My wife has a hemorrhoid when I talk about buying freeze dried food. I know that pasta, rice, beans can keep for quite a while, but other than that, what is the longest lasting off the shelf food.
At least she hasn’t objected to my gold, guns, ammo, and alcohol purchases.
Canned foods will last longer then you.
Canned food, so long as it is not exposed to extreme temps, is good for years after the use-by date, which date is already years in the future.
boy-ar Dee keeps 2 years and peanut butter keeps 18 month or so.
Try www.waltonfeed.com
A pallet of food costs about $500 and will keep a family alive for 6 mo.
You can buy #10 cans of barley, popcorn, rolled oats, etc. that will keep 20 years or more.
Beans and rice are cheap from the restaurant supply house.
Buy mylar bags and oxygen absorbers to make beans and rice keep 20+ years.
I use Walton’s 8 grain mix to make flour with my grain mill. It makes AWESOME homemade bread at about $.50/loaf.
White rice, whole wheat (You will need a mill), beans, sugar, honey and spam are some. Review my Preparedness Manual Post #3:
http://www.tomeaker.com/kart/preparedness1i.pdf
Develop a taste for those 1.00 a pack Yakisoba dry noodle boxes with the dried veggies in the box. I think those things can last forever and even if they are designed to be microwaveable they can be cooked in a pot also. It is sort of like undercover emergency supplies, get a case of them tell her you are going to have them at work. They need seasoning besides the wretched stuff that come with them.
Before opening canned food make sure there is no evidence that it contains any built-up gasses (a sure sign of spoilage), and make sure it passes the "smell test" immediately after opening.
Throw peanut butter, raw unfiltered honey and some vitamins in with that beans and rice and you'll be in fairly decent shape. A Big Berkey water filter is another nice addition, along with a small supply of calcuium hypochlorite (to make bleach) and a bag or two of lime (to help with solid waste disposal).
Make sure the beans and rice is protected from rodents when stored (almost everyone used 5 gallon food-grade pastic buckets with sealed lids for this purpose).
My wife and I subscribe to the monthly freeze-dried food deliver from "Shelf Reliance". The food we have delievered is freeze-dried meet intended to throw in with the beans and rice to make it more palatable (beans and rice alone, however, are a tremendous source of both carbs and protein).
I highly recommend reading about the calcuium hypocholorite.
Also, lay in more commonly-used ammunition than you think you'll ever need. That has a shelf life of 50 years, and will be what you would use for money in a worst case situation.
Talk her into the freeze-dried food. Start small, 3 months supply for your family, then build upon it. Tell her that once you have it, you’ll always have it (for 25/30 years, anyway) and if in 25 years you were proved to be a paranoid nut, you’ll be happy to donate it to whichever soup kitchen she wants to.
Note that even if you have a 2 year supply, after 2 years your food runs out. So you need to start thinking about how to produce your own food, which is a far more difficult phase of ‘bugging out’ to plan for.
Honey
Salt
Sugar
Wheat
just a few, there are more.
Buy a dehydrator.
Anything canned will keep for years, if kept from freezing.