Why?

Good move! I'm sure there was very little in the way of nutrition left after all this time, and the oil had long since gone rancid.

Old flour makes horrible baked goods, and (white) bleached/unbleached flour has a relatively short shelf-life -- even refrigerated. A year at room temperature (70-degrees) is about all you can expect. Increase that storage life to 18-months if you refrigerate the flour, and double that 2-years if you freeze it. Since the flour was whole wheat, figure about half that amount of time.

Isn't it ironic that whole wheat berries will store for 25-30 years without going rancid. Once the bran has been cracked when it's milled into 100% whole wheat flour, the germ oil and nutrients begin to degrade from exposure to oxygen within 3-hours of milling. This is why milling your own grain (wheat as well as other grains) is the only way to get all the nutrition possible from the grain.

I try to use freshly-milled grain flour within hours of milling. Any leftover goes into the freezer. Freezing doesn't prevent the oil from going rancid or the nutrients from degrading, it just slows it down. It can still go rancid in the freezer because it's exposed to oxygen. I use any freshly-milled flour stored in the freezer within a week.

Fresh IS best!

-Grainlady

Oh... I agree that fresh is best!

I was wondering why he went into someone's things and started tossing....