NOTHING LASTS FOREVER? APPARENTLY, SOME THINGS DO!

You Won't Believe the Shelf Life of These 10 Food Products.

Image: Jason Tuistra

Everything has an expiration date—even the things that don’t really expire. The truth is, everything has an expiration date because the law says it has to, just to be on the safe side. As for the things that don’t expire, the list is not too long but it's probably longer than you expected it to be. For the sake of brevity, we narrowed it down to 10 items. Can you guess as to what you will find in it?

Image: Timo Volz

This first one is quite obvious. A few years ago, a running joke on the internet had the picture of a Himalayan pink salt package with a label that proudly stated "Formed 250 million years ago" and, in the small print at the bottom, said "Expires in 1 month". The joke being that salt does not expire. This is because salt is a mineral and, as such, it is not subjected to the decaying nature of organic matter.

Image: Arwin Neil Baichoo

This one is also quite legendary. Can you imagine smearing 3.000-year-old honey discovered in the tomb of Egyptian King Tut on your toast? Aside from the spectacular price tag such an item would go for, it would be perfectly safe for your health because, yes, you guessed it, honey lasts forever.

Bees create this elixir with almost no water, which is something microbes need to exist. And no microbes equals no decomposition. So, grab that honey jar at the bottom of the pantry and pour some on a cup of hot tea!

Image: Precious Plastic Melbourne

This one might not be as legendary as the previous too but it surely deserves a spot on our list. White****vinegar has an indefinite shelf life thanks to its high acidity (above 4%). Microbes don’t grow in acidic conditions. This is why you often see pickled products preserved in vinegar: because this liquid prevents spoiling due to its high acidity.


A bottle that was bought ages ago for a barbecue or a Bloody Mary cocktail and then forgotten in the pantry or the refrigerator door is still perfectly safe to consume. Worcestershire sauce doesn't really go bad. This happens because it is mostly made of white vinegar, and we already know what’s the deal with white vinegar, right?

So, use it for your tomato juice and vodka drink, pour it on your steak, and then cast it aside for a year or two, the trusty fellow will be there waiting for you as if time hadn’t passed at all.

Image: Nathan Cima

Do you remember those old liquor cabinets, usually in grandparent homes, filled with ancient alcohol bottles that nobody ever really drank? There is a reason those dusty bottles never went bad and it is a single word: alcohol.

Bacteria do NOT like alcohol, and beverages with high alcohol content keep bacteria from growing, thus, decaying.

Image: Lucy Wolski

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) says that powdered milk lasts between 2 and 10 years. We know that is nowhere near the shelf life of the other elements in this list but still, it's quite impressive for a dairy product. Some survival stores even sell non-fat dry powdered milk labeled with a 25-year shelf life.

Image: Shelley Pauls

Every person who has ever bought dry beans knows that this product lasts a long time. How long, you might ask? Dry beans are usually given a shelf-life of 3 to 6 years under optimal storage conditions, in a low humidity environment. But there are recorded cases of dry beans lasting longer than 24 years without significant taste loss or hardening and even a case of a carbon-dated 1,500-year-old batch of white beans that could be planted and grown perfectly in normal conditions.

Image: Myriam Zylles

In the same manner that we can count on salt forever, sugar is another thing that won’t go bad. Due to their resistance to microbial growth, commercial sugars have an indefinite shelf life.

While sugars are recommended to be used within 2 years, that is because of lumpiness or hardening in granulated sugars and crystallization of sugars in honey and syrup. It is still safe to use even when lumpy or crystals are present. The color and flavor of liquid sugars may change over time, but they can still be consumed.

Image: rivage

For most people, coffee is a comforting beverage to have around and, as such, it is nice to know that it won’t go bad anytime soon. Instant coffee, while unopened, has a shelf life of up to 20 years, depending on the package and the processing methods. Coffee, while it can lose some of its flavor over time, consistently proves itself as a long-lasting contender.

Image: Kobby Mendez

Another comfort food, pure maple syrup can last a really long time, due to its high sugar content. According to various sources, the shelf life of pure maple syrup is pretty much eternal.

If stored properly, that is, in a dark and dry place, and, ideally, in a glass container, pure maple syrup will last indefinitely. If crystals form in the bottle, placing the vessel in boiling water will undo them and make the syrup as good as new.

Only time can tell

Some authors never knew: Literature classics that were flops initially

Some of the most celebrated artists of history died without realizing the value of the work they’d left behind. Such was the fate of Vincent van Gogh, who sold, by most accounts, exactly one painting in his lifetime. Many of the authors we now call brilliant had similar experiences. Emily Dickinson made her sister promise she’d burn each of her 1,800 poems after she died; Fitzgerald thought The Great Gatsby had been a fluke, as did Melville of Moby-Dick. Here are 10 stories with bittersweet endings about authors who never knew the historical significance of their work.

Moby-Dick hit shelves in 1851, but it sold roughly 3,000 copies in Melville's entire lifetime. Critics dismissed it as bloated and strange. Melville had been a literary star in his twenties, but this book baffled readers expecting another great sailor's tale.

Sales never recovered. He spent his last two decades as a customs inspector on the New York docks. He died in 1891, believing this book was a failure. It took until the 1920s, and a wave of scholars celebrating the centennial of his birth, for critics to declare Moby-Dick the great American novel.

