>
> Did I read this right? Did you say that the jars still contained food in
> them from the '70s? If so, that's downright scary. It's what we label
> "toxic waste" at my house. I once had some fruit that I had canned
> (apricots) that were so sour no one wanted to eat them so they sat on my
> food storage shelves for close to 8 years when I finally tasked one of my
> kids with the unpleasant job of opening each jar and dumping them in the
> compost.
>
(Sorry, I can't figure out the attribution.)



Talk about toxic waste, I think I've mentioned here that after my
parents died in 1971 and '72we had the job of preparing their house to sell.

In the old New England "cellar" we found a half barrel of wine (my dad
made it every year with friends) and 2 or 3 dozen quart canning jars
(the old kind with bail tops and rubber rings) full of rabbit stew from
WWII--the early 1940s! There was no question of saving the jars--no one
wanted to chance opening them. They went straight to the dump.

They are probably still polluting the groundwater. I wonder what
future archaeologists will think of what they find in dump digs.

gloria p