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I imagine that title might look a little odd until you realize what sub this is :)

So two years ago I freeze dried a tray of cream cheese and two trays of greek yogurt. Coming out of the freeze dryer, they seemed absolutely great. They were dry, powdered well, and took water quickly.

I vacuum sealed the yogurt in non-mylar bags and vacuum sealed the cream cheese in two jars.

While doing some fall cleaning (it's like spring cleaning but it's in the fall, duh), I pulled most of the food out of the kitchen pantry to store in the basement with the rest. Living off of stores, I don't need to worry about keeping the kitchen pantry packed as much as just keeping something up there as a kind of "live inventory" that represents some of what's in the basement stores.

So I hauled about 10 bags of groceries down to the basement, put them away, looked through one of the shelves and took stock of conditions. I pulled a jar of cream cheese and the 4 bags of yogurt. I also pulled the "shelf stable" ham pieces - you know the kind you can get in the store that's filled with preserving shit and then vacuum sealed in a bag? Yeah, that stuff.

The yogurt was... brown. The clear plastic bags (as expected) aren't a perfect air/water barrier and it seems that after two years of storage that they were not up to the task. They still were "air tight" in appearance but not a good enough barrier. As said, this was expected but now I know at least "2 years" is a bit too long to expect them to hold. Squeezing the yogurt "powder" revealed that it wasn't much powder any more, more like a really dry but barely moist clump that looked like powder. I didn't even open them; they went right in the trash.

The ham was... brownish with spots of something that grew inside of it. I bought them in 2017 and were small pieces, $1 each, purchased just for this experiment. They were still air tight but the condition tells me that when they were packaged, sanitary conditions weren't top notch. Those went in the trash as well.

As for the other items on that shelf that I prepared/preserved myself, the green onions are starting to go a little brown but are still perfectly dry. They're freeze dried and sealed in jars so I expect that this is pretty much normal being two years old.

As for the cream cheese... It's fine. I popped open a jar this morning. Smelled fine, texture fine, still dry. It takes surprisingly little water to rehydrate and does well just stirring with a fork. The end result is a cream cheese that is light and fluffy, almost as if you had taken beaters and whipped the shit out of it. A blender would have done better as there were small lumps but that is because of it being mixed with a fork. It has a very slight cardboard-ish taste, certainly not fresh but it doesn't taste off in any other way. I put some on a bagel this morning and I'll let you know if it kills me.

In any case, it seems that the clear plastic for vacuum sealing is good for less than a year or so, mylar bags 18 months to two years (tops) and jars much longer. I'll keep this in mind as I start making my "home made MREs."