The final royalty check F. Scott Fitzgerald ever received for The Great Gatsby came to $13.13. When the novel about a mysterious millionaire chasing a lost love across Long Island's glittering parties appeared in 1925, it sold fewer than 25,000 copies and left unsold stock rotting in warehouses.

Fitzgerald died in 1940, convinced he'd been forgotten, unable even to find copies of his own books in Los Angeles stores. Then, in World War II, the government's Armed Services Editions program shipped 155,000 pocket-sized copies to soldiers overseas, and each one reportedly got passed around and read by roughly seven men. Its popularity rose. Today, Gatsby sells half a million copies a year and is one of the best-selling American novels ever written.

A grieving mother, a stack of rejected pages, and one very reluctant novelist. That formula gave way to the funniest book of 1981. John Kennedy Toole wrote his sprawling New Orleans comedy in the early 1960s, only to have it rejected by Simon & Schuster after two years of revisions.

Crushed, he shelved it. In 1969, at 31, he took his own life. But his mother, Thelma, refused to let the manuscript die with him. For years, she pushed it toward publishers, finally cornering novelist Walker Percy, who initially refused… But he couldn't put the pages down. Louisiana State University Press published it in 1980, eleven years after Toole's death. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

When Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, self-published in Brooklyn with Walt Whitman’s name left off the cover, only around 800 copies existed, and just one American library bothered to buy one.

Critics called it obscene; one reviewer suggested throwing it in the fire. Whitman kept revising and expanding it for the rest of his life, eventually growing it from 12 poems to more than 400. Even his 1881 edition, praised by many, was effectively banned in Boston after a district attorney threatened obscenity charges over its treatment of sexuality. Whitman simply found a new publisher.

Though Whitman achieved notoriety towards the end of his life, he was not widely famous or commercially successful for most of his career. It took around a century for America to stop calling Leaves of Grass filthy and start calling it foundational.

Today, Jane Austen is one of the English language's most beloved novelists, her evergreen books selling millions each year. But, during her lifetime, each of her novels was published anonymously, credited only to "A Lady" or "the author of Pride and Prejudice."

When Austen died in 1817 at just 41, most of the reading public had no idea who had written the books they loved. Persuasion, her last completed novel, was published six months after her death. It was only then, in a memorial notice her brother Henry attached to the edition, that the world learned Jane Austen's actual name.

H.P. Lovecraft finished one of his most ambitious stories, a chilling tale of an Antarctic expedition, and his own editor wouldn't even publish it. In 1931, he submitted At the Mountains of Madness to Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that had run most of his work, only to have editor Farnsworth Wright reject it for being too long.

Lovecraft was so stung he shelved the manuscript for four years, unwilling to even look at it. It finally appeared in 1936 in Astounding Stories, heavily and clumsily edited without his approval, earning him $315, the most money he ever made from a single story. A fully restored version of his original text wasn't published until 1985, nearly fifty years after his death. Today the novella is considered one of his finest works and a major influence on modern science fiction horror.

Franz Kafka wrote the story of a man who wakes up transformed into a giant insect in just three weeks, then spent years anxious about how it would be received. When The Metamorphosis finally appeared in 1915, it was one of the very few works Kafka published during his lifetime; most of his fiction stayed in drawers or notebooks.

Reception was modest at best, confined to small German literary circles, who found it strange and difficult to categorize. Kafka was so protective of the story's ambiguity that he insisted the insect itself never be illustrated on the cover, worried an image would ruin the horror readers built in their own minds. He died in 1924, having no idea that Gregor Samsa's transformation would become one of the most analyzed openings in all of literature.

Sylvia Plath was so unsure of her only novel that she published it under a fake name. The Bell Jar, a thinly veiled account of a young woman's breakdown during a summer internship in New York, appeared in London in January 1963 under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas", in a print run of just 2,000 copies.

Plath worried a poorly received novel might damage her standing as a poet. Weeks later, she died. The book's true authorship became public only after her death, and it wasn't published in the U.S. under her real name until 1971, once her reputation as a poet had already secured her a devoted readership. Today, it's considered one of the defining American novels about mental health and womanhood.

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems. She saw fewer than a dozen printed in her lifetime, and even those were published anonymously, likely without her full consent.

She lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, sewing her poems into small hand-bound booklets and tucking them into a bureau drawer. When she died in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered the stash and, instead of burning it as she'd once promised, resolved to share it with the world.

She turned to writer and editor Mabel Loomis Todd, who happened to be having a long affair with Emily's brother Austin, and scholar Thomas Wentworth Higginson to prepare the poems for print. Their edited version appeared in 1890 and became an immediate sensation.

Stieg Larsson never got to hold a single copy of any of his three bestselling novels. The Swedish journalist wrote The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels in his spare time, mostly for his own satisfaction, and only shopped them to a publisher shortly before his death.

In November 2004, months after turning in all three manuscripts, he suffered a fatal heart attack at 50, reportedly after climbing several flights of stairs when his office elevator broke down. The books were published starting in 2005 and went on to sell more than 60 million copies worldwide, spawning multiple film adaptations and making its heroine, Lisbeth Salander, a global icon.