gloria.p wrote:
>
>>
>> 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
Some urban archaeologists in California discovered some discarded steak
in a dump and the steak was still good. Newspapers taken from there were
readable too. No telling what they will find.

When I was fossicking for old bottles back in the sixties my Dad and I
found an old city dump that had been abandoned for many years, got a lot
of good bottles and collector cans from that place until I fell into a
hole from which I had to be rescued. Turns out they had dumped over an
old stump and it eventually rotted, leaving a thin crust of junk over
the hole. Scared the hell out of me and my Dad but I wasn't hurt. Just
never went back there again. The city put up a fence around the place
after that. I stuck with privy holes after that incident.