920x60-2

Archive for the ‘Food Storage’Category

The Q10 Temperature Coefficient and Food Storage, and How The Internet is Sometimes Wrong

I know, I know…the Internet is never wrong!  Which may be true, if you know where to look.  I indicated back in this post that I was going to do my best to broaden my knowledge-base in the packaging field, and in particular in regard to products we sell.

As part of that effort, I recently attended a seminar put on by MOCON, the acknowledged experts in permeation testing (what passes through my bag?), shelf life studies (how long will my stuff last?) and other atmospheric packaging analysis.  The subject was the Q10 temperature coefficient and its ability to help predict shelf life.  It sounds complicated, but it isn’t really.  What was really interesting about the seminar was the fact that it demonstrated the basis of an ‘Internet Fact’ about Food Storage, and how some folks may be using that information incorrectly.  I’ll fill you in on the rumor and how it likely came to be in a few paragraphs.

Put simply, it is cost-prohibitive to study the shelf life of products by simply waiting.  What if a product has a 10 year shelf life?  You’d never be able to get it to market.  Often, even 6 months is too long to wait to bring a product to market.  So food and drink companies hire testing companies to help them determine the shelf lives of their products.  And testing companies, such as MOCON, use methods that mimic longer shelf lives through the use of temperature.  Companies can then use that information to decide on what type of packaging they will put their products in for retail sale.  For example, as part of the seminar, they walked us through a shelf life study of potato chips.  A snack company was thinking of changing packaging to extend the shelf life of their chips, and they wanted to know which material would let them do that.  MOCON, using temperature, was then able to mimic 6 months of bio and enzyme activity (spoilage essentially) in several weeks time.  By using a baseline of 20 degrees Celsius, for example, they could mimic 6 months activity in 3 months by raising the temp to 30 degrees, in 1.5 months by raising the temp to 40 degrees and 3 weeks by raising it to 50 degrees.

Now, the Q10 rule doesn’t specifically state there will always be a 2:1 relationship between temperature and shelf life, but that there is a relationship, whether that is 1.2:1 or 1.5 or something else (so they might simulate 6 months of activity in 4 months with a 10 degree increase in temperature).

I am sure many of us have heard a wise-sounding Internet meme regarding food storage that goes something like this:  For every 10 degrees warmer your food storage becomes, you cut your shelf life in half.  I believed it myself.  While the gist of the message is true, the math is off by 80% or so.  And that is because most of us are stubborn Americans.  To our Canadian and British and French and Armenian friends, the rule is essentially correct.  It is only wrong for us because we measure in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius.  The principle of the Q10 Coefficient has to be measured in Celsius to be accurate.  Thus the rule for Americans should be “For every 18 degrees warmer your food storage becomes, you cut your shelf life in half.”  Interesting, yes?  To many, the difference between keeping our food storage areas at 70 vs 78 degrees is significant (Using a baseline of 60 degrees as the ‘standard storage temperature’), and those that may have based food storage decisions off of this particular piece of information could well find themselves in trouble.

‘You get what you pay for warning’:  I am not a scientist, nor do I pretend to be one.  If this post touches something you are working on, please research it further, as my terminology may not be exact, and I haven’t gone into all the details we covered in the seminar.

11

01 2012

Comprehensive Long Term Water Storage Plan Part 1

Imagine a worst case scenario, something you would read in a Michael Crichton novel.  After coming out of a period of minimal solar activity, the sun erupts with a solar flare of unimaginable magnitude.  From this flare comes a silent, invisible Super-storm, called a Coronal Mass Ejection.  This CME speeds towards the earth at over 500,000 miles per hour and washes across the earth’s magnetic field a mere 18 hours later.  50% of the satellites in orbit, those not protected by the body of the earth, shudder with the geomagnetic storm and then go silent, disrupting cell phone traffic across the globe end rendering much of the GPS network inoperable.  On earth, the storm causes Aurora, much like the Northern Lights, that are visible as far south as San Juan.  Energy is almost visible to the human eye as the atmosphere literally hums with the power.  As the pulse touches down on the world’s electrical grids, no one can imagine the speed at which our fragile wire-based infrastructure collapses…a massive chain of transformer and power station explosions rock the country.  The energy companies tell us it will take 20 years to restore power to 90% of the planet, due to the complexity and lack of capacity to build new transformers, if the parts can even be fabricated in our sudden electricity-less world.

