Long Term Food Storage - part 2

I think I posted on this topic before, but I couldn't find it.

I'm beginning to think freeze-dried food definitely has a place in my long-term food storage. I don't mean individual Mountain House meals. ($$$$) They have their place, for camping and in the BOB, but I'm talking about #10 cans of freeze dried foods - fruits, veggies, etc, for sheltering in place for long periods.

I bought the book "Just in Case," by Kathy Harrison, after someone here linked to it. I found it to be basic, but very helpful for planning long-term. She spoke about heavily relying on stores of freeze-dried food, and using it regularly so her family was used to eating it. I decided to try it, (starting with breakfast) and bought some milk, dried strawberries, and a pineapple-pear mix. They were surprisingly good in either cereal or granola! The cans are bulky, but very light. Some internet research reassured me that freeze-dried retains it's nutritional value- perhaps better than canned - and serving for serving it is definitly less expensive. One #10 can easily equals a flat or even a case of the same food frozen or in cans. Storage is also much easier than frozen or canned. Just have plenty of water on hand, but that's a given anyway.

I'm going to try some veggies next, but I think this is something I will continue to buy, and use regularly.

I have never used #10 cans of anything, but have always had a concern about what happens to the contents once you open a can. Will the contents "go bad" once opened, requiring you to eat a can empty once it is opened? If that is the case, seems to me that you could get really tired of having the same thing every meal 'til gone, and then it is gone for good. No variety. Do the cans come with plastic snap-on lids to "seal" the can once it is opened???

Mountain House says this in reference to their #10 cans: "After opening, we recommend using the contents within 2 to 3 weeks for best results and taste. Use the convenient resealable plastic lid between uses."

I am working on some backpacking recipes and need to find some dehydrated veggies like broccoli or green/red peppers.

Can anyone help?

Yes, the big cans come with a plastic lid, like a can of coffee. If you kept it in a dry place, I would not think you would have a problem. This stuff is DRY - not like some "dried" fruit like apples and apricots that are still flexible and have a good bit of moisture. You can easily crumble it into powder.


http://beprepared.com/default.asp?&SID=MSN&EID=MSB200703015CT&bhcd2=1225651996

This is where I bought mine, although there are other sites out there. I didn't see red peppers, but they JUST HAPPEN to have broccolli on sale this month.

Before you order from Emergency Essentials find out the costto ship to you and let me know I can drive to the warehouse and pick the stuff up and see if I can ship it cheaper (sometimes I can!)


Mike

Check out:
http://www.justtomatoes.com/
and
http://www.harmonyhousefoods.com/
You can buy bulk and I've heard nothing but good things about both of them.

I definitely think Mountain House has some good stuff, but are expensive and I liked the article from Paul who opened up and ate them 37 years later and they were still good. There's something to be said about that.

http://www.armchairsurvivalist.com/paulsmountain.html






Paul James, 85, standing beside some 200 cases of Mountain House freeze dried food. Purchased and trucked all the way cross country from Oregon in 1975, this “mountain” of food was recently pulled down from where it was stored for 37 years. This photo was taken July 29, 2007, moments before the mountain was loaded into a moving van headed back across the country to Idaho.

Freeze dried is not the same thing as dehydrated. Dehydrating foods is something easily done at home, though not all food items lend themselves to the process. It is an economical way of processing food for storage that complements canning and freezing, but is is not as durable as canning or freeze drying, in general.

Freeze dried food does not need to be rehydrated to consume, but it may not be as palatable. Freeze dried foods thus consumed will rehydrate using digestive fluids, so an appropriate increase in water may need to be considered.

I am still waiting for the government to allow us to irradiate foods en masse so that we can have shelf stable, fresh food that is fully hydrated fresher than foods preserved using any other method. I understand we already allow some foods to be irradiated. This topic came up a long time ago and I can't recall now where we left it. Rather than let all that Cobalt and Cesium we have presently just sitting around doing nothing, we could be sterilizing fresh foods and avoid the risk of another ecoli or salmonella outbreak in this country. Everyone is so concerned about the risk of consuming an induced isotope, they don't realize we are constantly exposed to ionizing radiation in many different forms. The level of isotopic induction in foods by irradiation is so low, you stand a greater lifetime cumulative risk of exposure just going to the dentist once a year.

I have a pretty good sized selection of freeze dried goods in all types of goods. I have entrees, plain meats, and plain fruits or veggies. Living 3 blocks from emergency essentals is somewhat nice. A few things to keep in mind however. Think about what you need and in what quantity. Lets go with blueberries. A #10 can holds approx 6lbs of fresh blueberries. When you open it you can increase the shelf life a little by storing them in the freezer or fridge, but how long would it take you to consume 6 lbs of blueberries? Even making pancakes, granola, snaking on them, muffins, blending them into drinks, point is, it takes a while. Where as some items... say the bell peppers and onions... these are easier, since you can substitue fresh for the FD in most recipes from stews and soup, to meatloaf, to various other recipes that anyone cooks on a regular basis. The staples are really convient and will get used, the odd balls... they may get VERY boring before being consumed.

