RELEASE DRAFT V9.1 ©2011 Writer and LongTermStorageFood.com, All Rights Reserved.

Long Term Food Storage Table Of Contents.

Before we get started, let's hear from the new generations.

Special intro for those scared about fallout from Japan: radiation and stored food.

Radiation and stored food updated 6/21/2011.

It's now looking like things are considerably worse than people were told. It's looking like we have three exposed cores and some now believe at least 2 of them went into full meltdown. It won't be possible to "cool" these former reactors until about a year from now. Until then, This fallout is JETSTREAMING over to us. It's gonna be more or less UBIQUITOUS soon which means it will be pretty much everyplace. It's the CONCENTRATIONS we're looking at. Well the good news is we're not all dead yet. The bad news is that radiating particles will continue to emit from problem reactors. The world we live in just became a bit worse. But you can't (and shouldn't) keep gobbling down iodine pills forever.

For those interested in this science, the idea is that we have iodine receptors in our bodies, our bodies have tons of them for all kinds of things, but one of them is receptive to iodine. Now with certain types of reactions, we have, among other things, radioactive particles of iodines and maybe iodates floating around and you might breathe some in or ingest them. So the idea is to keep these receptors full of "nice" iodine" so our bodies don't uptake the "nasty" iodines. Well that's kinda fine except there's all kinds of other particles floating around that we really can't do much about except try to filter out. And we don't really know how much iodine you can uptake in what interim, and the pills have indeterminate shelf-life, and now we have pills coming in from China and who knows what's in those, and now the speculators are selling anything with iodine in it or maybe even play-dough for all we know.

We do speak about radiation and food/water storage below. As far as food goes, where you are safe from radiation, generally so is your food. Underground is the answer, 3 feet or more of dirt over you and you are protected in most scenarios outside of a blast radius. And we discuss underground storage extensively below. The thing to remember here is with the Japan scenario, we're not talking about X-radiation or Gamma-radiation associated with a nuclear bomb, we're talking about fallout. So basically keeping foods and water sealed is the precaution here. To explain further, a nuclear blast generates radiation that acts more like a wave than a particle. It's on the same wave spectra as the light we see but it goes right through you or even vaporizes you if you are really close to it. Fallout is particular mass, it's dust. It just happens to be radioactive dust. Now just to put that in perspective, our own government has done repeated above-ground nuclear detonations right here in the Nevada desert. We've nuked OURSELVES way more than Japan ever will. So listen up. Sealed foods should be fine until opened in a contaminated environment. And we're not gonna get that contaminated at least from where we sit in the USA because most fallout from Japan will dissipate into the Pacific ocean and become diluted in the jetstream. It really does stink but it's not TEOTWAWKI. Enough said. On with the show.

Introduction: the why, what, where and when of foods in long term storage.

Long term food storage or long term storage food?

Does this site talk about long term storage food or long term food storage? It talks about both the food and it's storage over the long term. What makes food "long term storage food" is both about the food, it's preparation and packaging as well as where and how it's stored. And even about a mentality or sense of preservation which speaks to a life-style change. For many people, changing lifestyle is very threatening. Being made to change your lifestyle always sucks. Changing your own lifestyle can often be good. We saw that people are willing to change but don't know how in a very basic way. We also saw that people don't know how to connect spirituality with science without a great deal of conflict so we decided to speak to that too. Science has been very helpful in proving that we were right all along (joke).

What we have so far is a lot of people offering a lot of great storable food products and information but how do we know what the really good products are and what might be recycled Y2K rations? What are the options out there? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each and what are the most affordable for folks who are already struggling? A lot of us can't afford to go out and buy the perfect storable foods and storage containers so we have to make them on our own. This site aims to be comprehensive in it's approach. It was organized following the natural progression of harvest, processing, packaging and storage but somehow it ended up different. It emphasizes things we can do at home (or in homelessness) rather than industrial techniques.

This information could save your life! It can also get you killed.

And so can a can opener or a cup or water or a clean public bathroom when you really need one. Fortunately in these pages I'll show you how to save money. Not spend to save, not "come up with $20 and I'll tell you how", you will be able to use methods and techniques here to start saving money and eating better today and having more peace of mind today.

Be warned. Just like a dirty cup of water or public bathroom, the methods of food handling and storage, if not properly observed, can make you seriously sick or dead. In these pages, I talk about some older, historical and traditional methods that are frowned upon by today's science. You are advised to do further research on all of the methods and techniques described here before trying them.

Why we need long term food storage.

Seems like a dumb question but people still argue about it. The basic ideas are these:

There's lots of other reasons but those are the basics. It either makes sense because you are a total paranoiac like me or it just seems like common sense to store up food for the long term.

History of long term food storage and storable foods.

It all started with this guy called Scroungimus Maximus back in ancient Greece or something. Just kidding. People have been trying to figure out how to pile up some chow for later since 4 hours after the first breakfast, whenever that was. So people have always been interested in preservation techniques like smoking meat, salting meat, pickling all kinds of things, keeping things cool, keeping things out of sunlight, keeping stupid rats and dogs from stealing it, keeping some stuff dry and other stuff moist. A few gazillion years of trial and error and we came up with most of the methods we use today. And as we look back on winning civilizations, they were often the ones who were able to store up lots of grub for unstable times. Egypt, Babylon, Israel, Greece, Rome, all the really huge Native American societies had systems in place for the long term storage of all kinds of food. Native America, particularly the Pueblo-dwelling peoples of the historic Southwest left us seeds in their granaries that we managed to use today. We gained back interesting crops including a bean that's just phenomenal in terms of low-fat, high protein and it can grow in deserts. We're talking hundreds, maybe thousands of years since anybody ate these beans but scoop them up from a cliffside granary and shebang! they are back. We call them "Anasazi Beans" these days although most pueblo dwellers really don't like the term "Anasazi". But how's that for long-term food storage? Our best techniques get us about a decade or so. Behold the thousand year bean, courtesy of the "heathen savages". And it's why all of us with elderlies that suffered through the last Great Depression, well, we're constantly finding cupboards and closets packed full of canned goods when they die like they were just about to have a banquet for the whole town. When you are hungry it takes a long, long time to forget it. So nowadays we have all kinds of new fancy methods. Pressure cookers did a lot for canning. And now there's freeze-dried and dehydrated and stuff packed in nitrogen with desiccants and instructions right inside the package.

What foods are best for storing long term?

"In a nutshell, seeds last the longest"©. Ha ha. Joke right? But no food stores for the long term without preparation. That's why you need this information. In general, foods with low moisture content, with low fat and sugar content are best for long term storage and these will store the best with minimum preparation. Unfortunately, not too many foods fit this definition. Historically, dried beans and seeds have the longest term or shelf life of any foods. And thence our very long discussion. Sit down. Good thing you aren't going anyplace for a while.

The science of long term food storage.

This part could go on forever. To us it's just food. To of the creatures of the Earth it's pretty much the same thing. If you count entropy into the picture it might as well be the same for the rest of the universe. Food to us omnivores can be made of lots of different things, lots of different chemicals and different things happen to them over time and in different conditions. In general the threats to our food value over time in storage are:

The history and science, over time, address each of these concerns. But let's start simple. Short of really obvious stuff like don't store your ham in a working outhouse.

The Four Factors of Long Term Food Storage.

More than any single thing, temperature but the real 4 things, the 4 threats are these:

The 4 rules of long term storage for food:

Nasty little microscopic life forms: bacteria, fungus, viri (viruseses).

Like many life forms, bacteria, fungus and evolution's retarded son viri are happy to have a free meal in a warm place but if they can't get it they hang out just about everyplace. Many people are surprised to find that a lot of these organisms that make us sick don't come from the food or because somebody didn't wash their hands, they are ubiquitous in our environment. That means they are in our air and water and hanging out on our skin and inside our houses. Yup, freaky but true. Normally they don't get out of control and our immune system fights them off. Naturally, raw foods pose more of a threat that cooked foods because cooking destroys most of these germs so it's not always a problem. When they do get out of control, they mass populate and that's where the problems start for us humans.

Some nasty organisms like viri and fungi are bad for us all by themselves. There are forms of bacteria and fungi that excrete things that are poisonous (toxic) to us. Examples include botulinum toxin and some forms of black mold mycotoxin. Some less lethal forms of them will leave your food visibly behind but rob it of nutritional value and leave behind a really lousy flavor. This can be the case with mold. Moldy flour makes for some pretty unappealing bread.

Food, water, warmth. My don't we have a lot in common.

So these nasty microscopics, as humans, like food, water and warmth in general. In terms of need they may differ only in their needs for shelter and emotional warmth and acceptance but it's difficult to prove objectively. Perhaps science will one day provide us with the means to communicate with bacteria. We can tell our head cold that we feel like crap and it will reply "well that makes one of us!". Thankfully this day has not yet come and we do not care for the emotional lives of nasty biologicals or their families, jobs, churches or communities. We are pretty prejudicial when it comes to their civil rights.

A focus on common killer food born microorganisms.

The most common foodborne micro-nasties are Campylobacter (bacteria), Salmonella (bacteria), botulus (bacteria) E. coli (virus) and by a gang of viruses called calicivirus, also known as the Norwalk viruses. Now since these and other micro-murderers are so well documented, there's no point in re-phrasing it here now. In a rare example of government being helpful, a great review of these plagues are found here. These are of limited utility to our discussion to this point however. There are so many microbiotics that can feast on our various foods it's impossible for me to list them. Besides, new ones seem to pop up now and then.

Molds, fungi, mushrooms and food storage.

In traditional terms, mushrooms and molds are "old". They have mysterious powers. Mushrooms and molds can form overnight, almost faster than anything else that lives, but tradition teaches us that these things live underground. So we were not surprised when science told us that the mushroom us just an above-ground manifestation of something large, even ubiquitous in the soil, in the Earth. Moldy or mushroomy soil has a smell, and molds are pretty much welcome in our composts. They are the Fungus amongus. Let this balance get out of control and we are in trouble.

As we'll state repeatedly, microorganisms are older life forms in competition with us for food. The fungi have had a winning strategy for a long time. Some of them populate on our food and some of them populate on us whom they consider food. But some of them can do us favors. For instance, we get penicillin from mold and it's a very powerful bactericide which means it can kill bacteria. Which makes total sense if you are a mold, a microscopic mold, because your main competitor is nobody else but bacteria. So you want to repel them. And it's this quality that makes mold our friend, particularly when we get to cheesing and curdling. So let's get friendly with mold for a minute.

Mold.

There are dozens of types we are concerned with out of thousands or even millions of varieties. They all have really complex sounding scientific names which do us no real good to repeat here. Molds seem to do fine in dark environments although many can tolerate sunlight. Controlling mold is a matter of keeping humidity and temperatures down low. And fortunately most of them are aerobic which means they breathe air. This means our modern packing methods which remove oxygen from sealed containers can stop them from multiplying. This is why we've moved away from storing grain in sacks and towards sealed containers for storage. Bleach will take out most forms of surface mold but the problem with molds and fungi is they can cover amazingly large pieces of ground. When a mushroom pops up overnight, you aren't seeing a mushroom, you are seeing a small visible manifestation of something very large underground. By the time you see it, often it's released spores and maybe other things.

Some molds emit "mycotoxins". We're not sure why, maybe it has to do with weakening competition or the host organism but some of them do. And i'm not sure whether the micotoxins are sporous or gaseous in nature but when it gets into you it can cause all kinds of illness. Illnesses associated with them are respiratory problems, liver damage, renal failure and cancer. Yes, they are that nasty. These mycotoxins are what kill people when they eat the wrong type of mushrooms.

