Better have a water supply. Uncooked rice and beans are bad on the teeth

I already have a water supply, I actually already have a good canned food and MRE supply. Just looking for some longer term dry goods storage.

Ate two cans of tomato soup yesterday that expired in 2010. No worries.

So far...


Just wait until they're finished incubating.  

At least he can eat the mice

Man, how fucked up would it be if your food supply gave you the munchies...

I freeze for 48hrs before packing

For those that use mylar, do you take the rice/beans/etc out of the packaging or just toss it in before going through the rest of the process?

Me too.  Then I throw in dry ice and seal.

 

I have heard that if you put in the freezer before storage it helps.

Aluminized mylar is an excellent barrier to oxygen diffusion.

It is amazing the number of people that think that way.  Once again, I thought I was making in roads with the wife when she seen that Costco had the buckets of food for storage.  We talked about them for a bit and I thought I was going to get the go-ahead to order a couple of buckets (to start with) that could be stored in the guest room closet.  Unfortunately, I saw that road closed when she came the to conclusion that the food wouldn't taste good, thus would be pointless to have.

Since you're the knowledgeable one in this thread, can you post a link to or describe a bucket (5 or 6 G) that contains "everything" (whatever that may be) on a budget, how many it can feed, and for how long?

there's that protein we were missing...

Last week I was in the Winco Foods market near my house and I noticed a display with 10 or so stacks of 5 and 2 gallon buckets on it.  Arranged around the base of the display were oxygen absorbers, mylar bags, lid openers, spigots, etc.

That is the first time I've seen "prepper" stuff in a regular store.  More than one person must have requested that stuff because it was a substantial inventory.  I thought it was very interesting coupled with places like Costco and Walmart now offering long term disaster food buckets.

I didn't even see that stuff during the horrible Y2K runup.

You can start by adding some quinoa.   Good protein profile, a little less empty that just white rice.

Although any prepper storage paradigm assumes you'll be hunting / fishing as well.

Vitamin C tablets are cheap as shit and seal up well for a long time.

We've got plenty of veggie seeds, put aside.

Prepping should be a cost/benefit determination.  It should be viewed as buying an insurance policy.

What are your real expectations and how much are you are willing to spend to be prepared to survive whatever you figure is going to happen?

Short term:

I live in a hurricane prone area.  It is possible that in my life time I will go through an event that would cause me to be without food for up to a month, probably a lesser time than that. In 1960 when Hurricane Donna went through we were without power for almost three weeks but after a week or so we could get some food from the stores. We got along OK.  Even in Hurricane Katrina there were no reports that I heard of people starving to death.

I keep my pantry stock fairly well and would not starve to death in a month if I rationed my food properly.  No need to spend much additional money on that.

Medium term:

This would be a disruption of food for up to a year.  There would have to a major civil disruption for this to happen.  While certainly possible the likelihood is not very great.

You can spend thousands of dollars preparing for this if you want.  You can buy all kinds of prepared food and eat well.

In my life time (I was born in 1947) if we would have spent thousands of dollars to prepared for this we would have wasted our money.

Since it is an unlikely event I would chose to spend only a few dollars.  It is cheap to have a well stocked pantry and then supplement it with rice, beans and few other bulk items things that can be bough cheaply and replaced every couple or three years.  For about 2-$300 you can buy staples like rice and beans and a few other things that would supplement your (well stocked) pantry for several months.  You wouldn't eat like a king but you wouldn't starve either.

To me that is the right cost/benefit ration for the probability of an event.

Long term:

Unless you have have a lot of extra money laying around it is going to be very expensive to stock up on enough food for more than a few months or a year.  We are talking thousands and thousands of dollars.

In reality you need a farm where you can grow your own food with much outside energy.  Very few people have that kind of resource.

Unless you are willing to go into hard core prepping then you are wasting your time trying to prepare for anything over a few months.  Since I think the likelihood of that happening is very small I am not willing to pay out tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for that.  

I am certainly not going to give up my comfortable lifestyle in a suburban community to live on an existence farm in the middle of nowhere just in case something with a low probability might happen.  I will prepare for the medium term scenario cheaply but not go overboard.

There is a cheap, easy, proven, time tested, lab tested way of doing food/bucket storage.  It involves mylar bags being sealed with heat, and oxygen absorbers.  I don't understand why so many people try and rig shit up that might work when there is already a great solution.

In case anyone missed it, yes, rats WILL eat through a plastic bucket.

In the past, farmers made 'grain bins' for storing corn and other feed from galvanized metal.  Entire rooms in the barn would be wrapped, floor to ceiling, in metal to prevent rats from gnawing in to the corn.

If you are not storing in metal, you are at risk for rodents.

TRG

I've put dry ice in an airtight sealed container before...

BOOM!

Oh sure, you say that now. But about the second day of not eating....

I believe you are supposed to put on the lid loosely until the dry ice evaporates and fills the bucket with CO2
then seal it up.

Amazon sells mylar and O2 packs with free shipping.  Seems a lot easier to handle it that way.

This really belongs in the Survival Forum. If you want good info on the subject or have a question, please go to the SF and search for rice, beans, buckets, Mylar, and oxygen absorbers all separately. You will have good reading info. If you don't find an answer to what you're looking for, just ask. The SF is a great friendly forum that is very helpful (unlike GD).

Thank youi.  A lot of unnecessary re-inventing the wheel going on here along with some ignorance.

Here are some good videos explaining the process:

long term food storage #1

long term food storage #2

long term food storage #3

Came to post this

By the time scurvy sets in everyone else will have been dead from starvation for a while.

Why I will defend my citrus trees in the event of "bad tidings".

Got a lot of water saved up too?

What about adding a pack of One-a-day Multivitamins, and some freeze-dried meats?





 

Two to three years is more like it, under ideal conditions. Or a couple weeks after roasting.

It's high, (there are far better deals on far better food out there) but the OP's way would suck hard.

Did you just pour it all into a 5gal bucket mixed up? I tried and could not get all of the above into a single bucket.