Flour never goes bad, does it?

I've been sick all week and I woke up this morning all ready to be productive.  Well, honestly, I was supposed to go golfing, but it was cold and crappy out, so I decided being productive was a decent alternative.  Also, I have a sitter coming over tonight and I didn't want to scare the poor girl off with the state of my house.

I had some bananas on the counter that were well-beyond edible and I decided that I should make some banana chocolate chip muffins.  They are yummy, my kids will eat them and they make me feel less like a failure for once again NOT eating the bananas.  I have such good intentions, I really do.

I went to the cupboard and got out the sugar and realized I had no flour. 

Never fear!  I knew there was an old bag in the back of the pantry.  And by "in the back," I mean, top shelf, can-barely-reach-it-even-when-standing-on-a-stool.  I climbed up on the stool and reached way up there with my stubby little arms and pulled down the barely-used bag of flour.  I swear, it weighed twenty pounds.  Ok, maybe only ten. 

I took the binder clip off of it and took a look at the expiration date.

Better if used by 05APR09.

Hmmmm.  Better?  As in "Better safe than sorry?" I tossed it.  All ten pounds of it.  I sure hope that garbage bag is as strong at the commercials say it is.

I climbed back up on that stool to see if there was another bag of flour up there.  And of course there was.  I wouldn't be me if I didn't have multiple, almost-used-up bags of all kinds of stuff sitting around.

Check the expiration date:

Better if used by 17May10.

At least it was a year younger than the first bag I dug up.  And there was probably only a cup of flour in the bag, so it wasn't nearly as wasteful.

After that second bag of flour, I just started tossing stuff. I figured if I had years-old flour, most of the other things on that shelf were probably past their expiration date too.  It was kind of cathartic throwing away bottles of sno-cone syrup that I had been squirreling away for the "next" summer. Looking at the flour evidence that "next" summer was probably 2008.

And then I discovered one last, mostly empty, sack of flour.  And I looked at the expiration date.

Better if used by 25Aug04.

Seriously?  My brain shut down for a minute. Wait.  What year is this?  2012.  This expired in 2004.  A little quick math tells me that was oh, approximately EIGHT years ago.  And if it expired eight years ago (still struggling with this) I must have bought it like ten years ago.  That sack of flour is as old as my daughter.

Conclusion:  I should clean out my pantry more often.  

By the way, I am a little ticked off that those Box Tops expired. I bet the school could have used them six years ago.