Geomagnetic Storm Headed Toward Earth

Of course this scenario is unlikely, farcical even…or is it?  The exact event I described, minus the effects on our current world, occurred in 1859, and is called the Carrington Event.

On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean; also noteworthy were those over the Rocky Mountains that were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.[4]

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed in some cases even shocking telegraph operators.[5] Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.[6] Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.[7]

While I preach that our preps should be based real-world likelihoods, the fragility of our electrical grid would make a storm of similar magnitude to what occurred in 1859 a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.  Most areas of the world in the 1800’s knew at least something about food production, carpentry, cobbling, coopering and a hundred other skills that we have lost in our specialized societies.  While specialization has led to booming living standards, it comes at a cost…brittleness.  Meaning, if everyone knows how to farm, the loss of any particular farming area or piece of equipment, while tragic, would likely be insignificant to the world’s food supply.  However, imagine that our entire method of farming, from industrial fertilization to high-capacity farm machinery, is rendered a total loss to the collapse of our electrical infrastructure.  That is another story entirely, and would require the remaking of our world.

Most here by now know I’m not a fatalist.  I prepare for things like tornadoes, job losses, and floods, not for EMP’s, nuclear war, or Zombies.  However, there is always a little tickle at the back of my skull that whispers of my lack of preparation in one particular area:  water, and what would occur if something truly monumental occurred.   You all know the deal with what I consider the 5 musts of preparedness:  Water, Food, Shelter, Fire, Light.

However, while I’ve harped to my preparedness group (I affectionately call it SurvivalClub) for over a year about our lack of water preps, they are woefully inadequate.  We have over 10 person-years of food stored, multiple locations we could head to for shelter (plus a dozen tents and tarps), 50 ways to make fire, probably 500 flashlights, candles, lanterns, torches, flares, glowsticks and headlamps.  All that, and we have less than 10 days worth of stored water, and very little planned in ways to get more.   Sure, we have water filters, ways to boil water, iodine, bleach, pool shock and several other ways to make water pure.  However, unlike the other areas, we don’t have a real plan.

So, having gotten tired of listening to me, our group has finally taken the first concrete steps toward a real water solution.  We came up with the SWP, the Survivalclub Water Plan.  The plan had several requirements:  it needed to work without electricity, had to be able to support 20+ people, and had to run with a minimum of moving parts that could break or wear down.  I don’t remember which of us actually first read about a ram-pump, but when we all saw it, we knew that was the solution we were looking for.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the ram-pump, how it works, and the components of our complete system.

15

07 2011

Article Content Entry – Dehydrate!

Thanks to Rob from Michigan for today’s entry!  My wife loves her Excalibur Dehydrator.   She uses it to make dog treats, dehydrate fruit and make other yummy concoctions!

Rob:

Dehydrate to help save space and money.  Besides having rice, beans and can vegetables stored for the unexpected, use a dehydrator to add to your long term storage. This is a great way to buy food when it is on sale and save money by doing the work yourself.

I found the easiest way to do this without getting  frustrated and saying the heck with it is to buy frozen bags of corn, green beans, peas, peas and carrots, hash browns, pineapple chunks, peaches (cubed), and whatever else you and the family will eat. I like buying them frozen because all the hard work is done. No stringing the beans and snapping them, they are already are cut, washed and all the same size.

The nice thing about having dehydrated food stored, it makes a great backpacking item. Light weight and easy to use. The food will hydrate to almost the same size as when you started and taste great. Plus it will store for a very long time. I will use storage baggies for things that will be eaten in a relativity short time. But for long term I like to use canning jars with a food saver vacuum sealer for the lids. The sealer will suck-out the air and give you a very tight seal on your jar.   You can open the jar, take out the portion you need and reseal it over and over. You can fit a lot of food in one jar, a 6 pound can of corn will dehydrate to about a pound saving a lot of space and weight.

