I have used www.nitropak.com, a bit pricey but always new product.

I have Mountain House Freeze Dried from them, the Security Pack which is about a 22 day supply, for 2 people, of 1500-1600 calorie per day meals with side dishes, pilot crackers, fruits, rice, peach drink, etc.

Some of the entrees and other items were different on their website than what I recieved, probably because of demand.

I also have their Starter Pack unit for extreme bugout (no time to load up, just grab a box and a water carrier). It would probably last 5 days for 2.

If I recall, after opening each box and confirming contents and container integrity, there was a plastic lid on every other container. So as I use up #10 cans, I'll have more lids, but since it keeps, opened, for about 3 weeks, I can switch entrees and sides right up until the end of the 30ish days and probably beyond if stored well, with some quality and caloric loss presumably.

And yep, I have other food sources, this is indeed to augment, and to share with the unprepared (along with MRE's, bags of rice and beans, canned everything, etc).

FYI, I calculated, by reading each can's label, that it would take about 25 gallons of water to reconstitute these meals, for the Security and the Starter Packs combined. The Peach drink takes up about 6-8 gallons itself, so if just food, about 18 gallons.

I labeled each box with the date recieved, presumed 25 year expiration date, amount of water per box needed, and a large print description (lunch, fruit, etc.)to further augment the factory's label. It takes up about a 3'x3' space in my garage.

"I am still waiting for the government to allow us to irradiate foods en masse..."

Why bother? The food we get from land farmed by conventional chemical agriculture isn't the nutritious stuff we think and hope it is. If you had the food you eat analyzed, you would discover that it's missing a lot of nutrients. Just because a food can contain certain minerals and vitamins doesn't mean it does. Most of the big corporate farms in America only fertilize with the Big Three: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium. They don't give a rat's patootie that most of their soil is lacking calcium, magnesium, sulfur, boron, molybdenum, copper, iron, zinc, or any of the trace minerals, all vital for a healthy body.

But if all the food that is harvested was good, nutrient-dense fare, irradiation would cancel it out. Irradiation doesn't just kill bacteria, it destroys vitamins, and not just at the time of the irradiation treatment, but the loss will continue in storage, and more will be lost when it is cooked (more in irradiated food than non-irradiated food).

If you have a head of irradiated romaine lettuce that can sit in a truck and then on a shelf for three months without rotting -- its nutrient value would have deteriorated so much that you would only get a fraction of the original nutrition, so what's the point?

The people pushing irradiation don't care about food quality or human health as much as they want a cheap way to kill nasty bacteria on filthy food. They can't be bothered to do a good, clean job, they just want a quick fix, a way to destroy the garbage that their sloppy production methods are adding to the food, so they don't have to change how they currently butcher animals and handle raw food. Providing us with clean food is not the issue. It never was.

Hamburger contaminated with intestinal contents and then irradiated, is still hamburger contaminated with intestinal contents. An irradiated steak with a coating of steer manure is still a steak coated with steer manure. Just because the E. coli is dead doesn't make it good food. Well, I don't think so, anyway. YMMV.

Read Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food by Wenonah Hauter and Mark Worth. It's ten bucks at AcresUSA. Then see if irradation seems like such a great idea.

We have met the enemy and he is us. --Walt Kelly

Sue

Another website I have heard of that sells freeze dried #10 cans is www.shelfreliance.com

They sell a line of products called Thrive that comes highly recommended. If you check their website they are seem to always be having some kind of sale or promotion....

So either I can grind up the multivitamins I take now and put them in the garden, where they will benefit all the little creatures there, along with myself, or I can continue to eat the low quality fruits and vegetables I am growing and selfishly take my vitamin supplements.

The author makes some ridiculuosly disassociated conclusions in her claims. I see her credentials make her well qualified to be an environmnental activist, except that she has no qualifications as a scientist whatsoever.

It is a fact that the meat industry is not the cleanest process it could be. So I guess we will just keep applying healthy sanitizing chemicals directly to our food and hope that the free radicals they introduce into our system don't destroy our dna or induce cancer.

Then again, I would wonder exactly what you think of how I process the wild game I regularly kill and eat myself.

I reckon if I hadn't been out at Hanford for a couple decades and been made privvy to some of the "studies" that were done on irradting food, maybe I could accept some of her assertions might be true.

I'm afraid I file this one under "Bogus" as it pertains to irradiating food and it's effects, although she did get the issues about the food processing industry right in some aspects. Having worked in a slaughterhouse, I can attest to the poor sanitation conditions, and the limits of inspection, and this was a major beef packer. Basically, I could be up to my chest covered in raw beef guts from working on a machine, and walk out onto the processing floor without cleaning anything off of me. If ever there was a chance of cross contamination, that would certainly be a prime candidate. In this respect, irradiation is not going to be any better than what they are doing to compensate for the poor hygiene now, which is to chem wash the meat before final packaging. Given those two choices, I would still recommend irradiation as a safer and more controllable/thorough sterilization process. We'd be far more likely to get that implemented than to get the meat packers of the world to clean up their act by quality control measures.

