then start consuming it, you'll usually find that it lasts roughly 5 days past the best before date.

My opinion is that the end dates are more conservative to avoid claims when food goes bad before their expiration date and maybe a little planned obsolescence. Most people, except for preppers maybe, will not chose one food item over another if it has a year or 2 more of shelf life. So why should manufacturers spend money over this if it's not a selling point to the most common denominator?

To give some perspective check out Steve1989MREInfo's Youtube channel [0], where he routinely ingests food from cans dating as far back as the world wars. Although you might argue he has a built up immumity by now giving the amount of bad food he must have eaten.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA

There's an important difference here between canned food and pretty much everything else. Expiry dates tend to be early for perishable goods, but IMO this is analogous to buildings being overengineered.

Canned goods, on the other hand, should last indefinitely so long as the can itself doesn't fail. There's just not a whole lot of relevant chemistry going on in a sterile, low oxygen environment. I suppose permeability of the can itself to oxygen (depending on what method was used to seal it) could become relevant on a long enough timescale, but if the contents are truly sterile even that shouldn't make much difference.

If anything does happen to the contents of the can, as noted in another comment there will almost certainly be a visible change in volume (ie the can will deform).

The reason it doesn't happen anymore is that a) surplus + international trade is used to hedge against localized disaster, and b) we've been lucky so far. So sure, we've invented canning and freezing, but we've also invented just-in-time inventory. So unless you stock a season's worth of canned goods, or have someone with a large private farm in your social circles, good luck getting food long-term if a continental-scale food shortage strikes.

And right now we're really busy catching up to the new limit! Won't take long now.

Carrying capacity is the natural limit on all life.

Lower birth rates (due to birth control, affluence) is the fundamental change.

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