When most food gets moldy we throw it out. However, for our curing hams hanging in the shade house, we let the exterior surface mold over, we cut the top layer off, cut as much ham as we want and let the fresh surface mold over again. Cheese and fruit are much the same: we cut off the effected surface and eat what's below. Other people don't do this these days but we did it for generations. Nobody ever got poisoned. The men in my family mainly succumb to gales and gunfire not the grub. However, beyond hard cheeses, cured meats and some fruits, mold + food = compost.

As we'll discuss, root cellars make dandy fungal incubators and once overrun it can be impossible to get rid of. Quarantine, purification by fire and decomissioning the cellar loom as necessities.

Rather larger biological threats to stored food.

Roaches, mice, rats, birds, squirrels, chipmunks, bunnies, racoon, dude, there are like so many things that wanna munch out on your food. Then there are humans. Don't worry, the universe in her infinite fairness has allowed at least a chance that the people who eat your food might themselves be eaten as food by something. Which puts a whole different spin on storage and food in general. And it's not like sharing isn't fun and all but most of these creatures will urinate or defecate on what they don't eat. Each one of these creatures has special talents and skills to try and sneak inside of your storage units. It's a point separate from the cross-contamination each of these creatures represents. In this, we make the point that you and every other living thing is in competition for food and since you have a lot of it, you just made a whole pacel of new enemies. Controlling mice can be quite a headache as they just LOVE the idea of a dry indoor place with more food than they ever seen in their furry little lives and plus, you were kind enough to leave them all this sack and bag material to use for nesting! Mice have no sense of long-term planning atall. Given more than a mouthful, they decide it's perfectly acceptable to urinate and defecate on the remaining hoards. Trapping them in the classic guillotine-type trap causes problems as you have just made a feast for the bacteria and whatever else Mr. Mouse has in him or on him and worse, flies love dead corpses and with flies come maggots. For mice and such I go for live or (humane) traps. Situate your trap on a piece of cardboard or something on the floor to catch droppings. You want that prisoner taken alive.

Things like bears can cause bigger problems. Doors to root cellars are generally thick. Humans can be even worse problems. Doors to cellars are often padlocked. It bears mentioning that in times of crisis, being known to have a lot of food stocked up could make you popular in all the worst ways. One good idea is not to tell anybody that you have a hoard. Another is to make sure your closest friends and neighbors are in on the deal. Give those who can help you defend it a stake in it. In troubled times, people will fight very, very hard to get food and to keep it.

It is with some reflection that we consider Japan now. No looting. No rioting. No unprotected women being raped. No theft. It's humbling to consider ourselves in the mirror of Japan's example but it's a caution as well: this ain't Japan.

Environmental factors and food storage, heat and cold.

Heat and long term food storage.

Heat is totally great for serving food. Get food up to around 140 F and you kill almost all the nasty micro-bugs that make us sick. Unfortunately it's the enemy of stored food. Some say every degree increase in temperature takes a year off the life term of your food in storage. Obviously this would be different for different foods stored with different methods. Some say that every 10 °F above 30°F cuts the storage life of dry grains in half. That would product something like the following table.

TemperatureStorage life of dry red beans
60°F20 years
70°F10 years
80°F5 years
90°F2.5 years
100°F1.25 years

Incredible, no? And with temperature instability, meaning temperatures where food is stored are constantly going up and down, the effect can be as bad or worse. By storing food in the hot garage or attic you could take it's life down to below one year!

There are a few situations where we use heat to disinfect certain suspected foods (like honey, jellies, nut butters) that come out of storage but that's more of a salvage thing that a storage technique. Heat also decreases nutritional value in foods at the chemical level but it's a physical disruption: cells are literally exploding, chemical bonds are becoming more excited and likely to run off with the neighbors to create new chemicals, so on and so on. This is a major trade-off with steam-canning.

Cold and food storage.

Cold is generally good. Anyplace between 40-65 °F is good in a root cellar. However, there's some foods we'd often rather not let freeze. Naturally, these would be our high-moisture content foods in storage.

The reason for this is that freezing mechanically breaks down fibers in food or other glutinous or lipidic structures that give food it's texture and it's cellular integrity. It breaks down cells which are little puddles of biology surrounded by membranes that ideally keep the stuff inside in and the stuff outside out. Breaking down these fibers and barriers makes the food itself more susceptible to penetration by nasty organisms. This breakdown happens all the way down to the chemical level as we see conventionally frozen foods loose some nutritional value. Repeated freezing and thawing just makes the damage happen again and again.

Freezers in general I don't really consider to be long term unless it's always frozen where you are. I try to keep the engineering low-tech, on the off-grid or off-gridable. Where I live, all that freezes will one day thaw.

Probably the best research that anybody has ever done and actually shared it with the world are the folks at Walton Feed. Their information was put together by true experts and has evolved over the years into a series of charts. Now charts are great for condensing information but all the richness of the stories has been sanitized away. But feast your eyes and brain on this. This really tells you how not just temperature but the right temperature at STABLE LEVELS really makes or breaks you. And how the label or the guarantee of "shelf life" really don't mean squat in terms of our traditional methods. And we see how even one day of super-heat can really screw canned food contents. But don't despair. Don't give up if your treasured preserved overheated for a day or a week, keep every practice here going, don't stop, "long-term" in survival terms means one more day. For us humans, survival in the basest terms means eyes-open tomorrow. Keep thinking "every trick in the book".

Light. Specifically sunlight, but any UV light and stored food.

First off, sunlight makes heat or is heat depending on how you look at photonic energy. And that's generally bad. To make matters worse, sunlight happens to be an active ingredient for photosynthesis. Many types of fungi just leap for joy when they see it. And worse yet, it seems to have mechanically disruptive effects, particularly in fluids like essential oils, and cooking oils which is why we store such things in dark colored bottles. It is, after all, photonic energy. Sunlight heats and cools things unevenly, driving moisture from one place to another. Sunlight attracts certain creepy crawlies. It used in drying of course, but this is a method of preparing food for long term storage. The storage almost never has anything to do with sunlight longterm.

Oxidation, wastage and rotation of foods in storage.

Oxidation is when things combine with oxygen on a chemical level. Rust on your car is oxidation and so is the brown layer that forms on your avocado almost as fast as rust on your car. On a chemical level, the oxidizing substance is loosing electrons (reduction) so it's loosing integrity at the atomic level. Some highly fascinating visible aspects of this is vegetables breaking down under heat or acidity so the succulent aspect dissolve and leave fibrous matrices behind (delignification) and other utterly useless comparisons to electrochemistry. Except for useless examples like what happens when moisture comes into contact with metal canned food. It starts to oxidize the can and then the can integrity might be compromised and then you are flirting with lady Botulism and she's a jealous gal.

Those of you living by oceans will have problems with oxidation because there's salt in the air, literally in the air and when it precipitates out by condensation or rain or whatever. This is corrosive to cans (metals) the electrons start a merry little parade. And if the cans themselves happen to be sitting in water, what we now have is an electrolyte which really speeds things up. Our little parade of migrating electrons has become a stampede because what we have going now is more like a battery. Rusty cans are dubious.

This naturally introduces wastage which is food you let spoil instead of eating it before it did. This is a major threat to long term food storage. You might have a basement full of cans in your summer house but do you know it's actually EDIBLE? Or do you just assume it will be fine?

For this reason, product rotation is crucial. The term of craft is FIFO, Fist In First Out. In other words, when you reach for a can of peas, make sure it's the oldest can on the shelf. Most commercially canned products have dates lazer-written into the bottom of the can but the old and true technique is labeling everything with an indelible marker, label the date and the contents of the can. And don't write on the can label, you write it on the can itself. Those labels fall off with moisture in storage. Yup, that dang moisture thing again. But this presumes that you are actually USING your precious long term stored food! EEEEEEEEEEEK! Well settle down, it's exactly what I'm telling you to do.

Yup, except for the fancy freeze dried stuff, I recommend people not make distinction between their stored food and their table food. Buy in bulk, buy quality for cheap and start eating it. When is a better time to start saving money and eating healthier? Pretty much any time but today for many of us and I know why. It involves that horrible and repulsive concept of lifestyle change. See once you start buying in bulk and not eating it, you can just put the spoilage dates on your calendar and use this as a handy guide for how many garbage bags you will be using. It makes a great new twist on old kids chores because now not only do they know when they'll be taking out the trash, they'll know what they'll be throwing away in advance. Start buying, start eating.

I had a guy tell me "well I'll eat the foods I enjoy now and when TSHTF I'll get used to eating my stored food". I wished I had a spare jackass award on me (I need mine as a credential). "Let me get this straight" I said, warming up for a kill, "you want to overspend on food now so you can eat sub-par food when you really need it?" The guy said "yeah". Well ok then. I guess people have some idea of "we'll all be screwed together" but all I heard this guy saying is "I'd rather hurry up and starve". Like TEOTWAWKI is gonna be like summer camp, tough it out for two weeks and enjoy the pictures for a lifetime? I don't know how to break it to the general public that surviving isn't going to look like The Swiss Family Robinson. Me personally, my internal dictionary has getting screwed and starving under "things to avoid". Somehow the whole romance of the notion was left behind in my pubescence.

Rancidity of foods in long term storage.

Rancidity is oxidation or other chemical breakdown applied to oils and fats which we discusses as keeping water locked up in greasy globules. Kind of. What they mostly are is twisty little chains of oxygen and carbon and hydrogen molecules, but these are kind of the building blocks of life as we know it. So we tend to think of fat and water as two different things, but fat is really just nature's way of storing water long-term. Water bound to fats in this twisty carbon hydrogen chain are more chemically stable than water splashed on a sidewalk, so the regular water will evaporate in minutes whereas fats will stay on the sidewalk and cause countless people to slip and fall. The example of the banana peel has to do with this as a banana keeps lots of water in fat (that's what gives the banana it's incredible flavor—the banana oils coat the inside of your mouth and taste buds, making them more receptive to flavor which is part of why bananas go well with so many other flavors in your mouth, but the banana peel also has a mechanical slippery-mechanism: it's tactile outer surface debonds with it's interior surface—lubricated by banana oil—resulting in a truly admirable method of putting a human down ass-first) is only part of it. And it happens that banana oil, when it rancidifies, pretty much develops an alcohol smell which is the excreta of bacteria, but in cooking, the alcohol evaporates quickly and leaves a delicious aroma. The blackest banana gives a sweet bread. Other fats, like animal fats rancidify and give our noses a danger signal at least in contemporary times. Time was when a man who slicked his hair down with bear fat, rancid bear fat, it was a signal to the ladies that you were a great hunter! Nobody but a great hunter could afford such a precious thing as fat to smooth his hair and oil his skin. He was sending a signal to you ladies: get with me, I am a provider. But perhaps he wasn't just being sexy in his eagle feathers. Maybe there's more to bear fat eh? Good thing science is here to confirm.

Fats (lipids) are absolutely essential parts of our diets, we get sick and die without them and lack of them is the nutritional downfall of almost every longterm food storage plan. And most of the time there's not much we can do about it. This chemical breakdown de-enhances it's vital nutritional power and can result in "rancid smells" or tastes in the oil. Virgin cooking oil will rancidify generally in under a year. And worse, it's susceptible to bacterial colonization. All things combined, lipidic fats can turn into something pretty toxic and harmful to us. It's certainly what makes meats among the most challenging things to preserve and store longterm. And many toxins, unlike the living things that excreted them, can't be killed. It was never alive to begin with.