The simple act of cooking food destroys a lot of the nutritional quality, and induces chemical reactions that generate mutagenic, carcinogenic, teratogenic, and generally toxic components not previously present in the food in a raw state. In fact, some of the food we eat contains a whole range of toxins that can effect us. Heck, the air we breathe contains natural carcinogens and toxins that we cannot regulate. Even some organic foods give off toxic chemicals as they sit on the counter waiting to be consumed.

My point was that food, whatever food you can get your hands on, can be made shelf stable by irradiating it; that irradiation is better than the alternatives for long term storage, because it requires less energy, is more thorough, is less damaging to the nutritional content of the food, and retains the food quality better than any other process. If you start with high quality hygenically sound raw food, then irradiation is going to be the best method of preserving that food, it's nutritional value, and it palatability. If you start with poor quality food, irradiation is still going to be the best way of making that food safe to consume, and preserving it that way, compared to any other method. Irradiation does not destroy food, in fact, in most cases not only does it sterilize it, but it stops the enzymatic processes that make foods chemically degrade, as with overripe bananas, which would also destroy the quality of sterilized food over time. Irradiation does not destroy nutrition any more than any other preservation method, usually less so. It also depends on the type of radiation applied. Generally Gamma and X-Ray radiation is far less deteriorating than electron bombardment, mainly because ionized electrons are also free radicals, which can propogate just like all free radicals do. Non-particulate ionizing radiation doesn't generate anywhere near the level of free-radicals. What it does is kill living organisms without a lot of tissue destruction. Irradiation doesn't "cook" the food.

So the question isn't whether you want to eat clean uncontaminated food vs. food that is irradiated, but whether you want the food you eat, the stuff that is being sold in bulk to the general public, to be sterilized with or without additives, regardless of the quality control. That Brazilian hamburger that we are buying and eating now is already contaminated as is, and is treated with Chlorine, Tri-Sodium-Phosphate, and a whole slew of other nasty chemicals to make it safe to eat. Chemical treatment of our food is already required to make it safe for the general public. What irradiation would do is eliminate the need for chemicals entirely without significantly adding anything else.

Could you imagine the difficulty trying to convince a French Cheese producer that irradiating his cheeses would be a good idea.

Sue is perfectly correct about the state of fruit and vegetables and their nutritional content. One little fact I heard recently from a friend who worked at the Scottish Crop Research Institute just down the road was about the average modern day tomato. It apparently has only 1/40 the nutritional value of a tomato from the 1940s. It probably also had 1/40 the taste value as well.

The modern supermarket values conformity and visual appearance even above shelf life. Irradiation is concerned about delaying the inevitable loss of food from rotting on the supermarket shelf. Irradiation will destroy some of the little available nutrients, which have through a combination including selectively breeding of the fruit and vegetable varieties together with the over use of the land used to grow the fruit and vegetables, reducing the nutrients that would have otherwise been available. Irradiation is simply about maximising profit by the food producers and supermarket chains by conning the consumer into thinking they are buying fresh fruit and vegetables.

Take the humble bag of lettuce salad leaves in a sealed plastic bag. Puncture the bag and the nitrogen only atmosphere will have been destroyed. Within 24 hrs those salad leaves will have begun to rot, probably because the bag could have been manufactured and produced nearly 6 weeks earlier.

Rather than purchasing irradiated food, even canned and frozen produce would probably be a better bet from a nutritional standpoint of view. Better still, pick and dig up, your own produced fruit and vegetables from your own garden. And if your lettuce happens to have a snail eating the same leaves then at least you'll know its at least worth eating.

The supermarkets are full to the ceiling of bland tasting, nutrionally poor but otherwise perfectly formed and beautifully identical fruit and veg. A bit like the cheese!!

Most folks need to go to countries like Cyprus, where they don't muck around with their fruit and veg, to sample just how tasty even a simple baked potato can be.

What Ben said, with one clarification. Radiation sterilization is what he described. This almost "cooks" the foods and is akin to, say canning.

On the other hand, fresh foods like ground beef, strawberries, etc. can be radiation pasteurized which extends the fresh shelf life and kills the real nasties like e-coli but not the normal spoilage bateria that starts to stink and let you know the food is old.

Even at the much lower doses needed for pasteurization, it is still an expensive process. I worked for a company that was trying to make it more economical but the industry does not encourage innovation and they were basically squashed.

Sure, you can be on a first name basis with the cow, he farmer, the butcher, the cook, and so on, but it only takes one little mistake or lapse of discipline to contaminate the food. In God we trust, all others we irradiate.

You can find some irradiated foods in the store, look for the Radura symbol

Don't you just love the marketing men..

So did I. And it is EXCELLENT. It is a nice compliment to Lundin's work, much more "mom friendly". In many ways, it is actually a more practical book for people who are just getting into the community.

FWIW I also live within 20 mins of this place as well as Emergency Essentials. So if anybody needs anything just PM me and I'll see what I can do


Mike

Okay, if you want the truth about irradiating food, then go to the source.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no3_supp/tauxe.htm

or if you prefer

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/DBMD/diseaseinfo/foodirradiation.htm

Rather than listen to environmental activists who are have no qualifications to discuss such scientific issues, find out what qualified scientists actually have to say about the matter. We are paying these scientists to answer these questions objectively. Ms. Hauter is a sociologist paid by her publicist to write interesting and provocative stories, and is paid by lobbyists to try and influence the decisions our leaders make, for whatever agenda they may wish to put forth.