Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

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Kip42
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Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Kip42 »

I am looking for cheap food, that lasts a long time, and can be put in with regular meals. MRE's are cool but they are expensive, dont last for ever, and have more calories than I would eat to rotate them through supply. What are some food ideas that I can stock pile?

Was thinking stuff like rice but not sure if there is some rice that lasts longer, has more calories, etc.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by doubloon »

beans
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Kip42
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Kip42 »

What kind exactly and how long can I store them?
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by bakerjw »

Kip there is at least one long term storage thread on here that should help.

Most use 5 gallon buckets with food grade Mylar bags. For example I'll fill the bottom of the bag with pinto beans and then stick a couple sleeves of spaghetti in the middle of the beans. I'll then add Ziploc bags filled with oatmeal, instant mashed potatoes, macaroni, rice, etc... around the outer edge around the spaghetti. You do need to take a toothpick and poke some holes in the Ziploc bags to allow air a way to escape. I then pack the inner voids with more pinto beans and then fill it to the top. I drop in 2 1500cc oxygen absorbers and heat seal most of the top of the Mylar bag. I use a tube with a vacuum pump into the opening that I left to draw out most of the air before finally sealing it completely. Once the oxygen absorbers do their trick the Mylar bag is draw to a fairly hard vacuum that is devoid of oxygen. If kept cool these containers are good for many many years.

Another thing to do is get a vacuum pump and a set of food saver mason jar adapters. I will take powdered milk and put it in mason jars and then draw them down to almost a complete vacuum. It works very well for sugar and salt as well. Don't do mixes with baking powder as they will still react and can build pressure. Baking powder does seem to be stored in a vacuum well.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by doubloon »

Kip42 wrote:What kind exactly and how long can I store them?
First hit on the search engine.

http://longtermfoodstorage.org/

A first hit forum thread.

http://www.silencertalk.com/forum3/view ... 74&t=70936

Third hit.

http://www.silencertalk.com/forum3/view ... 74&t=51643
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Kip42
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Kip42 »

I was sitting at work eatting lunch today thinking about how I have a ton of guns and ammo but no emergency food. I am going to study this and see if I can find a way to cost effectively store food for a year that will feed 9 people.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Gibal »

Honey lasts... forever.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by mars »

Rice. Sealed the Mylar bag way will last a looooong time. You an buy 100# for $35 bucks.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by AMProducts »

It's kinda interesting, I've been thinking about starting a blog site devoted to storage food cooking.

Rice: white rice keeps the longest (vs brown rice) IIRC about 5-10 years. I pack all my stuff in the mylar bags and then toss it into 5 gal buckets that are then purged with argon (from the welder). personally, I hate white rice, so what I do is I keep bullion cubes handy, add 1/2 chicken cube per cup of rice. Add the cube to the water. You can also add mustard powder or turmerec, tastes good, has fat (from the stock) and even picky 5 year olds like it.

You can cook up some powdered eggs and some freeze dried shallots and add it to the rice, you can also hydrate some beef jerky or freeze dried meat and make an asian style fried rice dish.

Canned Tuna: usually lasts 2-3 years if bought fresh, keep some mayo packets on hand, I usually add 4 mayo packets per small size can (6oz IIRC) you can also stash some horseradish sauce packets, add 1 per can, makes about 2 regular sized sandwiches, or about half a sleeve of crackers.

Spam: 'nuff said.

Honeyville grain sells quite a variety of stuff including freeze dried vegetables, meats, and canned cheeses. The most important thing to have in your survival food stock is fats and oils, these are difficult to store, but are required to keep you healthy, otherwise you have to worry about rabbit starvation. Salt is also very important.

Hope that helps.
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Gibal
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Gibal »

AMProducts wrote: Salt is also very important.
That's one I think people forget the most. Yeast is another, you can grow your own but you need some to start with.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by generaldisarray »

Image
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by bakerjw »

Diversity is a key element. We have a lot of rice, pasta, and beans as well as things to go with them. i.e. sauces and such.

