Keebler did adopt Streitmann's Zesta saltine brand as Keebler's national brand of saltine crackers. 10 Keebler-Weyl Bakery became the official baker of Girl Scout Cookies in 1936, the first commercial company to bake the cookies (the scouts and their mothers had done it previously). Does not have a uniform system of coding expiration dates on food products as of 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The federal government only requires expiration dates on baby foods and infant formula. Keebler did adopt Streitmann's Zesta saltine brand as Keebler's national brand of saltine crackers. Saltines are America's favorite cracker and Monarch Saltine Crackers are no exception. They're a must-have for soups, salads and cracker baskets. They're also a great snacking cracker, served with peanut butter or cheese. The two-cracker packs are ideal for takeout orders and help reduce waste, too. The crackers are edible and the expiration date is (4) months away, but there is NO cracker CRUNCH! It's missing that satisfying hard texture that resounds through your head when chewed. I am unsure of how they became stale and un-fresh; the plastic packaging appeared sealed and intact. Consumer Reports can help you determine if expired food is safe to eat, noting that confusion over expiration dates leads Americans to throw out food when it might still be good.
So last year I finished off one box. This year I hadnt really bothered the other two boxes (the kind that have four long narrow packs of crackersinside the box)...
Then recently I went to eat some from a breaker pack in one of those remaining two boxes....
I suppose they were just slightly 'expired' (by the MFG Standards anyways) at the time of purchase....
And eating them wasnt even possible (despite having toppings worth roughing it for all ready to go), as they tasted like... paint.
Not quite as bad as oil based paint, at least, nor quite like epoxy paint (which I surmise has no taste as its such a perfectly hard material), butdefinitely like 3 day dried latex acrylic paint.
So naturally I decided to dump each breaker pack into the fire, as the cats surely wouldnt walk within five feet of them... And they were unfit for the compost setup as they have salt...
And I'll tell ya, they would probably make for halfway decent firestarter kindling, as you'd think I had just dumped shards of pine particle board onthe fire when I poured the 7 breaker packs into it rather quick like...
So naturally I got to wondering, maybe that's exactly how dried latex paint would burn...
How Long Crackers Last
Meaning of course I went and grabbed a big 'slap' of dried latex paint and threw it in there (the sort of patch you peel out of a paint bucket afterits fully dried for a few days, and then left to dry in the sun for a few more)...I snip you not, I seriously had this most perfect specimen of latex paint on hand for this most ultimately serious example of a controlled scienceexperiment ever contemplated...
So I threw it in there...
Could still see many crackers not yet burnt because they didnt get far enough in there...
And the patch of latex paint in the fire next to the crackers (no pun intended), had the most astounding results...
It burned both 'faster' and 'slower' than the cracker did!
It managed to do this simultaneously (which is without a doubt a truly indisputable marvel of all known and fictional science theory)...
How Long Do Crackers Last
But after many minutes of advanced enhanced exotic calculations, and my nose, without any doubt whatsoever roughly the same amount of energy expelledfrom the patch of dried latex paint as would have roughly the same dried mass of saltine crackers (that smelled like three day old dried latex paint)would have...
AND, the smell of the fire didnt change at all from one moment before the latex paint was added (while the crackers were still going at it), andafter!!!
Do Crackers Go Bad