We like to eat the fruit as snacks while hiking and camping. It taste great, not heavy to carry and will give you the nutrition you need while out. This is just one way of many that you van build your long term food storage. Buying it from the manufacture can be very expensive but well worth adding to your food storage.

14

07 2011

Article Contest Entry – Prepare With a Friend

Great advice today from Tim in the Land of 10,000 Lakes about preparing with a friend.  Only 2 days left to get your entries in.  Due to the number of participants, I guarantee everyone who has participated so far but doesn’t win one of the first three prizes will get at least a little something from the Random Survival Hoard!  For those who have participated but didn’t leave me your address, please email it.  Gift Certificates will mail next week.  My wife is having knee surgery tomorrow (prayers welcome!) so I’ll be picking up a lot of extra tasks, so it might be the following week to be able to mail the other prizes.

From Tim:

If I could give any advice on food storage from my limited experience, it would have to be doing it with a friend.  My first time storing food didn’t go so well.  I had 5 pails with the Mylar bags inside them and had filled them with food, and the oxygen absorbers still in their sealed bag.  I only did 5 pails my first try because I was not aware how much work it would be, but I learned it would have been a lot nicer to do it with a friend. 

When I had all the food in the bags (rice, and pinto beans) I had already heated up the iron to seal the bags but I had not anticipated how long I would be leaving the absorbers open.  When I broke the seal I threw each absorber into a pail and started sealing the bags with an iron but it took longer than I thought it would, exposing the absorbers to air for a longer period of time.  Though I have read that this isn’t too big of a deal, obviously it is best to keep them exposed as little as possible. 

My next time around I filled ten pails with a friend of mine.  This went a lot smoother and a lot faster than if it had been just me.  We each sealed five pails in a quicker fashion than I had last time, saving a lot of work and time.  It was also good to talk to someone about why I was doing this, and it got him to start thinking about doing it as well.  So not only was the efficiency of my food storage increased but I also exposed a friend of mine to it.  As a younger guy with little income, I can’t include friends or neighbors in my storage plans so much, I am focused on myself and my family but; I think helped expose the world of preparing and self reliance to a dear friend of mine. 

13

07 2011

Article Contest Entry – Sound Advice

Thanks to Teresa for today’s entry into our Food Storage Article Contest!  I definitely relate to what she recommends; I did my ‘Buy-one-get-one’ day at Publix yesterday and got a cartful.  I don’t have any broth to speak of, but I’ll keep watch around turkey day this year!=)  Time is getting short so get your entries in; we’ll do the giveaway the weekend of July 15! 

     One piece of advice I have about food storage is to store even amounts of food in each 5 gallon bucket. For example, instead of storing one bucket of rice, one bucket of beans, one bucket with baking ingredients- put one or a few of each in every bucket. Of course you would probably want each item in a separate Mylar bag. This way each bucket contains a variety of items and you don’t have to open multiple buckets to get things you need during an emergency situation. I also developed a labeling system so that I know exactly what is in each bucket and the date it was packed. Obviously the date is very important so you can rotate your buckets accordingly.

Advice & Beans gives very good advice about buying an extra can item or bag of beans each time you go to the store. This helps those of us who cannot afford to buy everything at once. I always watch the store advertisements and when something I always use goes on sale, I buy quite a few of them. For example, canned chicken broth always gets down to .29 cents around Thanksgiving. I tend to try and store lots of it, partly because it works great in rice instead of water. That can come in handy if you’re trying to conserve as much water as possible during a crisis situation- plus it adds flavor.

 When thinking about long-term food storage, water is something many of us forget about yet it is the most important necessity for our survival. If you ever get in a situation where there is no running water, and you run out of stored water- remember there is usually 20-50 gallons in your hot water heater tank. It also would not be a bad idea if you kept some water purifier tablets on hand in case you had to get water from another source such as a lake or river. Good luck and happy storing!

21

06 2011