It may be some comfort to note that in the case of bacterial colonization, cooking oils can be heated and that will kill them off. The problem is with many bacteria, we're not so much worried about them as their excreta, and many toxins are just fine being heated. Even more disconcerting are viri which by current scientifical definition are not alive, never were, and yet they can reproduce and get along just fine in levels of heat that no other living thing can tolerate. They aren't alive to begin with so it's literally no sweat to them. Above all, keep your oils out of sunlight and cool. Beyond that, figuring out WHY your oil is rancid and what you can do about it might require more of that fancy scientifical testing equipment but fortunately this is one thing Mother Nature sought fit to equip us with: a nose with a distaste for rancidity. Oils, regrettably, are not something that lend themselves well to long term anything. So in addition to other things from the past, look for the return of the grease can. Bacon grease, the oil that comes out of canned tuna (preppers always buy canned tuna packed in oil for this reason plus if you really needed to you could make a really smelly oil lamp with tuna oil), we're gonna start saving it and using it. Commercially bought oils should be stored and oils derived from our bacon used first before opening a container of stored oil. Oil is something we'll have to replenish to survive. But all this talk about rancidity and food is really getting me in the mood to discuss cadavers in some detail.

Food handling and long term food storage.

Now since food preparation has implications for storage, I recommend everybody study a good Food Service Handler's training guide like you can find here. Study it to the level that you could pass a test on it. It's kind of implied that stored food eventually becomes consumed food. All that traffic, all the repackaging associated with bulk foods, all that represents it's own series of threats to the whole of your stored food stocks.

Cross-contamination of foods and food preparation surfaces.

One thing the food-service-workers training teaches us is not to cross-contaminate. The scoop you use for flower should never be used for meats or wet foods. The scoop in an infected bag of grain will happily infect another. Treat your dry storage and root cellar spaces as clean or cleaner than your kitchen. I know full well in households all over America today there are cats jumping from litter boxes right onto kitchen counters. You might think your kitchen is clean but if you own household pets, your whole house is a biological disaster waiting to happen. Don't reach into things with dirty hands. And until you disinfect them, your hands are always dirty. Don't even walk in there with those barnyard boots fella! Learn to see YOURSELF as the number-one transporter of infection into your food storage.

Other cross-contaminators you should never, ever, ever let into your root cellar or dry storage unit:

Some creatures we like in root cellars.

I guess I should touch on some creatures or peoples we traditionally like in cellars. Spiders. Pretty much good. They are our helpers, catching bugs and cleaning up the place. Silverfish are OK. They come out of the ground. Moles. Some disagreement here but moles are carnivores and they eat other bugs which are vegetarians. Snakes. Snakes are best left alone under any circumstances but they are one of the few things that can actually help you with mice. Modern science tells us the snake's skin and droppings are just full of salmonella, but keep your containers sealed and keep good food-handling and prep practices and you should be OK. The thing with most snakes is they are there looking for mice and stuff and if they can't find them, they move on. The mice will stay forever unless somebody or something stops them. The battle here is traditional ways against science. The medicine tradition states that snakes, spiders and amphibians are "old magic" and their purposes are often remote from our understanding. Their great power can hurt us or help us, but it's best to appreciate them from some distance and simply not trouble with them. The Way is to be at peace with them. I just leave them dwell in peace.

Natural disaster and long term food storage.

There's really no limit to how many types of natural disasters (or any other kind) that might strike. There's usually the direct effect, like an earthquake and the secondary effect is a whole lot of people need help at once and the infrastructure that was there to help them isn't operating too well. Long term food storage is all about helping with the secondary effects of disaster. Most environmental threats are regional and most advice on any topic has to be adjusted regionally or locally. I don't doubt there's places in Alaska where a "root cellar" might translate to "walk in freezer" a good part of the year. In humid places, you open a bag of potato chips and a half hour later they are soggy. Altitude makes a huge difference to things like boiling point which is pretty important when canning: above 10,000 feet, boiling water isn't hot enough to sterilize things! Remember that next time you are canning yams on top of Mount Ranier. I guess the point here is there's no one set of rules. You have to adapt everything to your climate and bioregion. Remembering the pueblo example, we see that deserts can be great for storing grain. We can see that polar regions are great places for storing wooly mammoths. We can see that both environments call for some tweaking to the plan.

By now it's pretty much clear what the planet has in store for us, we can get deluged by water, burnt by wildfire, choked by volcanos, rattled by earthquakes, smashed by asteroids, smitten by plagues, all that good stuff as well as the manmade disasters as outlined in the first chapters. Coming up with a contingency plan for each of these is a bit tricky.

Hiding and defending stored food.

Along with natural (and other types of) disaster comes the possibility that you'll have to defend your food and yourself to keep it. Not letting anybody know you have it is a good start but this might not do it. A combination of active defense such as pitbulls and passive defense such as barricade or fortification are prudent. Caching is another method in which we hedge our bets by distributing emergency food and supplies in different places so hopefully you don't loose everything at once. So along with nature and man's assaults on our stored food, we might think in terms of "store some high and store some low". Keep some high and dry and some buried deep. Keep some here and keep some there. Keep some on your land and some off it. Keep some with friends and some on the way to friends. If you have multiple homes, keep them all stocked. If you have a motorhome or a camper, keep it stocked and ready to roll.

Author's note: since the publishing of V8.0, lots of folks have said they would love to speak more clearly to defense in martial terms. We don't feel this is the proper place for us to talk about that. For one thing, it freaks some people out and for another, there are lots of places on the internet to discuss those things. With respect, this is neither the time nor the place for us to discuss these things. It's just not where we're going with this thing.

Welcome back root cellar! The ultimate long term food storage technology.

Of all the awesome innovations of time, the root cellar stands out as something available to both rich and poor. If you got a shovel and you can dig a hole, you are on your way to a storage environment that costs basically nothing to operate.

Root cellars have a few properties we want such as being cool and dark. Additionally, they tend to be stable in terms of humidity although moisture is pretty much the number one thing to be on the lookout for in a root cellar. But they have another incredible virtue.

Where I grew up it was quite common to keep refrigerators and freezers outdoors in winter. The idea is that the Earth produces plenty of coldness in the winter in most places so paying to heat a house in a cold planet and paying more to keep a part of your warm house cold on a cold planet made no sense atall. The trick was to make the door-activated light switch a manual-activated light switch (or even wire the switch in reverse so a low-watt light bulb burned with the door closed instead of open) so you could keep the light on at night and not have everything freeze. Kinda ran them in reverse in winters. Light bulbs are cheaper to operate than refrigerators in hot houses.

Root cellars keep things from freezing as well as from getting hot. And as we know from previous chapters, there's lots of food like milk and cheese and eggs that we'd rather not have frozen because it reduces their palatability and pleasant character. So a lot of this thing is gonna be about root-cellar evangelizing. I'm anointing each of you to practice and spread this gospel: the root cellar, ancient friend of man, has returned to us in our hour of need.

How to build a root cellar for food storage.

The most basic version is a hole in the ground. Any amount or depth of hole will help but in most parts of the country, you get about 3-4 feet of dirt on top of you and you enjoy year-round thermal stability. In other words it will always be between 40-60°F in a good root cellar no matter what the air temperature is. So we tend to make them elaborate holes in the ground.

Root cellars are often dug into hillsides for convenience, and in this configuration often have a regular door on the front, leading city people to believe that hobbits live nearby. But basically, a root cellar is a room with a floor and walls and a ceiling and about 3-4 feet of dirt on top of the ceiling and outside the walls. The floor is really important in root cellars, often have a central drainage ditch cut into the earth and a deep layer of gravel forming a flat surface on top. This floor drain system is our number one method of controlling moisture in our root cellar. We also usually have vents in the wall near the floor and others up by the roof or whatever top covering you have. This helps you regulate temperature as well as moisture. Ideally, cooler air flows in the bottom vents and warmer out the top.

The moisture issue is huge. In rainy parts of the country, any hole will tend to fill up with water and root cellars can be quite damp, inviting in all kinds of microscopic meanies like bacteria but fungi really love a nice damp dark root cellar. Things like blackmold might force you to abandon a cellar altogether if it gets out of hand. And in drier climates it can be just the opposite. There's people in the desert that bring cans of water INTO a root cellar to keep things like dried fruit from becoming entirely desiccated. Contact with dry air will seep moisture out like a huge dry sponge. A very patient and huge dry sponge. But in most places you are mostly concerned with the thing filling up with water. So we always find shelves in root cellars and seldom do we see foodstuffs stacked on the ground or floor of a root cellar. And it's why it's not uncommon to see temperature and humidity gages inside a root cellar. This is why it's important not to let your city friends into your cellar to do a magazine photo shoot.

The walls and roofs of root cellars vary. Sometimes they are just dirt. Sometimes the walls are stone or brick or concrete. Sometimes the walls and roof are simple boards which inevitably rot away and become subject to fungi. Stone, brick and concrete are obvious choices for obvious reasons: they resist rot, they can be made seamless barriers against larger biological threats and they are strong enough to where your root cellar can double as a fallout shelter. Wood is often the material at hand, so we try to waterproof the exterior, and for this reason a lot of root cellars end up being boxes that are buried in the earth.

We don't like pressure treated woods in root cellars. They outgas nasty stuff. Many modern composite materials such as particle boards may also outgas nasty stuff. I know the temptation is to find a rot-resistant material. Cedar and redwood are naturally rot resistant. We'll talk about some other stuff as we continue.

Root cellar hybrids (& illustrations some day).

There are kind of hybrid designs as well. The hillside root cellar has one problem: one of it's walls is in direct contact with the very hot or very cold outdoors which reduces it's effect. In some places this isn't such a big deal. In some places the Earth is cool enough to where you can have a sunken room with a normal roof on top. Plus you can use environmental factors such as shade trees or placing your door on the north side of a hill for a hillside cellar so it never gets direct sunlight.

Some houses have actual cellars underneath them, as in basements, particularly where it's cold enough to freeze the Earth itself on top. These make handy root cellars.

Why skimp if you can afford it?

Some really smart people with some bucks at their disposal take a shipping container, apply waterproofing to the outside, dig a big hole and just lay her right in. Fashion an entryway, cover it all over with dirt and now you have a combination root cellar, storm cellar and you are half way to having a bomb shelter to boot.

At any rate, root cellars aren't really about insulation as they are about thermal massiveness which is kind of the opposite of insulation. Insulation is a barrier between one heat zone and a different heat zone. Thermal massiveness soaks in heat or cold and let's it go very slowly. There's this huge interaction between the Earth and the air. The Earth itself emits warmth in winter and soaks it up in summer. It soaks up cool in winter and releases it in summer. This effect is obviously different from region to region, but the more extreme the temperatures, the deeper you want to go. One way to tell is to measure the temperature in your cellar using a thermometer. These rare scientific instruments can only be obtained from such exotic purveyors such as Walmart. Want to know what the soil temperature itself is? Get a meat thermometer, dig a hold and jab the thermometer in at various levels. Don't wait too long between the digging and the thermometering because the exposed soil is either soaking up heat from or loosing heat to the air, but it will give you a much clearer idea than guessing. The rule of thumb is once you are under 3 feet of dirt, you are temperature-stable pretty much year round. I guess there are places with such a thing as permafrost and maybe a reader from Alaska will tell us how they manage their root cellars. In most places, once you are under 3-4 feet of dirt you are around 50-65 °F. year round. That, incidentally, is the minimum depth range to protect you from the radiation of a thermonuclear detonation. If you are one of those lucky people outside of the immediate blast radius (in which case it's better to be outside in a lawn chair because you probably want to be vaporized instantly) but inside the reach of it's waves of penetrating radiation, this might be of some comfort to you. If you have a good way of sealing off all your vents or even using them for air filtration, you have a pretty nifty fallout shelter coming together. If this is a glum topic, be encourage by the fact that for a while, global nuclear warfare is not our greatest threat. Now it seems to be terrorism or natural disaster, each of which are local or regional in scope. Basically this means if a nuke goes off near you, you have a hope of riding out the initial period and then making it to someplace that's not as bad effected. In other words, you might actually make it if you are prepared. But this site isn't about nukes, it's about food.

Even more tricks! More micro climates inside your root cellar!