There are also the plain meats I have a few cases of. pre cooked chicken dice and ground beef can be tossed into packages soup mix or to casserole, or into prepackaged meals (hambuger helper) ect. Then there are uncooked porkchops. These I had to tyr before buying. Not bad, but not fresh, but cut up and make verde.... pretty tastey. Thing is here, there are about 30 porkchops in the can... again, how many times can you cook porkchops in a row? Your results may vary.

****Edit to add*** FD food is a great way to augment most meals. But do not make it you sole food source. One should have mutiple types of food, shelf stable, canned (purchased or home), FD, dehydrated, and the basic staples (grains, rice, beans, ect)

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.

Am_Fear speaks good sense on this one - I don't know what they make of irradiation but a great resource for anyone are Michael Pollan's books, Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. They chronicle the rise of the modern day American diet, the overproduction of corn, and our society's increasing dependence on High Fructose Corn Syrup. It explains alot, and his basic advice is simple: Eat (natural) foods. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The modern American diet is decidedly unhealthy, but it doesn't have to be. For about the last 4 months I've gotten a box of organic fuits and vegetables from a local farm every other week, for $30 a pop. My family and I eat way better, with more variety, more gusto, and all my indicators are heading in a better direction than they were before. We eat it, or it goes to waste - irradiation is irrelevant to me as a means of preserving what I eat. Frozen and canned foods and MREs, those are my supplements and emergency supplies. Meantime eat like there's no tomorrow!

Welcome to the forum, Rebecca!

That's been my mantra for far too long and, due to poor food choices amd too much time sitting at a desk, it shows. Of course I justify my paunch by saying that it's part of my disaster preparedness stockpile.

There is an interesting article in today's NY Times about root cellars and other longer term food storage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/garden/06root.html



I love Michael Pollan's books but he does point out that there really isn't that much difference between "organic" food carried at stores like Whole Foods and food found at a regular supermarket. His recommendation that we should all try to buy our food from producers that we can visit personally is just not practical for the vast majority of people even in a rich country like America.

Where I live, there is plenty of cactus, cotton, chili and even onions but not much else so Mr. Pollan's ideals are just silly to try to pursue here.

Hmm, it seems that adding nutrients to the soil to increase the nutritional value of the food produced from that soil is not much different from adding nutrients to the food after the fact, except that a goodly portion of the nutrients that go into the soil do not return to the food chain where we can get at them.

Nutrition is nutrition, and whether it is "organic" or local produce doesn't seem to count for much. When I go to someplace like Whole Foods, I find processed items labeled "organic" there with nutrition labels that don't vary significantly from the same generically labeled food items at the large grocery stores that cost me 1/3 as much. A box of Total cereal still delivers the same 100%+ nutrition per serving whether they label it organic or not. As for food additives for things like preservation or presentation, all I can say is these things have been around for a good long time, and people seem to be living much longer now on the average than they were when such additives were not being used at all. If there's all this toxic buildup in our food chain, how is it negatively affecting the general population? What I've seen in the past twenty years is more and more people overweight and out of shape, and subsequently more and more people coming down with diabetes, heart disease, etc. Maybe the best thing we can do for ourselves these days is to push away from the table a little sooner, and cut back on the 200+ channels of tv we glue into every night.

I think long before the issue of diminished nutrition becomes a factor is living a debilitating lifestyle. If you can get away from eating junk to eating real food, then that will go a lot farther towards improving your health than will upgrading from the apples sold at Walmart to the apples sold at the Farmer's market. There's a scaling factor, or law of diminishing returns, in that argument somewhere.

I believe that irradiation of food will be an increasingly important element of food safety, largely for economic reasons, in the future. I think the extensive use of chemical preservatives, like artificial fertilizers, will simply become too expensive, as well as being increasingly recognized as too environmentally and biologically unhealthy, over time.

I also think that the current global method of food production and distribution, where foodstuffs are produced in one nation or continent, processed in another, and perhaps sent back or to a third for consumption, will also be reduced for largely economic reasons in the future. It relies on comparatively cheap foreign labor and transportation, and those things are going away.

However, I don't foresee these being replaced by truly local, "organic" production anytime soon. Instead, I imagine that we will see increasing reliance on regional producers providing increased varieties of products appropriate for their region and season. This will be more affordable, sustainable, and less reliant upon petroleum-based transportation, chemicals and refrigeration. it will promote and require new agricultural methods, biodiversity and probably genetic engineering, too, and possibly create new markets for smaller farms.

I likewise foresee increasing demand for biofuels. Corn isn't the answer for that, but there will be resistance as long as the early caucuses and primaries are held in corn growing states, and those states keep re-electing senior congress members and senators. However, there is a huge potential market for American agriculture in producing affordable and renewable biomass alongside local food crops and animals that could revitalize smaller or marginal farms.

Corn, in the form of corn sweeteners, is also probably playing a role in the current obesity and diabetes epidemics. It appears that corn syrup is now in most all processed foods, and there is some alarming research on just how unhealthy that may be. Meanwhile, the American sugar lobby has it's hand in keeping the embargo on against Cuba, a potentially huge sugar supplier to the domestic food industry, to keep their prices artificially high. The days of large scale industrial corn monoculture are, or should be, numbered.

Just my two cents' worth.

Jeff