I'll See Your Duck & Raise You A Pig!

The Joys Of Outdated Tinned Meat!

On Sunday, Elisson introduced us to the pride of his pantry, Dead Duck in a Can.

As the story goes, the Can O' Mallard was a gift in the spring of 1994, and is now woefully out of date.

As it happens, I too have a Pantry Mascot from approximately the same era. I gradjitated kawledge in Spring '95, and a good friend preceded me by 3 semesters. He gifted me with this canned meat treat not long after he left school, a souvenir of his short-lived job working for an agency that received USDA food assistance.

Here it is, in all its steel-cased glory:




The rear reads - Ingredients: Pork- not less than 99%; Salt- not more than 1% (flavor).

This Pork is fully cooked in its own juices and is ready to use. Use cut-up Pork for salads, sandwiches, soups, stews, barbecue or spaghetti sauce, meat pies, casseroles, or creamed pork. Use juices and fat from canned Pork to flavor cooked vegetables, soups or gravy.

Creamed pork?? EWWWWWWWW!!!!!

The can is still not rusted or bulgy. I imagine I'll keep it until it explodes. Hell, I may put a codicil in my will that it gets opened and poured on my corpse just before the tray gets shoved in the cremation oven.

After graduation and before I landed my First Real Job, there were a few weeks here & there of extreme poverty, where ramen noodles and pinto beans were the mainstay of my diet. Even when I would have killed for a chilidog, I never could manage to crack open my can of USDA Pork With Natural Juices. It was just too weird to eat, you had to just look at it and wonder what was inside.

Reason #2 for not eating it? The Guv'mint never specified ingredients beyond the generic term "Pork". I was (and still am) terrified that I would open the can and find 29 ounces of USDA Prime Pork Snouts...