
100-year old fruit cake found in Antarctica's oldest building - kensai
https://www.nzaht.org/pages/100-year-old-fruit-cake-found-in-antarcticas-oldest-building
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leephillips
Amusing that the cake was in excellent condition, while the metal box it was
stored in was partly decomposed. Once again, reality has one-upped all the
jokes.

~~~
lawless123
Even the microbes don't want it.

~~~
ncr100
"100 year old fruit cake tastes just like new fruit cake." /s

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warvair
Amazing that after all this time it remains inedible.

~~~
SwellJoe
I don't understand why everyone doesn't love fruit cake. Maybe most people
have only ever had crappy cheap grocery store fruit cakes?

Fruit cake is literally one of my favorite foods, and I don't really feel like
I have esoteric taste in the general case.

~~~
vidarh
For my part I've never understood why people want fruit in cakes at all. I
live in the UK where it is a national obsession to put fruit in cakes. I'm
used to much more extensive use of cremes (egg, vanilla, regular), possibly
combined with berries in Norway, but not nearly as often with fruit (we do get
some, especially apple pies, but I at least perceive the selection as much
more varied, where it's often a challenge to avoid pastry where the filling
isn't meat or minced fruit in British bakeries...

(don't get me started on how limited British bakeries are - the only saving
grace is a slow increase in French and Eastern European patisseries)

~~~
hanoz
>For my part I've never understood why people want fruit in cakes at all.

How do you think your patisserie's finest extensive use of cremes cake would
look after 100 years in a hut?

~~~
vidarh
Our patisseries finest cakes would have been eaten, rather than left behind,
as they actually taste good enough to be something you want to consume.

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DannyB2
It's just as good as any fruitcake passed around at Christmas. It never gets
opened. It stays perfectly preserved. When you receive the fruitcake at
Christmas, you leave it wrapped, and gift it to someone else next Christmas.
Only a finite number of fruitcakes need be manufactured. Thus resources are
conserved. Only a finite number of fruitcakes ever had to be purchased. Again,
resources and economics. It's economical because when you receive the
fruitcake as a gift, you have a free gift to give someone next year without
spending money. It can be passed around almost indefinitely Best if used by
August 9, 2047.

~~~
zzalpha
I wonder if it goes down to the level of physics. I posit a fundamental Law of
The Conservation of Fruitcakes.

Specifically, of a fruitcake is destroyed another one is created, and vice
versa. This also means that the universe was created with a fixed number of
fruitcakes...

~~~
CharlesW
"If you wish to make a fruitcake from scratch, you must first invent the
universe?"

~~~
maxerickson
And then you still accidentally find one someone left lying around.

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aunty_helen
The weirdest part about all this is that they have to keep it frozen the whole
time and then at the end of it all fly it back down to Antarctica, trek it out
to the hut and then leave it there.

They did the same with a crate of whiskey they found a couple of years ago.
[https://www.nzaht.org/pages/shackletons-
whisky](https://www.nzaht.org/pages/shackletons-whisky)

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throwanem
Still every bit as edible as the day it was forged, I'm sure. Those things are
_terrifying_. But apparently they make very durable emergency rations! On the
one hand, they can last a century, and on the other, you can be sure no one
will molest them absent desperate necessity.

~~~
AaronM
Much like dwarven bread in Discworld?

"A traveller can go for miles, just knowing there's dwarf bread in their pack.
A traveller can think of just about anything to eat rather than dwarf bread
including their own foot and even pumpkins"

~~~
throwanem
Very much like. I want to say I recall somewhere seeing an interview or
similar in which Pratchett mentioned fruitcake as an inspiration for his dwarf
bread, but I can't find a cite for that, so may misremember.

~~~
AaronM
The wiki says its a take on food like hardtack, but given the description
fruit cake might fit

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gideonparanoid
My girlfriend has done some work in Antarctica before, she said that it wasn't
uncommon to find food ten or twenty years past its use-by-date. This is kind
of the next level though.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
We found 30+ year expired food in my mother's pantry not long ago. I doubt
that's particularly rare in the West.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
If it's pasteurized, sealed in a can and stored at room temperature there's
not much to make it go bad.

The molecules that make up living things (e.g. corn or Spam) are stable at the
temperatures at which those things live. If you remove the bacteria that
primarily breaks things down there's not going to be much change.

