I'm pretty bad about ignoring expiration dates and have cooked and eaten things out of cans up to about 10 years past the expiration dates.
One November morning about 3 am I was fixing breakfast and realized that I was out of eggs. So I went and got a couple out of my younger brother's refrigerator and boiled them. They sat pretty high in the water while boiling. When I removed the shells, the eggs looked like an egg sized white version of the drawing of a red corpuscle. They tasted fine, though. When I asked my younger brother how old the eggs were, he said they were left over from his fishing trip in April or May that year.
I recently had some really good tartar sauce. It was just plain old Kraft's tartar sauce from the store, but much more flavorful. The expiration date on the bottle was from 2019. I was really sad to finish it off.
One thing that doesn't keep well is canned saurkraut. I had some in a pantry that was only a year old when it ate through the can, spilled down on cans below it, and ate into them. Now I get the saurkraut in a big jar and keep it in the refrigerator.
When I buy a large ham (unsliced), I keep it in the refrigerator and slice off what I want as I go. I nearly always fry the ham slices. They are good for many things -- to go with eggs, cut into bite sized pieces, fried, and then add rice, green peas, and soy sauce for a ham fried rice, bite sized fried pieces to mix with pork flavor ramen noodles, cut into chunks to go in pinto beans I'm cooking, cut into chunks to go in the field peas, bite sized fried pieces to put on top of a garden salad, ... . Typically, they do well for up to a month, but I've bought some from WalMart that were fine even two months after I bought them.