We even have quite a bit of Ramen noodles.

And vitamins!
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Artful »

One a day Vitamins (should be rotated as loose potency with time)
Rice, dried Pinto Beans and Dried Peas - add whatever critter protein you can find to avoid blandness.
Will keep you alive without missing any nutritional values.
Add Wheat, herbs, and whatever else you may want but those 4 items store well and last longer than you'd care to think. :wink:
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by slackercruster »

Survival food should not be that hard. Just stock what you eat and eat what you stock...just more of it!

If nothing else, gets lots of dry cereal and powdered milk, rice, dry beans some water and beer. You could live on that for a while if nothing else.

Here is my basic bulk food list. Have lots of other food stored. But this is the very hi vol stuff.

Pasta Sauce
Pasta
Tom Paste
Dry beans: Garbanzo, Lentils, G.Northern, Pinto, Split Peas

Grains: Rice, Millet, Quinua, Wheat, Rye, Barley, Buckwheat, Oats (I use about 3 1/2 cups of wheat berries to grind for 1 loaf of bread)

Dry Cereal
Powdered Milk

Dry mushrooms
Dry Apples
Raisins
Dates
Pnuts / Almonds
Cornmeal
Sugar
White Unbleached Flour (impossible to make at home and good to mix in pancake batter to lighten it up.)
Honey
Maple Syrup
Choc chips (Milk choc for eating and Semi sweet for baking)
Yeast
Bake Soda
Spices
Salt (Iodized, Canning, Sea)
Powdered Eggs (Possibly? Have an old can I'm aging to see how long it stores. Never tried them)
Vitamins

Some meat and salmon canned. (I am mostly vegetarian)

Drinking Water
Beer
Wine
Welchs Grape Juice

http://www.survivalistboards.com/showth ... p?t=134304

For basic storage I use FDA plastic pails, some with liners and steel shelving. I rotate stock and eat out of what I stock. This is my 3rd pantry I work out of. I have 2 smaller pantries I cook from upstairs. Then have some larger buckets for bulk storage I don't work out of, just rotate them over time to the working pantries.

Image

With some areas of preparedness the time to start was yesterday.

Take growing fruit trees for instance - they take a few years to get established and produce some meaningful fruit. But many problems can occur during that time and the trees may have to be replaced before established which will add more time to the equation.

Do you know which fruit trees are biennials? they only produce fruit every other year? But you wont know this for 4 or 5 years down the road...will you?

Even with vegetable gardening it may take 3 to 5 seasons to learn the basics and produce quality and meaningful amounts of food to 'try' and live on.

And I can tell you from experience, it is hard to live just on what you grow...especially if you live in the cold zones of the US where you have to grow in short seasons.

So, as I said, the time was yesterday to get started in some areas of prep and the longer you wait the more behind you are.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Conaso »

I'm a novice at this but all of your plans appear to be, in the event of SHTF, settling in place. Which is good! Hopefully, you reside in a rural area and can fortify/camoflauge your abode against marauders.

But what if you have to relocate, e.g., natural disaster. How much of all that is transportable by yourself or your family; you may not even be able to drive out, so only what you can carry. I concentrated on three scenarios; being in place, having to drive out, having to walk out. It's great to have 10,000 rounds of ammo but will you be able to transport 10 ammo cans? I was surprised how much "stuff" weighed just to last a week; I'm constantly adjust my "load." Great to drive out, but how far. Remember hurricanes recently hitting Texas and Louisiana? People ran out of gas waiting on the interstates, gas stations out of supplies.
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Re: Food. What lasts long, can be eaten often, and is cheap?

Post by Ben B. »

Gibal wrote:
AMProducts wrote:... Yeast is another, you can grow your own but you need some to start with.
look into sourdough. Can be started about anywhere with flour, water and air.
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