How I Almost Died of Botchulism

Its no secret I hate going to the grocery store. Its also no secret that I rarely have food in the house and keep my fridge and cupboards rather bare. Case in point:

 
 Tonight I attempted to "make dinner".  By make dinner I mean, "open a can of soup".  I reach up into my nearly bare cupboard and pull out a can of ham and bean soup, proceed to open it, and pour it into the saucepan to heat it up (now you, too, know how to make soup).  Then a brilliant idea occurs to me:  I should open a second can of the same soup so that I have enough left over to take to work for lunches during the next few days.

Amazingly, I had a second can of the same soup.  Immediately I notice a slight difference.  The second can of soup was much lighter in color than the last soup I poured out and the chunks of mystery ham was much pinker than the first can's ham.  In fact, the first can's ham looked more like beef.  It was brown.  Hmmm.  Did I open a can of beef soup instead?  No, the label clearly says Ham and Bean.  By this time, I have already combined the two soups and began picking out the beef colored ham.

Then it dawned on me.  What was the expiration date of that first can of soup?  June of 2007!  Now people who know my eating habits, know I am particular about expiration dates.  I know the date my milk expires and it gets poured down the drain on the date that is printed on the carton itself.  Same with my eggs even though I know they last longer than the sell by date.  This wasn't just 3 days, though, this was almost 4  years old. 

More soup cans resided in my cupboard so I took a peak at their expiration dates only to find 2 more cans of soup with 2007 and 2008 expiration dates.  Not even good enough to give to the local food shelf. 

I'm thankful I decided to open that second can otherwise I may have eaten that first can of beef-looking-ham soup unknowing that little parasites would soon be growing in my belly.  And who knew a person could write a whole blog about soup?