Rancid oils don't taste good, but I've never heard of it being dangerous. I store opened nuts and whole grain flours in either plasticware that has a rubber seal or mason jars. This helps, but you just have to buy in quantities that you're going to use in a relatively short period of time.

I wouldn't worry about it then.



Don

For one thing, "been linked" is very dubious. It could mean anything from a very casual relationship to causing disease in lab rats that are fed massive quantities. It's a long ways away from saying that the stuff in your pantry is going to kill you. Things like nuts are very easy to tell when they go rancid. They smell bad and they taste bad. The same is true for cooking oils. Prepared foods have expiration dates which should be used. Anyone who keeps a granola bar in their pantry for 2 years and then tries to eat it is a moron. As I said, buy reasonable quantities and store them properly. I keep two types of olive oil out on my counter in a clear bottle with a pourer on the top, but I'll use the entire bottle within two months. I've been doing just that for the past 30 years just like my parents did and their parents before them. People have been storing and eating whole grains, cooking oils, and nuts for thousands of years with no apparent health effects. It's just now that people are getting away from hydrogenated crap, that they are realizing some stuff doesn't have the shelf life it used to have. So no, I don't worry about it and still won't after reading that article. I have more hazardous stuff to worry about like drowning in my bathtub and getting hit by lightening. YMMV.

Now if you want REALLY fresh weed, you go for this...

(I'm convinced they grow legs and walk) at the back of the cupboard. I was nearly flattened by the rancid stench of spoiled oil and whole rice is actually pretty low in oils.

The way to tell an oil is going rancid if it doesn't knock you flat with its odor is to take a tiny bit on your tongue. An oil going rancid will taste hot.

Unfortunately, the shift away from trans fats will increase the amount of rancidity that will soon taste normal to people who eat processed foods. The trans fats had an enormously long shelf life without refrigeration. Ordinary fats will need refrigeration, nitrogen packing, or a very quick "use by" expiration date.

That smell will knock you on your butt. I've opened jars of nuts and bags of pretzels that backed me up three steps.

She would have declared, "Ah. it just tastes a little funny, but its still good."

And then proceed to cook and eat it.

I think this is a major problem.

Don

and I know from some of the price tags that her bottles of spices were from the 70s when I went through the kitchen and tossed all the old food out. My dad objected strenuously when I was about to toss an open package of cereal and snatched it from me, "It's still good!"

A giant cockroach scuttled out of the box and ran up his arm and the expression on his face was one I'll treasure as one of my favorite memories of my now late dad.

I've also been grateful to that cockroach. The cabinets were cleaned of everything but 6 cans of soup and veg I knew he had a shot at eating when he got sick of microwaved dinners. And I had no interference.

As others have mentioned, rancid oil smells and tastes foul. Nearly any food will eventually spoil if you don't use it up in a timely manner, and yes, foods that aren't processed to within an inch of their lives spoil faster than foods that are laden with artificial preservatives. I fail to see any kind of logic in this sort of fear-mongering over the perfectly normal, natural process of old food spoiling and then put the word 'healthy' in scare quotes, as if whole grain flours and polyunsaturated fats were actually bad for us.

Using more natural, whole foods sometimes requires an adjustment in storage and cooking habits. That doesn't mean that the food is dangerous, it means you need to be smart enough to figure out that eating spoiled food (of any kind) is a really bad idea.