By playing all the tricks together we can in effect induce our own micro-climates in storage. The first ones we have if our cellar is well ventilated top and bottom, is that it's cooler on the floor and warmer towards the roof. I also once saw a cellar that had two rooms, one after another, and the first room had a concrete floor and was pretty dry and the rear one had a dirt floor and kept moister. Just by hanging and shelving things at different heights in one room or the other allowed the owner to really dial in on what balance of temperature and moisture different foods did best in. That was impressive.

Ice chests, ice houses, strawboxes, streams, springhouses and evaporative cooling. And coolers too.

Ice chests were great things. But they were kind of a rich man's (or wive's) convenience. Ice, formerly being a strictly seasonal type of product, was wickedly expensive in summer and it's harvesting was time and labor intensive. What we used to do was wait for a lake or pond to freeze, walk on out to the middle, drill a hole and begin cutting with saws that looked very much like one-man buck-saws with smaller teeth. Ice was sawn into blocks, loaded onto sleds and drawn for storage in ice houses. If you see old buck saws and ice saws at garage sales, buy them and stop calling them antiques. They really come in handy.

Now the ice houses, big surprise, were often a lot like very large root cellars, there are examples of them being located in caves, but they were often basically barn-like structures. The one thing you were sure to find around ice houses was huge amounts of straw. Above-ground structures required lots more straw. You can store ice under straw right on the ground in straw until spring when you can move it into your root cellar. Packing straw thick and tight on all sides of the ice did so well that New Englanders started shipping it all over the world! And this was with wind-driven craft, sailing ships. Ice was an international industry until refrigeration came along. Imagine being the lucky guy that got to work in the ice house all summer back then eh? Nobody wanted to hear how bad your day was.

Now straw is a really awesome insulator having high mass and low density. Ice houses were packed with it, the ice was packed in it and shipped in it. An ice-box isn't that well insultated but it wasn't your only cooling mechanism. Strawboxes are the intermediary. Strawboxes are really big boxes made of wood with drain holes on the bottom and you put down a good foot of straw in the bottom and lay your block ice in nice and tight and put a foot of straw on the sides and on top of the ice. It usually has a lid that hinges down shut on top. The thickness of straw here is arbitraty, the more straw, the more insulation.

So this is where the root cellar can hit the next level. A really cool root cellar can have a massive strawbox in it, there's ice in it and things we want to keep extra cool stay in there. We'll use the ice to preserve cooler temperatures in summer as needed or to chip away at for cocktails or to make ice cream in late summer if our stocks hold up well. You want to have some sort of provision for melting water for this.

Now here we go with the hybrids. Don't worry about finding an icebox at the thrift store, modern coolers work better and that's your daily household ice supply which you take from the strawbox in the cellar.

A final tip on straw boxes, they are good for more than just cooling. Insulation is pretty indifferent about what temperature it's maintaining. It keeps in heat too. So let's say you only have a bit of cook fuel and a big pot of rice. Make your fire, boil your rice as much as you can, when the flame dies, transfer the covered pot to a strawbox, cover it over and wait. Be patient. Let it go about twice as long to check on it and I'll bet your rice will be done enough. Yup, you knew horses ate straw but you didn't know straw was so helpful to you eating did you? Try the same trick in a thermos for dehydrated or freeze-dried food, it's a great field-technique.

The refrigerator-icebox

Don't worry poor man, I'm always on your side too. Grab a fridge, strip off all the cooling gear (you don't want chemicals in the ground and around your food), drill some holes into the back for drainage and sink it right into the ground where there's some shade. Used refrigerators come in handy for all kinds of things. The big thing about using a fridge as an ice box is that you want it on it's back with the door on top so you are reaching down into it. Cold naturally sinks, and when you open a strawbox or cooler, you access it from the top so all your cold air doesn't just literally spill down onto the floor.

Evaporative cooling and food storage.

Like many of our environmental factors, evaporative capability is a regional thing. It only works in dry environments, low humidity environments. However, evaporative coolers or "swamp coolers" are used to great effect here in the desert where they do the job of air conditioners at a fraction of the operational cost. I don't know anybody who's doing it but there's little reason not to try it to help root cellars stay cool in hot summers. They do introduce moisture into the air, but air dry enough to benefit from evaporative cooling is dry enough to tolerate some moisture as I mention elsewhere here. Evaporative cooling can be used in a humbler capacity. We have these butter boxes, a sort of open wooden cube that wet cloths are draped over and you put a stick of butter down in the middle and the evaporative action will probably keep your butter from melting. How do they work? Well in dry air, water evaporates pretty easy. The air is "thirsty". But converting that water into vapor is a physical change of state and that requires energy. So simply put, heat is the energy that is expent to turn the liquid water into vapor. The heat comes out of the air. The cooler the water, the more heat energy is exchanged with the air to turn the water into vapor. The result is cool air. Or cooler air. You can generally get 20 F below ambient temp with a swamp cooler, more with a more expensive one.

Obviously our examples like the butter might seem trivial, however this is a short-term tool that might help you save your stash one day. In a dry climate, water can help you control the temperature of the air. I've made a "butter box" out of a whole RV that was roasting by hanging wet towels all over the place.

The springhouse and springboxes.

Any cool running stream is a great boon to food storage. An icy spring is truly a miraculous thing. The very first thing we can do is make a "springbox" which is a box with holes in it. Milk crates work just fine. We settle this down in a shady part of the stream (or ideally a nice cold spring) and put cans and jars and bottles of food and milk in it to keep cool. Make sure you weight the bottom of your springbox with rocks and tether them to a nearby sapling, they have a tendency to want to migrate downstream. A slightly evolved version is an actual house or structure built over your springbox. Generally these are low-roofed structures with an earthen, stone or gravel floor and they have only minimum venting to keep their moisture and coolness inside. They tend to be small and have low roofs. Things might be kept right in the springbox such as milk or on shelves such as canned goods.

Sand storage of foods.

OK so we've seen how we can create particularly cold parts of our root cellar with straw boxes and ice. We talked about a certain level of humidity being good but some foods like to stay a bit dry while they are staying cool. Root food like potatoes, carrots, parsnips and the like really like being kinda medium-dry. So we as we recall using gravel on the floor to assist drainage and evaporation in a root cellar. Moisture coating the gravel increases it's surface-volume, exposing more of the water to airflow and thence helping with evaporation which produces cooling. As well as giving your feet something to walk on besides mud. We use the same trick with tubers. This includes potatoes, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips and stuff like that. A favorite trick is to store them buried in buckets of clean, dry sand. This increases air flow across the tubers themselves and helps wick moisture away from their surfaces but it doesn't let them dessicate. Keep an inch or two layer of sand between it's neighbors and the sides of the bucket. Now put the buckets higher up in the cellar where it's likely to be just a bit warmer. This will tend to keep them dryer and will keep old mold at bay. That's "dry storage" they only teach in the mountains.

Hanging and stacking foods in storage.

Herbs, plants and flowers do fine hanging upside down in storage. Dried flowers and herbs maintain much of their flavor in oils, and by not breaking down or chopping them, we preserve these oils in the freshest state we can so they are "virtuous". We generally want herbs and flowers to dry slowly and the cellars can be good places to start, and we start them up high where our temperature is higher and the moisture is lower. Other oily things such as cheeses and hams tend to do well hanging because their oils will tend to bleed out onto whatever surface they are sitting on. Hanging these types of food in storage eliminates all the issues of cross-contamination with surfaces. Be aware that hams and cheeses (and other things) can sweat and drip on whatever is below them so you don't want much of anything below them. Some people say to stack your apples high and close to vents. The explanation goes that apples and fuits will emit chemicals as they ripen which can trigger other vegetables and fuits in storage to spoil faster.

.

Now we can talk optimal temperature/humidity for various foods in storage.

Yup, now that we understand how air flow and temperature and humidity influences various types of food, we might really dial in on what goes exactly where in our cellars. There's only one problem. We know of only one other source of this really fine-tuned info and when we looked at it, well, some of it seemed right and some of it seemed wrong. But we couldn't agree what was and what we realized was that it's different in different parts of the country. We've heard of people packing root crops in stuff like sawdust because things won't dry as fast in it. All we can say is it better be pine sawdust or it will rot and pine might add a peculiar flavor to things like potatos and carrots. This is one aspect of this site we need to kind of hash out before we can publish it in a table. It's not that there's not empirical data, but this comes from industrial production where you can twist a few knobs and adjust temperature and humidity. For our homestead purposes, what we see is it's more about PREDICTING what your temp/humidity is gonna be like this week, this month and in the season ahead. Sometimes we know we will TEND TO have enough moisture and are shedding it over time. Sometimes it's just the oppisite. One thing we're looking at when we get empirical data is WHERE IT COMES FROM. Are they at sea level? Are they at altitude? Eventually we'll find a better way to express this.

Contagion, quarantine and purging of root cellar foods.

I hate to leave my fave topic on a down note, but as I mentioned, a root cellar can become hopelessly colonized by fungi and other stuff. The fungi have microscopic spores that are almost impossible to clean from a root cellar. If your cellar becomes overrun you might develop allergenic sensitivities to it that can make your life really miserable. Some studies seem to show a linkage between mold and childhood respiratory diseases and immune system insults. If this happens, you will be happy if you are one of the few with the sense to have two root cellars to at least half of your provisions will be safe. In any case, you will have to evacuate the overrun root cellar. DO NOT BRING ANYTHING FROM THE CONTAMINATED ROOT CELLAR INTO ANY OTHER STORAGE SPACE. All contents of the compromised root cellar are quarantined. If you think you can still use the contents of the canned good, leave them outside. Pour their contents into bowls to take inside and cook. Don't even stack the compromised food upwind of a good root cellar. The spores are airborne. A breeze will blow them for miles.

The outsides of non-permeable containers can be washed in bleach and left to dry in the sun and the food in the sealed storage containers is probably fine. Don't worry about the negative effects of sun this time, this is a salvage operation. Everything else is probably compost.

When a root cellar gets overrun like that, mountain wisdom says it's over. Purging with fire is one often tried method. Or it was anyway. You'd burn the cellar and all it's contents. Or just filling them in with dirt. Or sometimes they just got locked and left as an empty space full of memory until some kid finds his way in there. There was some sense of never going back, turning your back on that piece of dirt or hole where the dirt used to be.

Processing and preparing food for long term storage.

Drying foods for long term storage.

Drying is one of the oldest methods of preservation. In drying, we're making life more difficult for the micronasties by removing water from their park. And for a very long time, humans have relied heavily upon the drying power of the sun which was widely recognized as having a monopoly on the heating industry. Sun-drying works on a wide rage of things: meat, fish, fruit, grains, vegetables and insects. Indeed, every insect I have ever eaten either did or would have tasted better for sun drying. Or maybe it's a textural thing. I prefer "crunch" as opposed to "squirt". Drying goes by a lot of fancier names these days like dehydration and desiccation but the basic methods and utilities are still available. Spread food out on a rock in the sun and wait.

Something to remember! normal food when harvested is between like 90% for fruits and down to like 20% for lean meats. "Drying" is thus a pretty gross term and it means any less moisture content than present when the food was harvested. For practical purposes, dried fruit is somewhere around 15-20% moisture content but it only gets harder then crunchier the lower you go. In desert environments we can get things pretty dry, almost to the level we know call dehydration which is around 3% for fruits and vegetables.

Did you get that last point? Mostly we can only conventionally dry things as dry as the air in which we are drying it. Using a heat source, we can dehumidify an area around our drying food, but let it sit out in the air and it will start re-absorbing moisture. You folks in damper regions know this when your bag of potato chips is stale one day after opening. If you are drying to below-ambient humidity levels, you have to package the food fast just like they seal up your potato chip bag at the processing plant.

Drying meats is kinda different because a lot of moisture is contained in lipidic state, in fats in the meat. It's possible to totally dessicate meat, it can be dehydrated but it's generally not all that nice to eat. Meat is totally not supposed to go "crunch". But for practical purposes, simple drying down to around 7% delivers a longer lasting food source in the field. The new techniques such as commercial dehydration and freeze-drying take this a big step forward.

