"gloria.p" > wrote in message
...
>
>>
>> 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

My mother-in-law had made some sauerkraut at one time and put all of it out
in the playhouse in the back yard. It was all in canning jars, but boy, did
they look NASTY. I'm not sure whatever became of them, whether they
actually ever opened the cars to empty them and clean them out. That was
when we first started labeling home preserving gone wrong as toxic waste.