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A City Hall staffer took a (very, very stale) bite into American history this week.

After digging them up out of half-century-old storage in the building, Daniel Tewfik of the Boston Redevelopment Authority cracked open a can of 1963 civil defense crackers, designed to feed a small army of refuge-seekers after a nuclear holocaust, and sampled one of the Cold War-era treats.

It was gross, but not overwhelmingly so, Tewfik found, according to a YouTube video of the experience posted yesterday, which has since been made private. (Tewfik said in a comment on Reddit he’d been “told to remove it.”)

The video sparked lots of curiosity online, quickly climbing the ranks on Boston’s Reddit page and bringing attention once again to the strange, exceptionally large storehouse of the crackers, sort-of-edible memorabilia of America’s paranoid bygone era.

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“It’s a vivid, tangible relic of just intense fear,” said Seth Jacobs, a Boston College American history professor, of the rectangular rations, which look like pale graham crackers and were part of a massive mid-century civil defense program.

There are scores of boxes of them in a long concrete tunnel under city hall, accessed via a trap door near a security desk, sources who’ve been down there told Metro.

Reporter Kate Sosin Oeser, formerly of the Boston Courant, took a tour of the space last summer. She was fascinated by the trove of goods – fallout-approved toilets, Geiger counters – she said, but unlike Tewfik didn’t taste any rations.