TikTok Is Shocked To Find What's In This Grandparent's Freezer

No matter how organized you are, eventually, everyone has the experience of coming across an item or two in their freezer that they forgot was in there — perhaps that quarter bag of frozen corn that got tucked into the back corner, or a lone chicken breast that has long become freezer burned. Typically, you recognize that it's probably been in the freezer longer than is okay and just cut your losses, telling yourself you won't let anything like that happen again. Well, if you've ever felt guilty for having something in your freezer for a little too long, you'll want to hear the tale of TikTok user @madamquasar, a woman named Nellie Ancelet, who found some truly shocking items when she was helping to clean out the freezer of her husband's grandparents (via Newsweek).

To truly heighten the mystery of Ancelet's TikTok reveal, she selected a variety of items that were frozen in opaque plastic containers rather than clear Ziploc bags or see-through plastic containers — it seems that the grandparents in question were all about repurposing old food containers, putting their leftovers in vintage margarine and cottage cheese packaging. In order to truly see how the food had been changed by time, Ancelet allowed a few different items to defrost before showing what the foods looked like after being in the freezer for a while — and helpfully, each item had a masking tape label that clearly indicated when that food had gone into the freezer.

The vintage contents of the containers

Now, when you think of foods that have been in the freezer for a long time, you may be thinking of that bag of frozen peas that's been there for a year, or even two, maximum. Those aren't the type of timelines that Ancelet was looking at when she helped to clear out that freezer — the items she showed on TikTok dated all the way back to the '70s. That's right — she was looking at items that had been frozen and preserved for nearly half a century.

Luckily, though she did examine some defrosted egg yolks from 1998 and some ham broth from 1993, as Newsweek reports, she didn't actually check how raw meat would have fared all those years later. Instead, she showed off some blueberries from 1983, blackberries from 1972, and strawberries from 1984 that became an unrecognizable brown sludge when defrosted. The first post going through the old items racked up over 820,000 likes as well as 13,000 comments from shocked viewers.

"This food was frozen before I was walking on this earth," one TikTok user wrote. Another cheekily treated the defrosted berries as if they were fine wine, adding "97 was a good year for blueberry, don't throw those out." A different commenter chimed in, "I've always heard old folk say 'I've got food in my freezer older than you' I didn't realize it wasn't just a saying." Finally, one user wrote "donate them to science."