Posted on 09/04/2022 7:12:21 AM PDT by Chickensoup
What companies recommended for prepper storage foods
Any to avoid?
I freeze my flour for about a week, before using or storing.
I store in large tin cans, with 02 absorbers....I tested one that was stored for 11 years...and, it’s perfect, still....used it for baking and all was good!
I also store flours, and, grains in mylar, w/02 absorbers.
No! Olive oil does NOT last, forever.
Months, at most....especially if in plastic (yuck).
Buy it in glass (dark, preferably) jars, or large tins and you’ll get the longest/best storage.
It will smell ‘off’, when it has gone bad/past use time.
Commercial Freeze Dried foods are convenient, but that’s about it. The 30+ year shelf life is attractive, no doubt. Some of them are pretty tasty.
The downsides: They are very expensive. Sodium levels are way, way off the chart.
And the calories are pretty low (especially for the cost). The “2 Servings” blurb on the package is apparently 2 chipmunks. They are usually pretty light on protein, and fats don’t lend themselves to the freeze drying process, so they tend to be very lean, have lots of refined carbs or added sugar to boost the calorie level.
For my money I want the staples - Flour, Rice, Salt, Sugar, Beans, Pasta, Oil, etc, packaged and stored properly.
For example Flour will tend to have pantry moths or larvae if it is not addressed. Canned goods are a much better choice for most people and aren’t so expensive. Most of what the “Prepper” vendors are selling isn’t anything a savvy shopper can’t provide for themselves.
In addition to food stuffs don’t forget the “barterables”. ATF = alcohol, tobacco and firearms. With UN troops occupying American cities during a famine I’m sure a pack of cigarettes and a quart of whiskey could buy you a weeks worth of food.
First, I’d say COUNT THE CALORIES. A man needs around 2400 calories per day to not lose weight (women, I think 2000). I’ve seen survival rations claim a certain number of days based on 1000 calories per day. While most of us here are overweight, our ‘reserves’ will get diminished rather quickly if we’re only getting 1000 calories...figure 2 pounds per week at 1000 calories in.
Then ask what you really need, versus what you are being told to buy. Canned foods that you get at Walmart/Costco/Sams are FAR CHEAPER per calorie and will last for a long time - as in 10 years plus, so do you really need much crappier* food that is promised for 25 years (and only if the company stays in business that long)? So one option might be to buy a supply of canned foods and turn it over in 10 years, or eat some and replace it as you eat it - either way, much better food and much cheaper. You can also buy rice for next to nothing, and noodles for not much more, and they too will last a long time - particularly if you preserve it by the usual methods.
But freeze-dried does have a place when it comes to weight and calorie density - if you think you might need to carry the food in some way, it might make sense to have some high-quality freeze-dried foods, for example.
*I don’t consider real hiking freeze-dried foods like Mountain House to be crap, but the ones that sell their foods in buckets - just look at the nutrition/ingredients label - might as well just by flour for 1% of the cost, and then buy the buckets from Home Depot (but not Lowes, as Lowes doesn’t have a rubber seal).
Exactly how we’ve stored rice.
That...and, in gal mason’s with the air extracted. Still good after at least a decade!
Not sure what this prepping is all about. In Wisconsin everyone has a gun and sights a deer in their yard every week. Wisconsin can revert back to agrarian at any time. We still have meat packers and dairys. We have farms and huge gardens. We can can and jar and jerky. We can easily live off the land and feed everyone in Wisconsin. People in Madison and Milwaukee may suffer some. But the rest of the state will barely notice. Everyone has a deer or a half side of beef in their basement.
Good advice, especially about ensuring water supply. That cannot be stressed enough - clean water.
You know what else we did? Found a good rice and beans recipe. I like Popeye’s, personally. Then bought all the spices, liquid smoke, small red beans, rice etc. and threw them in a special sealing bucket.
So we won’t have just plain ‘ol rice and beans, it’ll be good too!
Got a pressure cooker and a couple butane stoves (they’re cheap).
Not looking forward to trying it all out, but better than trying to chase down an antelope with a rock.
store rice in 5 gallon buckets with oxygen absorbers. White rice lasts for decades. Brown rice will go rancid. Pinto beans get hard after 5+ years, and need to be soaked in water with a teaspoon of baking soda per pound, for a few hours, then rinsed and soaked over night before cooking them. Honey stores forever in glass jars. For supplementing, I use Auguson Farms from Walmart or on line. the fruits, powdered tomatoes, milk, and bread in # 10 cans is cost effective.
I was reading that many emergency food companies start up knowing they won’t be around when their 20-30 year promise comes to term so they aren’t actually testing their products and they can have ridiculous terms of “must be stored in a dark place at 50-60 degrees”…. Be careful, or just stock up on what you already eat.
ping
bmp
Prepper ping
And it doesn’t take up any more space than rehydrated H2O.
“Prepper Rule of Threes”;
#1 You can live three minutes without air
#2 You can live three days without water
#3 You can live three weeks without food
See also the tale of the whaling ship Essex (inspiration for Moby Dick):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL800722W/In_the_Heart_of_the_Sea
and the tale of the B-24 Lady Be Good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Be_Good_(aircraft)
One of the most useless things is gold. In the very early stages of a crisis, gold may have high value but when it becomes evident that civilization has collapsed, someone will give me a lot of gold that they can't eat, for a peanut butter sandwich that they can eat.
You Clazy!
My Dad was a HUGE Prepper. When I moved him out of his apartment to Assisted Living, he had his spare bedroom stacked to the ceiling with CRATES of large cans of dried foods, freeze-dried soups and casseroles, etc.
None of our local Food Pantries wanted the stuff. And, in reality it IS pretty awful. E-foods Direct was the company.
We’ve been pecking through it for nearly 10 years, now. I’ve found uses for some of the grains and of course the powdered milk was used as a milk substitute in baking and cream soups. The dried veggies reconstitute well in soups, too. Carrots, peas and potatoes, mostly. I still have 2 HUGE cans of cornmeal, but that will come in handy, I suppose.
After that ‘experiment’ my strategy changed to mainly canned fruit, veggies and meats along with my own preserving from the garden. Dried beans & rice, of course. 20# of flour in the freezer, rotated through Christmas baking and re-stocked when on sale at Christmastime for the next round.
We raise meat animals, have a HUGE garden and a private well for water. We also have a creek on our property (UPSTREAM from the dairy herd in our pasture!) and decon straws and bottles and such. Water is probably more important than food in the long run. Ever eat a Pine Tree? Many parts ARE edible. (Euell Gibbons. Remember him?)
If it’s ‘just’ a Civil War we’re up against, I’ll fight to protect what’s mine. If it’s a Nuke or Yellowstone blows? I’ve saved a bullet for myself. I’m no Hero. ;)
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