Moisture content of "raw" foods.

Let's just think in terms of basics and not list off 100 foods. Water is 100% moisture content (duh, I know) and it's where our table starts. It ends with freeze dried food under 3%.

FoodsMoisture
content
approx.
Water100%
Cantaloupe, cauliflower, celery, most lettuce90%
Apples, cherries, potatoes, grapes, apricots80%
Beef, chicken, fish, bananas, sweet potatoes, ginger70%
Grains20%
Honey15%
Some nuts10% and lower
Dehydrated and freeze dried foods3%

So we see most of the fresh foods we eat are in that 70-90% moisture content range. I suppose from the table above, nature is telling us it's long term storage foods are honey, nuts and grains which is no secret to bees and squirrels and the myriad grain-eating creatures that store up for winter.

Food dryers.

Any of these can be hybridized which means you can mix and match power sources. You can start stacking drying racks, just make sure that air can flow through and between your racks. Rotate your racks and product from top to bottom or however necessary to maintain even drying. With all foods you dry, the more uniform or even the shapes and thicknesses or the food, the more evenly it will dry. Feel free to experiment! Drier foods last longer, less dry foods have all kinds of variable textures and "rehydrate" faster when needed.

Wired food dryers.

The easiest way to get started drying foods is to pick up a little commercially bought unit. These are almost always electrically powered and have a little circulating fan. They can be found in thrift stores for a couple of bucks. Commercial dryers are all electric these days. You could easily design your own with a blow dryer. However there's no point in not investigating alternative heat sources.

Solar food dryers.

Solar food dryers are dandy. If you live where it's sunny. The work marvelously in deserts that's for sure. Solar dryers can just be a baking pan out in the sun or a string of chillies hanging or it can be a boxed-in, glass-topped affair. With a fancy solar food dryer, we design it to draw fresh, dry air up from the bottom and hot air vents from the top. Naturally, the fancier dryer is hotter, so you are rotating and moving more product through.

Fired food dryers.

Using fire to dry things like meats and fruit is pretty ancient and it speeds things up bigtime. We can dry a lot more product in a smaller area using fire (and electric for that matter) since we can stack our drying racks vertically as tall as we like. With fire you are keeping very busy rotating drying racks and keeping the fires even.

Dry storage & drying grains, beans for long term storage.

Drying of grains and beans for storage is historically done in the sun. Grains are dried in all kinds of indoor or other drying apparatus. Historically, some grains such as corn are allowed to dry on the cob, beans and other berry grains are dried whole, such that they can be preserved for seed crop. However, whole grains tend to preserve a lot of moisture and fat content. De-hulling grain berries for storage and separating components like germ can enhance the storage life term. For this reason, white rice is preferred by many for long term storage; the oils in brown rice tend to rancidify more quickly. Drying can be done in bins and it can be done under cover and with the benefit of heat from various sources. Grain storage silos themselves are big controlled drying storage units, and are ventilated and heated by solar or other means. Think of a silo as a big thermal tube that gets air moving vertically up through it from the bottom.

Desired moisture content levels for dried grains are below 15% for any period. In long term storage and for preservation of seed stock we want those moisture levels down to 10% or below. This can take a couple weeks and if you are in a humid climate you might have a hard time getting there. Air flow and temperature are important factors here. Once a good low moisture content is achieved, however, we want to get that grain into stable 60-65°F temperatures immediately for long term storage. From here, maintaining those levels of moisture and temperature are key. Our desert experience suggests that low humidity is more important than temperature, at least for very low-fat grains and beans.

Air flow remains important to the long term storage of grains in normal atmosphere. This is why burlap and canvas bags were often used for their storage. Folks buying grains specifically packaged for long term storage don't need to worry about this until the packages are opened. In general, packages are removed from dry storage areas upon opening for use in the household.

More specific data on grain drying and methods.

Determining moisture content of foods in storage.

Obviously there's scientifical instruments to get precise measures but at home we combine measurement with observation. Your basic "dried fruit" at around 20% moisture content is still flexible. Down around dehydration levels, 3%, it's brittle and snappy (apple chips! Yum!). Dried fruit has, for lack of better description, a desiccated look to it. Properly sundried peppers should make a "tap" sound when bounced off a surface. Beef Jerky at around 12% is still flexible. Weighing food is a good method of calculating how much H2O is gone if you have a scale because we calculate H2O content in food by weight rather than volume but when you have several tons of food, this can be a heck of a chore.

For grains and stuff like dried beans, moisture content becomes pretty crucial. Experience is the old mountain method, but there's a bit of hedging of bets going on. With drying of seed grains, moisture content massively effects their viability so we'd pull seeds from drying in batches, marking how long each batch had dried on the paper envelopes we kept them in and from what dates so we kind of had a bracket. At least some of the seeds were reasonably sure to be just about perfect. Oddly, preserving seeds, which are food for a germinating young plant, is pretty much like preserving our own food even though in much of this discussion, seeds are our food. Moisture, heat, sunlight are our mutual enemies as far as long term seed storage or even preservation until next season.

However, with weight we can do a decent job of determining moisture content in our food as it's drying, and we can extrapolate by comparing it to the rest of our stocks by observation of color, texture, smell and flavor. And we can continue to "bracket" our drying to further insure our protection.

To roughly determine moisture content of your drying foods, we can use the following method.

  1. Weigh a portion of the food before drying.
  2. Immediately start drying this portion to whatever point you think is good.
  3. Weight it again.
  4. Subtract the dry weight from the wet weight, divide this by dry weight and multiply the result by 100.
  5. This will be the moisture content in %.
  6. So the percentage of water in a food is ((wet-dry)/wet)*100.
  7. From here you can use your senses to determine your rough moisture content by comparing color, texture and weight for the rest of this type of food for that drying session.
  8. Be aware your drying times will vary from day to day (or day to night) depending on humidity.

Scales for determining moisture content of long term food stores and commerce.

It becomes pretty obvious that some things like grain grinders or mills come in handy for long term storage foods. Scales are really handy too. Keep your eyes peeled for old, still functional scales. Obviously the big ones we want are getting hard to find. Smaller scales force us to weigh a single shipment or harvest multiple times leading to increased inaccuracy. Take care to clean, lubricate and calibrate your scales or you'll be running around in circles. For commerce, barter and packaging we also have to be accurate. For measuring H2O content we have to be really accurate. Postal scales were designed to be accurate to within 1 gram and should be calibratable. These come in many different sizes.

Dehydration of foods for long term storage.

Dehydrated foods are the survival food of the 20th century. The choice of backpackers for it's light-weight and low volume, it's long term shelf life and the ability to create pre-prepared entrees with multiple ingredients including meats, vegetables and dairy, dehydrated packaged foods were the rage.

Dehydration could have been talked about along with drying and desiccation but it's kind of held to a certain standard these days. Drying is anything drier than the food was at harvest. Food which has been dehydrated is held to be at very low moisture levels. We manage to preserve higher nutritional values in food desiccation stored for the long term with dehydration than with other methods. It is possible to dehydrate food on your own using solar, fire or other heat source but in some areas, the ambient humidity is just working against you every step of the way. From handling food in atmosphere to the containers you put it into, some places are just too dang soggy. That could present some challenges.

Dehydrated foods offer many advantages. We can have almost anything in dehydrated food: eggs, cheese, juices, meat, prepared entrees, any kind of plant crops, they just have to be "rehydrated" for use after storage. However, it's important to note that most dehydrated long term storage foods are packaged as "single-foods". In other words you will likely be buying large packages or cans of peas and that's all there is in there. It's generally not pre-packaged entrees like we get with a lot of freeze dried survival foods. Ultimately a well planned store of dehydrated foods such as are found in the commercial packages offers more options for long term sustenance. Dehydrated food is also cheaper, it's about the cheapest (or low-cost, rather) food you can get. I generally favor dehydrated and dried foods for long term storage for all of these reasons.

Candying foods for long term storage.

Why does it have to be boring? A neat twist on drying stuff like apple chips and pineapple and ginger and rhubarb and other interesting flavors is candying which combines drying them to around 20% moisture content and then sugaring the foods so that remaining surface moisture is bound up in sugar crystals which micro-nasties have a hard time getting into. Sugared fruits in dry storage can last years but they generally get eaten pretty quickly so I really can't say how many years. Delicacies are very nice to have in long term storage. Candying is similar to brining in that the food goes into a completely saturated solution so the mineral (salt in the case of brining and sugar in the case of candying) is literally crystallizing around the surface of the food.

Smoking of foods for long term preservation.

Smoking happened when the sun first got serious competition in the heating industry. It's doing the same thing as sun-drying or fire-drying but it's not just the heat we're after, it's the smoke itself too. It's faster than sun drying plus if you use the right woods it leaves a really appealing flavor particularly in meats, fish and cheeses. Cheeeeeeeeses. With the heat cranked up to about 120-140 °F, not a lot of micronasties can survive so the food actually approaches something close to the modern definition of sanitary.

Smoking dehydrates the outside layers of meat to form a kind of barrier on the outside so you don't have to totally overcook things. The inside of meat is basically sterile until it's in advanced decomposition and literally permeated by micro-nasties. With some woods like manzanita and pine, the pitch itself is a deterrent to microbials.

Nowadays they do all the commercial smoking of meats in smokehouses. In the old days, people used to just smoke meat in smokehouses. Often it was the same house known in other parts of the year as the "sugar shack", which, contrary to contemporary belief, was not a house of lust and sin but rather a place where you boiled down maple sap to make syrup and maple sugar. It was typically a small structure which was designed to accommodate fire on the floor 24x7 and not burn down so the floors were generally stone. They were basically hearths, fireplaces that you stood inside of with the fire and the chimney was a hole in the roof. I'm really not thinking OSHA would approve of this working environment so just tell the building inspector it's a children's play house. The kids will agree, little animals that they are. There are few set global standards for how dry or what internal temperature should be achieved in smoking.

Smoking and drying racks.

A basic smoke house.

But before there were smoke houses there were much simpler and handier ways of smoking or drying and that's a simple rack you fashion out of branches and saplings. You can tie them together with twine you make out of willow, hickory bark, the fibers from our Agave plants here in the desert or my favorite trick of running to the hardware store for a ball of twine. There's no real official way to make a smoking rack, just get the meat over the heat.

Longer term storage of dried and smoked meats.

People these days will tell you it just can't or shouldn't be done. Hooey. Dried and smoked meats can do very well in root cellars but humidity can be a problem there. In the case of larger pieces of meats, mold is allowed to grow on the outer surface, and cuts are taken deeper, and the freshly exposed meat surface just grows more mold. The interior of the meat, the meat on the inside is, I suspect, essentially sterile. I believe this is why we have such a long tradition transporting and storing meat as the whole carcass rather than vacu-packing final cuts for sale in supermarkets as we do today. Getting back to the focus, some meats can do well in dry shade, and "shade houses" used to be common in the Southwest. It's a trick we picked up from the natives. These are above-ground structures that provide semi-shade. They work well in low-humidity environments. In general, if your smoked or dried meat starts rehydrating or even worse, moisture begins to condense on their surfaces, then you are starting to become concerned about too much moisture in that storage environment.

Salting and salt packing foods for long term storage.

A lot of microbiotics don't like salty environment so begin with but salting has an effect similar to drying and smoking. Salt induces a peritonic response in the cells of meat. The cells of meat, alive or dead, still have cellular membranes that contain their moisture among other things. Salt puts them into a state of dehydration such that the cell walls harden and moisture tends not to come out and be available for the micronasty pool party. Now some will argue that this happens because of H2O exiting the cells by osmosis, but they are correct. Osmosis is one of those acey-deucey kind of phenomena: do minerals head AWAY from concentration or does H2O move TOWARDS dehydration? They both kinda happen at the same time. There is some factor of some micronasties just not being able to tolerate that saline an environment because it makes the H2O and minerals in their cells go crazy coping too, but the main effect or salt is this dehydrating (or hypermineralizing) effect.