It's no different than a house with 200yo timbers.

~~~
Sleeep
I don't know, I wouldn't want to eat this -
[https://youtu.be/Kx0obvzqh0Q](https://youtu.be/Kx0obvzqh0Q)

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arethuza
It does rather remind me of the cakes that seemed to be popular in the UK in
my youth (1970s) that only seemed to be given as presents - nobody ever seemed
to eat them.

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theBobBob
I wonder how many of them were regifted and just passed around for ages.

~~~
arethuza
I think they were passed around until someone needed a wedding cake and then
they were covered in marzipan and Chobham armour like icing. These were cut up
and sent to people to say thanks for giving wedding presents - I can remember
eating the marzipan but never the cake or the impenetrable icing.

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Sleeep
Jay Leno ate some of a 125 year old fruitcake on his show in 2003 -
[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/maybe-he-shouldve-let-it-
breathe...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/maybe-he-shouldve-let-it-breathe/)

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retox
Cake, instant. Type two. Nice.

[https://youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA](https://youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA)

~~~
parshimers
"Nice hiss." They really should mail it to him considering it smelled OK. I
think he'd try eating a bit of it. I doubt it'd be the worst thing he's tried
on that channel, even if the nuts are a bit rancid.

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grondilu
It looks better than some of the stuff in my fridge.

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dzaragozar
Hahaha I read the title with fruitcake as the slang for lunatic: really old
lunatic found in Antarctica's oldest building :)

~~~
werdnapk
Where is this considered slang for lunatic? I've only heard this as slang for
homosexual.

~~~
hanoz
It's common in Britain. As far as I know the thinking is: nut (head) => nut
case / nuts / nutty etc. => "nuttier than a fruitcake" => fruitcake.

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mixmastamyk
I once visited a whaling station down there and it was quite cool to see all
the "steampunk" tech laying around, though rusting.

Also there was a British (I think) outpost that had canned food on the shelves
from the late 1950s, was a bit surreal.

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Taniwha
I've always been amused by Americans' hate relationship with fruitcake, all I
can assume is that they've never ever had good fruitcake

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ChrisRR
I'll wait for the video of Ashens eating it

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Hadn't heard of Ashens but "Steve" opens a lot of MREs including a 1969
Vietnam war cake,
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVOIgPrDH7E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVOIgPrDH7E).

Edit: Ashens cake from 1 year later,
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2zXt6irnOg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2zXt6irnOg).

~~~
Grue3
This guy ate a cracker from the time of American Civil War.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5JrN9DrVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5JrN9DrVI)

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y-haminator
They should send a piece of it to steve mre

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notadoc
Does fruit cake get better with a century of age or is it still terrible?

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yellowapple
I'm pretty sure that's normal for fruitcake.

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wsgeek
Apparently nobody liked Fruitcake 100 years ago either

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obilgic
Why does it come in a metal box?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
You don't just wrap a cake in a bag, toss it in the bottom of a ship and
expect it to be in good condition when it arrives on the other side of the
world.

Metal and wooden crates/boxes did the same job then as cardboard boxes do now.

~~~
vidarh
Well, clearly they should have made the box from fruit cake rather than metal,
since the cake looks to be in better shape (no, I'm not entirely serious)

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michelb
Just as well-conserved as the Huntley & Palmers website:
[http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=fi...](http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=file&p=huntley&f=huntley.htm)

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zerr
I wonder what's that hixclient.exe

~~~
GFischer
Probably some awful CGI VB6 or C app.

I've had to maintain some of those.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface)

~~~
scruple
> awful CGI VB6 or C app.

I'm starting to have flashbacks to the various C web CGI applications that I
used to develop and maintain now... Awful is not the descriptor that I'd have
used. These things were abominations, more so by todays "standards." I don't
remember all of the details, but I do distinctly remember that user input was
an absolute nightmare to deal with, as well as sending/receiving files.

Another nightmarish memory from those days: I once had a co-worker develop the
backend to a web CGI in bash (!) and, before I knew he had done it, he was
kicking it over the wall for me to finish. I ended up demonstrating why this
would cause poor performance and then re-wrote it as C. Yikes. I'm really glad
that we've moved beyond all of... that.

~~~
13of40
> I once had a co-worker develop the backend to a web CGI in bash

I did that once with Fortran 77 on Linux back in the 90's, but just as a joke.
IIRC, there were some issues, like you could never suppress all of the console
output it produced or something. In general, though, I think it's good to
still have a lowbrow CGI option if you just want to throw something together.

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defterGoose
In before the cake rots.

~~~
defterGoose
Jeez this place is joyless

