There's no safety issue, especially with home-canned foods in glass (as opposed to commercial cans). In other words, if a food is safely processed following current guidelines and the seal remains good, you could consume it 10 or 20 years down the road with no risk. Canned foods retrieved from Civil War shipwrecks still had no significant bacterial load. What does become an issue is quality. Flavors fade. Textures soften. Colors brown. When it's no longer appealing for any of these reasons, toss it. But I would definitely not toss good food merely because it had passed some arbitrary expiration date. One issue not mentioned that is key to longevity is conditions of storage. Foods stored at consistently moderate temperatures with minimal exposure to light will have a much longer shelf life. Carol

I will say one last thing on this. I asked a simple question and a well respected poster gave me a simple answer, which I thanked her for. As for the whole "desperation" thing, so what if it is?! I find it a little offensive that in this day and age someone would find the need to point that out. Sometimes online it is easy to come across a certain way that you don't intend but your intent seems obvious and I don't understand why you should care whether I am horridly desperate and in need of food or not. I don't know many people who would make an issue of it. There are many people here who have canned up a recipe and decided that it wasn't entirely to their liking once processed and used the product in another way. I will use the products since they are safe and will make sure not to send you any for a Christmas gift.

I personally store my printer paper and photo paper in an "under the bed" tote. It's not totally air sealed, but it is close. With life expectancy of photos no one really knows. We users are still in the infancy stage of printing at home. I have read articles where Kodak and Fuji have claimed that commercially developed pictures will long outlast printer generated photos. Of course, this could be self-serving. Several years ago HP declared its photo paper and ink 25 (or 30 year?) life expectancy. My thoughts then is who really knows. We can store on CD/DVD, but again who really knows the time frame before degradation begins. My gut feeling is that with paper and printer quality as it is today in 75-100 years from now the preservation will not be as we have had in the previous century. Our only hope is the computer future bring users a new system that will be unveiled to permanently store our memories and retain them.

I've never really thought of shelf life in relation to soaps. Is there any expiration date on the box you currently have? I would think as long as you don't store it in a damp basement or unheated garage you should be okay.