Foods we traditionally salt are meats and seafood. The technique is rubbing salt (sea salt is good, we don't use iodized salt) and spices if desired thickly into the meat on all sides. The resulting product can be dried, smoked or salt-packed which is placing pieces of salted meat into a container, packing meat and more salt in layers and so the meat isn't touching the sides of the container and sealing it. The advantage here is the meat just keep desiccating and dehydrating over time. Since salt packing meat is a pretty manual process, a wide-mouth container is used. Metal and metal lids are not recommended for salt packing because of the corrosive nature of salt. Glass containers with wax or fat seals may be your preference. There are commercial curing agents in the supermarket for curing meat but I've never seen them used.

Brining meats for long term storage.

Brining is another salt reservation method for meat and fish. Brined meats are immersed and sealed into a saturated saline solution. This means the level of salt is at the point where no more can be dissolved in the solution. That's over 3 pounds of salt per gallon of water. That's a lotta salt. Again, we use non-iodized salt. Brining is used on raw or cooked meats and can last for many years. You can use your canning equipment for this method but as with salt packing we avoid metal containers and lids because of the corrosive nature of all that salt.

Jerking meats for long term preservation and storage.

Jerking is a hybrid of smoking and drying salting meat. Salt your meat then smoke it and you have a much more durable food that can last years. It's light, it's ready to eat and it's concentrated calories. It can be shredded and dropped into stew if you are sick to the point of tears of vegetable stew. Many people are only familiar with the strip-jerky found in stores today up on the counter, but some people still do jerk whole animals. Whole cows and horses and buffalo. This is traditionally done with the animal hanging in front of you. So the...ah...equipment is a bit different for a whole animal and there's a lot more patience involved as we let nature do her work but it's exactly the same besides that. For the most part, you want to stay more basic and make your cuts as even as you can, salting and smoking different cuts in batches. Moisture content for jerky is pretty much where you want it to be, but to be a durable long-term food you want it down below 15% in my estimation. Hanging your jerked meats in the root cellar is a find way of storing it.

Field-dressing and butchering a carcass.

Preservation begins as soon as the organism is some kind of definition of "dead" which describes the cessation of respiration of an organism. It's a rather imprecise definition as many cells of bodies and many cells hanging out on bodies continue to respire long after consciousness has left (Elvis has left the building) but we'll leave such up to the mystics for now. What you need for dressing, gutting, skinning and butchering involves the following:

In brief your job here has 5 parts: cut, hang, bleed, gut, skin. So we start by cutting the animal deeply across the throat if that wasn't their method of dispatch to begin with, severing the carotid arteries. The you hang the animal by it's rear feet (or ankles more appropriately with a hook though their achilles tendons) and let the animal bleed out all it's gonna. Catch the blood in a bucket for all kinds of uses if you want. I like to decapitate the animal at this point because it's often easier to invert the animal following this point. You are ready to gut the animal.

Insert your long knife into the rectum and begin cutting around the abdomen and towards the rib cage, then right up (or down) through the middle of the rib cage and not stopping until you are through the chest and throat area. Whatever is inside of that body cavity comes out into a garbage can below. It can be lined in case you want to save the entrails for any number or purposes. And then you are ready to skin the animal. Watch for musk sacks on male animals. They will ruin your kill.

From there you can leave the carcass hang for days or even weeks in your root cellar and just age a bit. Meat's fibers break down chemically as it ages and becomes more tender. And from there you can take it any way you want from leaving the carcass intact or going ahead and butchering and packaging the parts for freezing or drying or smoking or salting or what-have-you. Generally with a large animal you want to use all of the techniques as they each result in different flavors and have different resistances to decomposition. If one method fails you hopefully have meats preserved differently that made it.

Butchering.

With the above we're kind of forced to know how to butcher. OK the guys in the supermarket with the white coats on, they don't even know how to butcher anymore. It's a real art but you don't have to be the world's greatest to reduce a full size animal into more manageable chunks. But I tend to take a lot of things for granted, and in this case, I can't remember when I first dressed and butchered an animal. I don't remember learning it. I think I probably saw it done so many times it was like picking up the phone was for us old people who remember phones when they were attached to walls. Nobody had to show us, when we got tall enough to pick the damn thing up is when the trouble started. Nowadays people have phones attached to their bodies. Now I'm not going to get too deep into butchery here. But in brief, if you have to, it's cut, hang, bleed, gut, skin, dry.

Here is a really excellent paper on meat preservation. which is from a grassroots perspective. It includes a very basic butchering diagram.

Freeze drying: the ultimate long term storage food?

Just as packaged, dehydrated foods were the survival food of the 20th century, freeze dried foods are all the rage today. We get all the longevity, the light weight, the interesting recipes and we get better flavor and nutritional quality. We don't get the compact form of dehydration and like dehydration, most dehydrated foods need rehydration which ups your water requirements, but it's still great stuff for survival food.

Freeze drying is getting pretty high tech indeed. I think some guy called what's-his-name invented it. Clarenece Birdseye. Anyways, remember how the crystallization of water in freezing tends to screw up the texture and nutritional content of food? Bird-man found a way that by rapidly freezing things really really cold--using stuff like liquid nitrogen--like colder than stuff normally gets on planet Earth, he managed to not only get around these problems but he found a way to extract tons of this frozen water out of the product when it heated back up to what we think of as normal freezing temperatures. With this technique we exceeded most previous preservation methods except the Pueblo dwellers who's sprits still laugh at us and say "hope you liked the beans" which still happen to germinate. Unfortunately it's a really high tech process involving highly specialized processing and equipment. We cannot freeze dry food at home.

Some argument exists as to the methods of freeze drying and whether some of them leave behind anything undesirable in our food. At this point there are many reputable vendors to choose from who pledge to sell us a quality product.

Comparison chart for freeze dried vs. dehydrated foods for long term storage.

Note that we assume these foods are packaged oxygen free for long term storage.

MethodTermFlavorNutritionComplexityCostNeeds H2O?Compact?
Dehydrated20+ yearsGoodGoodFair to goodCheapYesYes
Freeze dried20+ yearsGreatGreatFair to greatPriceyYesNo

Curdling and cheesing as long term food storage methods.

Curdling and cheesing is our way of making dairy product last longer. Cheesing can involve almost every art of food preservation previous to it and then some. Cheesing itself, curdling is ancient. In this we induce a change by chemical agents (usually acids or enzymes) in which the curds (solid product) get separated from the whey (liquid byproduct) in a process of rapid dehydration. The curds can be processed in any number of ways for long term storage. What most of us think of as cheese gets pressed and aged.

Cheese making illustrated.

A cheesing site with lots of specific tips.

The levels of processing are hierarchical in terms of long term storage. At the shortest term is fresh. Curdling to remove H2O leaves a longer lasting product. Cheesing removes more H2O so it's product lasts even longer, especially when salt is added. Aging cheeses can remove even more moisture and also allow for all kinds of GOOD fungi and bacteria which not only can flavor our cheeses but set up even more hostile environments for other micro-nasties we don't want in our lives. Going one step further, we dip cheeses in hot wax for storage which puts a disinfected and air-tight layer around the cheese, even further inhibiting decay. Finally, cheeses can be canned, making a truly long term storable food. Canned cheese and butter can be bought from numerous suppliers. It's amazing to thing the stuff starts as a liquid.

Storage terms or longevity of cheese is pretty much up in the air. Most of the cheese-making world considers maximum term to be about 10 years but French people would argue. For my cheeseworth, about 5 years produces some pretty sharp cheddar. There's some older stuff that's just sublime at parties but I wouldn't eat it day to day. cheese tends to harden and crumble over time as fats slowly sweat out. Younger, more elastic and milder cheeses are good for sandwiches.

Buttering and churning for dairy preservation.

Butter is quite easily and economically made at home, especially with a blender or food processer. Salted butter can be stored for weeks and even months at proper temperature. Canned butter can last as long as any other canned product. Butter has long been regarded by my people as an essential part of eggs and toast for breakfast. Butter is half of the justification for having refrigeration in the first place, the other half being to preserve medicines and serums for other arguably just as important life-saving activity.

So from the prepper or survivalist or self-sufficiency perspective, it looks like the butter-churn is coming back into fashion. Compared to other farm chores, it's a welcome chance to sit down. It's certainly more pleasant that actually obtaining the milk from the cow. Remember, with dairy processing, proper food handling and sanitation is really important. The critical phase of milk handling is the moment it comes out of the cow and into our environment. We need to cool it quickly and consume it or process it by any method here described. Raw milk can be strained and put into sanitized steel, glass or plastic containers for cooling, and can hang out in a proper root cellar for a week or longer. The cream will rise to the surface and can be used to richen certain things, used for butter or cheeses and the lower fat milk below consumed with your Wheaties. The nice thing about milk is we don't have to wonder if it's bad. Everything in us knows when we have a mouth full of bad milk, the nose knows it as soon as that milk comes close. Imagine being the man with the last box of Wheaties on planet Earth and you get to be the last man who can said you did when they say "better eat your Wheaties, men" and you had them with lowfat milk. You are gonna have a leg up on that day.

Preparation and packaging food for long term food storage.

Canning foods for long term storage.

In linear historical terms, canning is the last art from the old days in that when we developed it, we still weren't entirely sure what we were protecting ourselves from or exactly how it worked. It's kind of the pinnacle of the ages-old trial-and-error method that produced every method before it and to this time. Canning is the method by which we hope to sterilize the container and the food at once and try to get a seal on them while it's still theoretically sterile. So all the micro-nasties die and no more can get in to all that nice food and moisture. And the method we use to achieve sterility is heat. And the medium we use to transmit this heat is water. Canning has also enjoyed a renewed interest and popularity so it's one of the easiest things to find great information about on the web. This is good because is you screw it up you can poison people.

Remember our discussion of altitude? Water boils at different temperatures depending on how high you are? Yeah, I know the school books all say H2O boils at 220F and freezes at 32F and all the books were written by frumpy old academics in cardigan sweaters at sea-level. Up at altitude, boiling water won't sterilize your fingers. Go ahead, dip 'em right in if you got thick skin. Well it also happens that some micro-nasties can handle way more heat that you or me or your little fingies. For some micro-nasties we need to really crank up the heat. Well, as we know, water has this desire to turn itself into vapor above it's boiling point and that is determined by altitude or more precisely, atmospheric pressure. See, down at sea level, the air is denser so it's literally PRESSING on the water, making it harder for the hydrogen and oxygen to gasify. Observing this, humans saw a need to up the atmospheric pressure so we invented the pressure cooker!

A pressure cooker simply seals in pressure and this allows us to get water to get way hotter before it gasifies and this extra heat allows us to kill of more micro-murderers than ever! The one draw back is they can explode if not properly handled or something is wrong with the cooker. That can cause life-changing injuries. Steam burns can be pretty nasty.

In canning we frequently also use chemistry to extend the shelf term of our product including salts, acids and other additives.

Pickling for preservation and storage.

Pickling involves a different trick against the micronasties. The basic form is to put perishable foods into a solution which is way acidic (low pH like below 4.6). Acidic beyond their ability to cope with life atall. Vinegar, wine, citrus juices all have this level of acidity. This method is so effective that the food (or even really the containers) you are dealing with doesn't have to be sterile when pickled. Pickling is why you don't really have to refrigerate pickles. Or relish. Or tomato catsup. Or mustard. But here's where another one of those scientific arguments start. Some point out that things like mustard (seed) and garlic and onions and stuff have chemically antimicrobial properties. And others will point out that Asian pickling methods often use salt to the point where it's more like brining or salt curing than pickling in that you have that old isotonic cellular thing happening. Who cares? I say pickling is about pH because I've already identified salting as one method and I'm going to mention additives later so that leaves the pH issue which I'm gonna call pickling till the day I die. Pickling can use sugar and sweeteners to produce decidedly un-tart and un-pickly tastes. As long as that acid content is cranked up there in solution and the acid permeates the foodstuff we have a preservation method of great past, present and future value.

