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Posted on 07/23/2012 3:56:07 PM PDT by Kartographer
Mountain House, the leading domestic brand of freeze-dried food, released the results today of a study designed to illustrate how different brands handle oxygen levels in their long-term food storage products. The study, conducted by Columbia Food Laboratories, focused on oxygen levels found in pouches of Mountain House freeze-dried foods compared to those of a competitor.
“For proper long-term food storage, it’s important to maintain oxygen exposure as low as possible,” said Lee Goin, laboratory director at Columbia Food Laboratories. “Oxygen causes rancidity in foods containing unsaturated fats. Even slight rancidity can make a food undesirable. Oxygen causes nutritional value to be lost, especially vitamins A, C, D and E. Removal of oxygen will kill any insects, larvae and their eggs that may to be present.”
Consumers should be aware that there are four main contributors to food spoilage: water, heat, light, and oxygen. Freeze drying removes 98% of the water in food, while dehydrating removes between 80% and 97%. Storing food in a cool, dark place helps to avoid heat and light exposure. However, the fourth factor, oxygen, can only be averted through quality processing and packaging, which is where the study found competitor’s products falling short.
(Excerpt) Read more at learntoprepare.com ...
Preppers’ PING!!
O2 absorbers = iron filings
Hand warmers = iron filings
#2 is much cheaper if you catch a spring sale.
At a recent Readiness Group meeting, we discovered that Mountain House is jacking up their prices come August 1st.
i ate mountain house for 10 days straight on an alaskan trip. now even looking at the label makes me feel sick. really got hard by day 10 to choke it down.
better than starvation, but not by much.
Check out Thrive Foods they’ve been around since the early 2000, its a good product
Hmmm?
Hand warmers are O2 absorbers?
What’s up with the clock Boss? Only 2:38 our time.
Thanks for all you do.
It has been off since the last crash. It is an ongoing problem from time to time over the last few years. I despair over the infrastructure here.
I never could afford all those kinds of emergency foods, but it’s always good to know what’s better and what isn’t. I might come into money, ya never know!
Isn’t that what Costco sells? How long have you eaten it? How much? Any other thoughts about the product?
Thanks
If you are going to store in airtight containers you can put some dry ice in and close it.
You need to be a bit more precise there with the use of the dry ice. First, you need a bit of paper on top of the grain (if it’s not in mylar) to keep the cold from damaging your grain.
Second, you don’t just put it in and seal the bucket. The point of the dry ice is to let it sublimate to CO2 gas that displaces the oxygen between the grain and the lid. My point is that you have to let it sublimate for a while and not immediately put the lid on. The other thing is that the dry ice sublimation only displaces oxygen, it does not sequester it like a O2 absorber.
You use an O2 absorber in a mylar bag and it will suck it down to a near vacuum. You can see the grain kernals through the sealed bag.
I’ve used both the dry ice and the O2 absorber (not handwarmers yet, didn’t find out that til recently). I prefer the O2 absorber to the CO2 method because of the ongoing absorbtion effect after you seal up the container.
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