The Food Storage Blog

When I started this blog, my intent was to give the very basics in terms of advice.  Meaning, exactly what should one do to prepare, and in what order.  Over the 2 years we’ve been here, I hope I’ve at least mostly done that.  Because we have had several thousand new folks stop by in the last couple of months, likely do to an increased awareness of preparedness (thanks to shows like Doomsday Preppers, Doomsday Bunkers and Independence, USA), I want to revisit these basics.

At the lowest level, a good preparedness plan includes both information and resources.  Information preparedness includes ‘what will me and my family do if there is X’, with X being whatever scenarios you consider important to prepare for.  So for example, if X = Tornado, then you and your family need to know how the weather service and your town will announce a Tornado Warning or Watch, the difference between the 2, and what you should do in the event of either.  These types of scenarios can be as few as you feel are probable in your area, such as:  Blizzard, Tornado, and Wildfire.  Or they can be as complex as some of the ‘Doomsday’ shows are highlighting, such as an EMP, Economic Collapse, Legions of the Undead, or Nuclear event.

Other items in the information category include a fire safety and evacuation plan for your home, knowing and securing your important documents, and a communication plan to ensure everyone knows how to get in touch.  Something simple like making a laminated list with every important phone number your family can have is something you could do in the next couple of days to increase your families level of preparedness.

When it comes to resources, I’ve stuck to 5 principal categories:

1:  Water

2:  Food

3:  Shelter

4:  Fire

5:  Light

Again, as this is more of a refresh, how much you keep in each category depends on what types of events you are preparing for.

For the first category, I recommend at the very least what FEMA does, which is at least one gallon of water per person, per day for at least 3 days.  So for a family of 4, you need at least 12 gallons of water on hand.  Preferably, you would have on hand as much water as you can reasonably store, plus the knowledge and ability to make more potable water, whether through boiling (pasteurization), filtration, or use of bleach (sodium hypochorlite/pool shock) or iodine.  Or, as many in the preparedness community, having all of the above available let’s you use whichever is most appropriate for your circumstance.  Having all of the above methods available is really not that expensive; however, make sure you use each method ahead of time to avoid confusion and stress in a time of need.  Sodium hypochorlite, for example, comes in several purities, and knowing how much to use is vitally important to prevent underutilizing, which can lead to drinking bad water, to overusing which can cause poisoning.

In the second category, food, I would also recommend at least 72 hours worth of food that can be eaten and enjoyed without cooking, whether that is MRE’s, canned meats and fruits, or something as simple as peanut butter and crackers.  There is a whole category of ‘survival food’ that can set you back a pretty penny, but if you are only looking to be able to survive a long weekend, avoid the expense and pick yourself up some cheap canned goods.  If you choose to move into medium and long term food storage (part of the reason many folks find their way to the blog), check this post first, as its been the most popular post on the blog since very early on.

In many (or most) cases #3 on the list, shelter, will simply be your own home.  Those events which displace us from our homes are also the most devastating.  There is an entire blogging industry dedicated to the ‘bug-out-bag’, so type it into Google and spend a week reading.  Any good car bag or 72-hour kit will have some sort of portable shelter, which can be as simple as a tarp, bivy sack, or tent.  Shelter can also be a friend, neighbor or family member who has agreed to take you in should something occur.  While we may assume our in-laws will be thrilled to have 4 additional family members in the house, it’s still a good idea to broach the subject of what would happen during a personal disaster so you know where you will and won’t be welcome.  To ease shelter concerns, also keep a few hundred dollars in cash on hand in your 72-hour kit or vehicle so you can potentially stay at a hotel temporarily as well.

Fire, as everyone from the caveman on can attest, is man’s most powerful discovery.  Knowing how to safely build, use, and put out a fire is a critical skill every man, woman and (depending on how early you teach your children things) child should know.  For those who think children shouldn’t know how to build a fire don’t understand that boys at least, will learn either the easy or hard way.=)  While a fire won’t come into play in every disaster scenario, knowing how to cook, boil water, and use one for warmth will be very handy during many.

Light is one of those items not found on every real prepper’s list.  However, from a well-being standpoint, I consider light crucial to maintaining some semblance of normalcy in otherwise stressful circumstances.  At our house, we have several on-demand light sources such as Mag-lites (and a box of D-batteries neatly stashed right next to the flashlight) and a hand-crank flashlight, as well as candles and several oil and propane lanterns/lamps.  You can pick up some nice oil lamps at many tag sales for a dollar or two, so never pay retail for one.  My wife had a run of about a half-dozen tag sales where she came back with over a dozen, several of which we ended up giving away!  With new LED technology, you can also get some great light sources now that use very little in terms of battery power.

While there is a ton more that goes into preparedness, from storing your irreplaceable documents to learning how to prepare for an extended event, having the above in place will give you something to build on.  Most importantly, it gives you something simple that you can (and should) DO RIGHT NOW.  Do not get stuck in ‘research paralysis’ land, which I have watched many people do.  In order to not do anything wrong, I’ve seen some folks not do anything at all, and that is a shame.  If you have this type of paralysis, many times it will go away as soon as you do something.  Pick up a couple of gallons of water, some long-lasting food, a good flashlight, and some cool stormproof matches tomorrow, and realize that preparedness is just another part of life, like going to the gym, paying your bills, and going to school.  If you don’t over-complicate it, you might even enjoy it!

Good luck y’all!

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.

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.

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.

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.