Fermenting for preservation and entertainment.

Ah fermentation. What a blessed method of preservation on the one hand and condemnation on the other. It seems inappropriate to write this chapter now, I happen to be out of ferment. It's somehow dishonest of me to extol the virtues of the yeast from a detached distance. We put yeast in an environment with water, sugar, warmth and let it go crazy. By not allowing this yeast to get a fresh supply of oxygen, we force them to use up all the oxygen in the container and while they are doing this, they are also most commonly excreting alcohol. In this way we end up with an oxygen-deprived environment plus it's both acidic and toxic. So it makes a handy way of storing fruit juices longterm. A rather fun way of enjoying fruit. Rendering fruit into fermented beverages is also a way to save space if you need any more excuses. Plus, fermentation is natures way of producing carbonated beverages, so you can always say what you really wanted was a soda but all you had was cider. Fermented beverages may have other benefits such as driving away unwanted spouses and children.

At any rate, you can ferment just about anything, not just fruit. Pumpkins, potatoes, corn, just 'cause it ain't sweet don't mean it don't got sugar. Of course, there are tastier things to drink, but the scenario with pumpkin wine is you ended up with too many pumpkins and didn't want them to go entirely to waste. Of course at that rate you might just want to go the final mile and run it though a still. Gets the pain over with faster and to possibly better medicinal effect.

I guess it should be noted that alcohol itself has been used as a preservative, especially with fruits. I've seen this in European techniques like dropping whole fruits into liquors like schnapps. It's basically a hybrid of candying and pickling. Since the flavor and color of the fruit itself is pretty much ruined I'd consider this a novelty. Booze and fruit to me, it's either fancy like cherries jubilee or the good old white-lighting-saturated watermellon but either way that's a fresh thing.

Tinctures, extracts and essential oils as preservation methods.

Here's something that works for medicinal herbs and nice smelling things as well as it does for food. With tinctures and extracts, we use alcohol to dissolve and carry the flavorful and scented oils from plant material. For our purposes, tinctures and extracts are the same thing. In the case of essential oil, these oils are steamed and them distilled from the plant material. Both methods will preserve the flavor and aroma of the essential oil in the plants. The preservation aspects for oils is that we're removing water. With tinctures we're dissolving the oils in something most microscopics hate, alcohol.

Hanging many herbs and medicines upside down in our cool, dark, dry storage environment is sufficient for a year. After this point the oils in the plants begins to break down to the point where it's "virtues" are diminished. Essential oils, tinctures and extracts preserve much of these virtues for years.

It should be noted that essential oils (arguable more stable and storable than herbal tinctures and extracts), their flavor or aroma isn't 100% stable over time. Sometimes it gets better or looses a certain something, that's purely dependent upon your preference. Some oils like sandalwood and my favorite, vetiver get deeper and more musky with age.

Essential oils in particular can help concentrate the medicinal effect of many medicinal herbs, particularly those that are applied topically. In the cases of rosemary and clove, the two herbal patron-saints for gum and tooth hurts, there's hardly any way to get enough of them where you want them. A touch of the oils twice a day brings immediate and lasting relief.

Essential oils, tinctures and extracts obviously store very well, they take up very little space and they make for very lucrative trade items. We escape most of the problems of mold and fungus which will rob our medicinal plants of their virtues with essential oils. Plus they are ready for immediate use at any time.

Used in cooking, a little goes a long way. Naturally we get more oil from oily plant materials like almonds. A touch of almond oil in baking can do wonders. With things like flowers you might think it's hard to tell what has more oil but your nose knows. If the flower has a distinct and full aroma, it's oils in that plant carrying that scent to your smeller. Rose, carnation, all pungent flowers yield reasonably well. Woods such as cedar are another example.

The Heartmagic essential oil still. One of the best setups we've seen.

Essential oil still.

Tinctures and extracts can be made fairly easily in the kitchen using a range of types of alcohol including booze if nothing else is handy. Moonshine (everclear) works well. Other spirits such as gin, vodka and even whiskey can result in some very interesting flavors which you might find you like. Or not. Never use rubbing alcohol, wood alcohol or anything not specifically food-grade is you intend to ingest en extract. Tinctures and extracts can be done in small quantities so there's no harm in experimenting. You can use tincturing to get a rough idea of what scents to together if you want to design fragrances. This saves a lot of effort in deriving essential oils to experiment with.

Please note that we don't want infants and tinctures or oils mixing. We feel they are just too powerful for little bodies. Some herbs like pennyroyal and wormwood are know and powerful abortives and the oils are way more powerful. We probably don't want pregnant women making oils unless they are known-benign like chamomile.

Dry goods packaging, nitrogen, desiccants & oxygen absorbers for storage.

As previously discussed, dry goods like grains and beans were historically packed into sacks that allowed for air flow and ventilation through the product in storage. Things in barrels, jars and things that were not likely to show any surface moisture were often packed into the same areas, but my preference is to store these apart. Bottled or jarred fluids and handing meats that have any chance of sweating do not belong with drygoods storage.

Industrial packagers of long term storage food are able to pack foods in inert gasses. Stuff like nitrogen that does nothing really but take up the space that oxygen or CO2 would have taken up, and which are also necessary for most of the micro nasties to survive. Foods like this are packaged into airtight containers like buckets or mylar bags, nitrogen is introduced which displaces all the atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide and the container is sealed up quick before anything escapes or gets into it. This has been shown to vastly increase the life term of food in storage. It's how they get those "salad in a bag" things at supermarkets to hold up these days. Those bags are full of nitrogen. I have trouble seeing how this is a practical technique for most of us at home but nowadays we also oxygen absorbing agents you can throw into your buckets and bags. I'm told these work well but I'm not sure how to calculate how much oxygen is present in various containers for various foods at various grinds or millings. I'm a little more sure about the little desiccant packages because we CAN calculate moisture content. The couple of desiccants I looked at, they absorb their own volume in water so that puts their usage into perspective. There are color-shifting desiccants that allow you to tell when they've absorbed all the moisture they can. Something tells me if you are relying on desiccants your overall strategy is failing.

Long term food storage containers.

The containers we got these days are pretty awesome as compared to burlap sacks and wooden barrels. From sealable plastic containers that actually do resist UV radiation to resealable mylar we have some great packaging. I'm not too sure how the environment feels about this packaging but for our survival purposes it's pretty nifty. Your selection of storage containers and methods has much to do the humidity in your environment or locale. The burlap and canvas sacks we used to use for grains had the advantage of being able to breathe which is great if the air is as dry as you want your grain. This strength becomes the downfall with moisture and all kinds of contaminants can make it in too. Mice can nibble right through them and do their dirty work. So sacks and baskets are still great for low-humidity, pest-free storage areas. And thanks to the miracles of modern science, we have lots of other options available for long term storage today that work well in all environments. Many of these can be had for free.Pay attention to warning labels on containers. Don't use nasty chemical containers for food storage.

Mylar bags for food storage.

Mylar is the shiny plastic stuff that everybody is making bags from these days. Mylar is expensive but it has the advantage of being resealable with heat. A household steam iron can be used to seal and reseal mylar bags. So if you package your food into separate bags within mylar, you should be able to re-use the mylar bags again and again. They slowly get trimmed down over time with repeated openings and sealings, but by the time you are down to teabag-size pouches you really know you've gotten the last penny out of them. Mylar bags are sealed with heat-sealers but can also be resealed with your clothing iron (just put down newspaper over the area you want to seal, the iron will melt they mylar if direct contact is made). Like many modern materials, mylar doesn't's stand up to UV radiation very well so keep your mylar out of the sunlight. Mylar bags make excellent bucket liners because they are truly air-impermeable. Properly prepared foods packed in mylar with dessicants and oxygen absorbers give us optimum shelf life.

A note on trash bags: NOT food grade. Many of them have pesticides in them. None of our food should ever see the inside of a garbage bag.

5 gallon buckets.

It's easy to make the point that all these plastics in our environment are pollutants. 5 gallon buckets are some of the handiest pollutants ever devised. We use them for planting, storage of everything from nuts and bolts to food, they can be helpful in constructing all kinds of furniture (turn one over and it's a chair), for mixing concrete, they have handles, they are big enough to be meaningful when full but not so big as to break your back. Make an old fashioned yoke out of a 2x4 and see how much dirt or water you can move in a day, you'll be amazed. They are wonderful pollutants to have around.

These buckets come in "food grade" and non-food grade. Obviously, we want food grade buckets for food and water. These can be scored from local restaurants, school kitchens, hotels and such. The bigger the kitchen the larger the types of containers they might let you have. Always score the lids with the containers. It's well worth the trouble to ingratiate yourself to the chef. Show up at scheduled times to pick things up and leave the garbage disposal areas of kitchens neat and organized. We have to make ourselves welcome guests over the long term, not unwelcome pests in the short term.

Always get airtight lids for your buckets. Again, mylar bags make excellent bucket liners as many platics aren't truly air-impermeable. With this type of setup, by using oxygen absorbers, you can get something like a 7 year shelf life for dry goods.

Mark your food-grade buckets clearly so they don't get mixed in with the tool buckets.

50 gallon and 55 gallon food storage containers.

The big blue and white drums. Again, we want to pay special attention to warning labels on these containers, but these babies are great when you get 'em with their lids. Like their 5-gal little brothers, these things can be used for infinite applications. Rain barrels, general storage, planting pots, roofing material, the list goes on. I saw a Youtube of a guy that made rotors for wind turbines using plastic 55-gal buckets.

Buckets and barrels for long term food storage are readily available for purchase but if you are spending money on them, make sure you get air-tight lids. Remember that many plastics aren't considered to be truly air-impermeable. Refer to mylar above.

"Food storage units".

Food storage unit seems to be a modern term, one that came along with the commercialization of "long term food storage products". The idea is that you are getting a nutritionally balanced variety of foods for a given number of people for a given amount of time. I will not hesitate to say that many of these look REALLY, REALLY GOOD to me, both in terms of price and described quality. Which one is best? That depends on your requriements. What's most important to you? If you live in a small apartment you want compact. If you are well off you can afford convenience and variation. If you are way self reliant you probably want foods in the most "whole" form. You might demmand all-natural or even organic food supplies. You might pick whichever one is least expensive. At this time we'd like more input from you readers who have bought these types of packages so we can do more comparison. So for now, we have a couple reviews of food storage units in our "Other resources" section all the way at the bottom.

What we're looking for in a food storage unit is primarily calories and the daily RDA% for things like protein, carbohydrates, essential vitamins and minerals as well as dietary fiber, something the more expensive freeze-dried or MRE-type plans lack. It's good to back all of these units up with a multivitamin. The dehydrated units all pretty much accept that you will need some amount of vegetable oil to supplement them (oil doesn't tolerate storage for long).

The value of some of these food storage units is fantastic, but supply is becoming unpredictable. I can also promise you that prices are going up, up, up over time. Buy now, save later. Again, check the resources section for our current recommendations.

Another interpretation of "food storage unit" is a storage system. Given what we've discussed, I think the underground shipping container with the straw boxes & etc. inside are pretty freaking state-of-the-art. Anything larger gets into the definition of "underground complex" or "barn" or "silo" (which can be an underground complex used for firing missiles or an above ground one used for storing grain. I see no reason a missile silo couldn't be a heck of a root cellar too). There are underground systems such as the "Groundhog" which is like a big metal box with a sealed lid that you bury in the ground and there are some really big plastic containers, often on wheels that suit mass storage. Or the ones they drop out of airplanes on parachutes. The Groundhog might be the only thing in the scale and scope of our discussion.

