The staff of the Isle of Wight County Museum in Smithfield, Va., had a hard time buying a new display case for their most prized artifact. 
 
 Museum curator Tracey Neikirk said her requests for a case for the item—what the museum calls the world's oldest edible cured ham—were met with disbelief. 
 
 "I had a few exhibit companies say we... ||||| A ham in the US said to be the oldest in the world has celebrated its 112th birthday. Can it really be edible after all this time, asks Tom de Castella. 
 
 It was first cured by the Gwaltney meat company in 1902, forgotten about at the back of a storage room, and eventually donated to the Isle of Wight County Museum in Smithfield, Virginia. Today it looks like a piece of old leather. A special case protects it from bugs and mould, and it is billed the world's oldest edible cured ham. "It would be dry, dry tasting, but it's not molded," curator Tracey Neikirk told the Wall Street Journal. 
 
 The answer It might not be dangerous, but the ham would not taste pleasant 
 
 It would be extremely dry and have a rancid flavour 
 
 Dry curing - salting the meat and draining the blood - allows ham to last and develop a richer flavour. But most hams are only aged for a year or two. Not 112. "After such a long time and without knowing how the ham was processed it's difficult to know whether it would be safe," a Food Standards Agency spokesman says. To most people "edible" means more than the ability to eat something without it killing you. "Jamon iberico of four to five years is amazing," says Jose Pizarro, owner of Pizarro, a Spanish restaurant in London." The oldest edible ham he's heard of is eight years old. After that the fat starts to oxidise and the flavour disappears from the meat. A rancid taste develops as the yellow fat diffuses, and as the decades pass it will become as hard as a stone and incredibly ugly, he says. 
 
 And then there's the question of whether the Virginia museum's really is the oldest. In 1993, Michael Feller, a butcher in Oxford, bought a ham at auction that was 101 years old. It looked "rather yukky" but was edible, although he wasn't going to cut into it. Today it hangs in the shop window, unnibbled at the ripe old age of 122. Food writer Jay Rayner is unmoved by the battle for the title of oldest ham. "I'd be suspicious of anyone getting excited about the former back end of a pig that's been hanging around for 112 years." Wine and spirits offer a better bet. He remembers drinking a "rather lovely" 1865 armagnac. It had aged well - "deep and toasty" - but the real attraction was not its flavour, he concedes. It was "that link with antiquity". Which perhaps explains the birthday party for a shrivelled up piece of pork. 
 
 Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.
– Sure, according to the BBC, "it looks like a piece of old leather"—but if you ask at Smithfield, Virginia's Isle of Wight County Museum, you'll learn that a century-old ham is still, apparently, edible. It just celebrated its 112th birthday, and it's the oldest cured ham in the world you could conceivably still eat, the museum says, per the Wall Street Journal. The ham is one of three kept side-by-side in cases that block out bugs and mold while silica trays keep things dry. An expert lends support to the edibility idea: "From a microbiological standpoint, it's got an indefinite shelf life once you remove enough of the water," says a food microbiologist. Still, he notes, that doesn't mean it would taste good. Meanwhile, a food standards official isn't so sure it would be safe to eat: "After such a long time, and without knowing how the ham was processed, it's difficult to know," he says. Either way, the ham has long been an attraction: As far back as the 1920s, it was appearing on Ripley's Believe It or Not. (In somewhat related news, click to find out why bacon smells so amazing.)