Can I feed expired flour?

[Gardenlady2]

I found an unopened bag of organic whole wheat flour in my pantry that expired a year ago. Is it safe to feed this to my week-old chicks?

 

[pdirt]

I'm not entirely sure on that. But here are some of my thoughts:

If food is stored properly (dark, cool place), many foods will last beyond their "use by" date, especially if unopened. The food, such as flour, may have lost some or much of it's nutritional value, but it's still decent food. The important thing to watch out for are oils in foods going rancid. I don't use wheat flour, so I don't have experience with it's shelf life. Open the bag and sniff it for an acrid, rancid odor. If you don't smell the rancid smell, scoop some out and sniff again. If it still smells fine, you could use it.

The other thing is because wheat is not a complete meal and low in protein, you'll want to feed it only as a treat to the chicks. Make sure their main food is the chick starter.

What I would do if I were you is wait until they were older (6+ weeks) and instead of switching to a grower feed, keep feeding the chick starter, but cut it with the wheat flour (75% chick starter, 25% wheat flour) and make it into a fermented feed. Fermenting will improve the nutritional qualities of the expired wheat flour.