It’s probably still perfectly safe to eat. It likely just tastes like hot garbage. Frozen food doesn’t technically expire, it just slowly gets more and more freezer burnt that degrades the quality and taste. It remains perfectly safe to eat indefinitely, however.
With some exceptions, like lamps or tvs, older devices lasted much more. You can inspect the older devices you find around you and check for yourself. In general, they were much more robust and used better components and were designed to last. This was due to a lot of things that were different. I will try to list some:
in some industry areas, growth in the market was mostly due to population increase, people who never got access to some things being able to buy them, and expansion to development countries, so it was better for the companies that the devices lasted long, because they wouldn’t be able to supply a demand of replacement + new users. In other words, there was no incentive for products with small life.
devices were generally simpler, with fewer components, therefore, with fewer points of failure. The components used were often more “brute”, instead of the delicate electronic components we have.
a lot of the modern obsolescence comes from software and from i/o communication incompatibilities, things that weren’t even present in most devices
market demand forces prices down, and this has led to many things, including worse quality stuff
the life cycle of everything has diminished, as the consumerism became stronger, and people are buying new things much faster, leading to users not even caring for things to last long, because they will buy a new one soon anyway.
These are the things that came to my mind. However, it’s important to remember that there are products being made out there with the same robustness level of old appliances. Look into industrial devices, for example. They’re build to last for decades and endure much more than common devices, but the prices aren’t inviting to the average user.
In Engineering you have two different kinds of failures:
The first is to do with manufacturing flaws and happens in the first couple of months of use, hence how Warranties work - bad part of bad assembly so it breaks on first use or soon after.
The second kind is the device dying from decay due to use, from old age if you will.
Survivor bias, IMHO, only applies for those devices that last beyond the stage were the first kind of failure can happen as it’s kinda random (you can reduce the proportion of devices that fail, but for any one device it’s random if it will be one that fails or not)
So a 3 year old fridge dying is not from manufacturing defects but it’s dying from faster ageing, which is a flaw in the design or a choice of cheaper, lower quality components.
From what I’ve seen that’s exactly what’s been happenning: less robust designs and cheaper components with shorter lifespans, all to save on raw material costs.
Lower manufacturing quality tends to cause the first kind of failures, not the failures well past the first few months.
PS: Note that dying from the second kind of failure still has a random probability for any one device, though whilst the probability from dying from manufacturing flaws is very time dependent (starting very high and then tailing off to pretty much zero within some months), the probability of dying from age is a lot less time dependent and if that much increases slightly with increasing age (whilst the other kind decreases steeply with age, specifically decreases steeply with use). I’m mentioning this for completness, as the point still stands - if there is a high proportion of devices of a given type dying at year 3, then that design has a much higher rate of failure due to aging than devices for which a much smaller proportion dies at year 3, hence the design is not robust and/or lower quality components are being used.
My father was an academic and the thing academics do when they visit each other’s houses is to bring a bottle of something. So they had a cellar room full of booze. It was awesome when I was in high school in the mid-90s. My parents didn’t drink beer though, so there was no beer in the house except for a six-pack of Michelob at the back of the room that had pull tabs on it. They stopped making pull tabs in 1980. So it was at least 14-year-old beer. It was one of the few things I didn’t think about and/or decide to steal.
Similar situation for me, but my sister was five years older than me and age and her friends got to all the good stuff first. All that was left for me was a selection of gross flavored brandy and a bunch of novelty shaped bottles that I undoubtedly ruined the collectible value of when I cracked them open.
My girlfriend’s family cabin has a cold storage in the basement. We found some canned stew that had expired in 1982. A friend of mine actually ate it and he didn’t get sick!
Yeah, the expiry is beaurocracy in action, but okay beiroacracy, I’m fine with putting the dates. But canned goods are eternal if stored properly, and doing a quick inspection for what you mentioned is all you need when you’re scouring the wasteland for Vienna sausages in the far off time of the year 2025.
2097, obviously, cause 1817 there were no plastics* or refrigerators** or cameras cheap enough to take pictures of trivial shit*** and 1997 would be to obvious. Nah, its definitely not 1997
There’s also a lot of other stuff that changed over time. New appliances may be more efficient, run on different (more environmentally friendly) coolant, have lead-free solder circuits, etc.
The thing is, a lot of that old stuff which was found to have health or environment issues also lasted longer. Leaded solder didn’t get burrs, for example. The components may also have been easier to repair.
But there’s also survivor bias. For every old freezer that sat in grandma’s basement for 2-3 decades many more ended up in a scrap heap.
I have a freezer from 1953, works fine. It’s appliances made after @2000 that shit the bed in 5 years or less. No, it’s not survivorship bias, there’s a certain time period you don’t see anything survived from.
Yes it is. The probability is much more significant that there are appliances from 2000s still working fine while your 1950s piece is one of the last few left. Just because your reality has a different view doesn’t mean it’s the same on a global scale.
No, it’s not. You should see a bunch of appliances from that era like you do older eras, but they’re just gone. My 53 fridge i bought last year, i was so happy when it turned on again. Moving them at that age is risky as hell. but I have ten fridges and 6 freezers i use to run my small town restaurant. I’ve paid close attention to the used market, I’m not just blowing random horseshit. Commercial grade is a different story. but wasn;t what I was talking about.
My mom didn’t defrost the freezer for ages. It’s finally dead, but it took 2 hours just for the doors to unfreeze from the rest so I could open them.
See for yourself: https://i.imgur.com/7BQ8S6I.jpg
So perhaps a similar issue.
It still technically works, it’s just that the door doesn’t close properly, making it kinda useless. It was only shut off due to high temp alarm, which I am surprised took so long to turn on as there was some gap in the doors all the time.
I kind of want to see a charter plot of that scoring function projected onto a 3-axis manifold with a colored heat map. How would I minMax my anticipated score given my current age or projected lifespan?
From a reverse image search, looks like this was originally posted on Twitter by Orla Walsh, a dietician. Her education experience on her LinkedIn puts her at about 36 years old at the time the image was posted (July 2023). Since this is her mom’s fridge though, we estimate her age at 36+25=61. So, total score is 42.62.
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