Cramming food down people's mouths as a means of general preservation.

A sort of last-ditch preservation technique is barter, trade or gift. Better to give and make friends than allow a morsel to go to wastage. In this way we seek to convert food energy into another type of energy or resource. Don't let your storage go so long it runs out of term. Sample your foods regularly. And learn every culinary trick to prevent food fatigue which is where you get so bored of eating the same thing every day you almost want to cry at mealtime. Humans crave variation in foods, possibly because our bodies know all the various nutrients we need come from variety. There are very few foods on Earth that can be considered "nutritionally complete" in the survival sense. No single food can sustain humans for their reasonable life expectancy which I'd put at anything above 45 years.

A comparison chart of shelf life or storage terms of foods in storage.

OK so you guys get the idea that putting things into a table is kind of misleading right? It's not just the method, it's the food itself, it's moisture content, it's pH level (acidity), temperature, all kinds of things so this table is just kind of ballparks right?

MethodTerm
Fresh whole milk kept out of sun and heatMaybe a week
Fresh laid eggs kept out of sun and heatCouple weeks
Fresh cheeses kept out of sun and heatMaybe a month
Waxed hard cheesesYears.
Home dried and properly stored1 year
Properly canned1-3 years
Properly dehydrated5-15 years
Properly dehydrated and mylar packed with the dessicants and oxy absorbers20 years
Freeze dried30 years
Anasazi beans in a cliffside granary500+ years
Viable seeds in Egyptian toombs3000+ years

Kinda wild when seen in a table eh? Kinda puts it in perspective eh? "Long term storage" of food ranges from later today until later in the evolution of our species. Just remember what you've read to this point. If you skipped ahead, everybody who read all the boring stuff before this is calling you a cheater. Refer to the introduction, this information can get you killed if you don't use it properly. Everybody these days is over-programmed to seeing information reduced into a cookbook or a table or a chart or a graph. If you did your reading to this point you know how to interpret the table above. And if this is you, continue reading. If not, go back to the end of the line.

If you read this far, CONGRADS! YOU KNOW A WHOLE LOT MORE THAN YOU DID WHEN YOU STARTED!

Yup, if you read all of this and understood it, you know a lot more than you think you do. You know a lot more than almost anybody you know. I did tell you, way back up there, that it was a good thing you weren't going anywhere for a while. Anyways, you did it, you got to here. That's the course. From here it's mostly extra-credit stuff. Congrads, graduates! Nice job, we appreciate ya. Go out there and share it. Save lives.

What about water? Storage, purification, filtration.

Really important stuff, water is. Not only do we die within days without it, if all you are storing is dehydrated or freeze dried, you are kinda bumming without water. Women tend to dislike men who don't have access to water to wash our smelly bodies in. Water, we are told, has a "double-tail" but we said "we already knew that". Then the chemists explained that water has double-tail because it has a positively and negatively charged side and we said "we knew that". And the chemists further explained that makes water a handy solvent for both water and fat and we said "we already know that" and finally the chemists asked how we know that and we explained "because water is female and not only is she handy, we die without her and with regrets". The Joes know that regret is the true bitch in life. Water is many things, lifesaver, destroyer, she's pretty much what a woman is. Regret is worse and regretting lack of water is just a plain cruel way to die.

This is one section we're tying to get Moccasin to fill out with some science but he's too reticent all the sudden. All we got is your literal "last ditch" teachings.

Water can be stored for fairly long periods if we follow the same general rules: keep it cool, keep it out of sunlight. Additionally, moving water is better off than still water. There's still lots of micro-nasties that seem to do swell in water, even in the dark and seemingly with nothing to eat. To counter this we have purification techniques such as boiling and antimicrobial agents like bleach (chlorine) and iodine. Some commercially packaged "survival water" is actually irradiated. I suppose we could literally can water just like we can vegetables, and radiological protocols (like after a nuclear bomb) describe drinking water only from glass containers with non-metallic, radiation-proof lids. Good like finding those at the supermarket.

There can be no doubt that a good filter is necessary for all of us. The Berkey's have an excellent reputation, I've used them, everybody I know has one. They are expensive but even just the Sport Berkey is better than nothing. I have no idea how competitive systems stack up in terms of their filtering capabilities. Side-by-side comparisons are hard to find. More expensive reverse-osmosis systems are fantastic until the power goes out. Berkeys are gravity fed. I'd get a Berkey or similar filter first.

Tobacco the poor man's disinfectant water purifier.

To a river ecosystem, a lot of the things we consider to be micronasties are microgoodies. All the little creatures you see booking around are eating even littler ones you can't see. A butt can neutralize 100 feet of river microfauna and microflora. If you see anyone flicking cigarette butts into natural water, chastise them severely for this reason. All the crawfish will be bumming out and the bass will be all bumming out because the crawfish are bumming out and so on.

To us in terms of water, tobacco is just plain skippy! We're gonna seriously have to try and determine exact dosages but our way was about two teabags worth, maybe a good smoke or two's worth of tobacco will do for a 50 gallon drum. But this would obviously be effected by the level of contamination. The only time we used it in the mountains was when we were close to waters that were fed by swamps, by still water. Too much tobacco and you will have a pretty good bout of nausea. Too little and the micro-meanies might get ya and put you through worse. We don't really know how much tobacco for how much water under what degree of contamination. So we tend to back it up with another technique, water filtration.

UV or ultraviolet purification of water.

With the tobacco and the methods described below, one thing we didn't know traditionally is how effective sunlight is in purifying water. Many of the micro-nasties that we've discussed can't handle sunlight, particularly bacteria. Exposure to direct sunlight in a glass jar for 3-4 hours will significantly reduce bacterial and many viral and fungal agents in water.

Heat and water purification.

With the above on UV water purification, heat, boiling water will kill almost all bacteria and most other biological problems with water. Humans have recently gone deep into oceans and found microscopic and macroscopic life huddling around magma vents in the ocean floor and they can withstand heat and pressure like nothing on our surface of the Earth, so we don't worry about them too much. But boiling and UV and all of these, when we're confronted with the ugly possiblity of water starvation, we go to whatever extreme necessary. Read on, we gang these techniques up and use them together wherever we can.

Poor man's water filter.

When we talk water purification, we're talking about killing all the nasty bugs that might be in it. With filtration we're trying to strain them out. With filtration we can also try to remove chemical contaminants. No filter is perfect because water, being two hydrogens and an oxygen molecule, is larger than many contaminants, so a filter with large enough pores to let water pass will also let many chemicals and metals and nasty inorganic stuff pass through. Now if you are well-to-do, you have a nice, state-of-the-art reverse osmosis filtration system in the basement, no worries. For the rest of us, keeping not only a stock of good water around but keeping THE ABILITY TO PURIFY WATER and PURIFY IT ON THE FLY becomes critical. And we can use some of the stuff that expensive commercial systems use. Here we go.

We use sand and charcoal as our primary filters. If you want to use undied natural fabric like cotton as an additional filter, even paper towels from the dispenser in the truck stop bathroom, swell. We just don't want to use tissues with chemical scents or things in them. Now if you don't have charcoal, break out your flint, steel and tinder and get busy making some by burning wood. Hardwoods work best as they have less oils and resins in them so the hardwood charcoal comes out "thirstier" than softwoods like pine, spruce or fir. But at the end of the day, charcoal is charcoal and it has amazing filtration properties.

It's gotta be more than the microporous nature of charcoal. The stuff just begins drinking stuff like solvents and many chemical toxins right out of the air. I've heard coal called the "liver of the Earth" because somebody had a spiritual or intuitive understanding of this somewhere along the road and we realized it might have a lot to do with purifying our water down inside of the Earth where the rock water comes from. We're using it regardless and this is how. We make a tripod and we hang a series of stick platforms from it. We hand as many of these platforms as we can. The paper goes down on top of the stick platforms if you have paper. If not, perforated skunk-cabbage leaves or birch bark will do and if you don't have any of those things, don't use those things. All we really need is sand and charcoal. So the sand is there for rough-screening and the charcoal for fine. We can layer sand and charcoal as many times as we want on all the platforms but it's traditional to end with charcoal so the last thing the water passes though is the purifying power of charcoal. Once we have it set up, we pour or drip the water slowly onto the top platform, being careful not to wash the sand and charcoal down, and we let it dripple down though all the platforms and layers and catch it in a bucket or folded skunk cabbage lear or can or plastic bag below. Boiling the water before running it down the filter obviously massively helps us neutralize micro-meanies too. You can set up as many of these filter tripods that you want but we generally don't pass water through the same tripod more than once. I don't know if that's our "superstition" or science, but we kind of want to cycle the water through new, cleaner tripods rather than running them though the same one. And however many tripods and however much charcoal you run it through, what comes out at the end you drink. Because if you weren't desperate you wouldn't have gone through all this hassle to begin with so it's the water you have and it's the water you will drink.

There are a couple other things we're experimenting with that you might want to hybridize into this filtration method. There are some arguments going on about this but use your own judgement in the circumstances. One is aeration. It was said that a rushing river could purify itself of biological contaminants such as fecal matter in 100 feet. I'm not atall sure how to quantify this as in how much aeration and at what level of atomization or misting does what good. And I'm not sure how to aerate water in the field. And if you could, in the desert, you'd be loosing so much water to evaporation you might get nothing back. My jury is out on aeration but I'd try it if I had no other methods. Another one is UV light, the stuff that comes from the sun. Now we know the sun is the enemy of long term food storage and there's lots of things like algae that love the sun. But there's lots of bacteria that HATE the sun. Like the bacillus or streptococci we might find with fecally contaminated water. Setting water out with no cap in a clear glass jar in the sun will neutralize many bacteria. It's not as sure as boiling but if you can't make fire, UV is the way to go.

Summary on field water purification techniques.

Folks, this is one of those things we hesitated to tell you because we don't really want anybody trying to drink swamp water. There's lots of things in ground water these days that we can't really filter so don't trust any one of these techniques, USE THEM ALL TOGETHER WHEREVER YOU CAN. If you can, strain it, expose it to UV, boil it, filter it, hit it with tobacco. Just save the charcoal filtration for last so you can try and filter out whatever our antibiological agents can't get out.

Appendices: Industrial food preservation techniques, other resources.

Industrial long term storage techniques: pasteurization, homogenization.

Right around the time when people figured out they were dying in large numbers in France, this French dude was sitting around wondering why. Being a Frenchman, he reasoned that it had to be either the wine or the cheese. Happily for Frenchmen, it turned out the cheese, or dairy, was the problem and they could continue merrily getting soaked while figuring out how to tweak the cheese. A guy called Pasteur came up with the answer. You heat stuff up to a point and it does something to make it stop killing people. Yup. Turns out for most micro-nasties, temperatures around 140 F just totally bum them out. To the point where they self destruct. Same thing would happen to you and me if we were 140 F. We'd be dead, cooked. It's a major advantage of cooking things. Homogenization is pretty different. The term "the cream rises to the top" refers to days before homogenization when cream on milk would literally float up to the top of the bottle. This high butterfat-content cream was highly susceptible to infection. Homogenization renders this into lower levels of overall fat content. Generally survivalists are gonna want dehomogenization of milk because then you can obtain cream and from cream make butter and really nice rich cheeses.

Industrial long term storage techniques: additives, preservatives, stabilizers, fixers.

Not all of them are bad. Ascorbic acid is a very helpful preservative in canning. So is sodium nitrate (salt). There are gums we use as stabilizers to prevent separations, emulsifiers that do the same. Some of them are ok in my opinion. The rest of it you can take back to the fine folks in DC at the FDA and tell them to cream their own coffee with it. But don't be afraid to use our own foods as their own additives in the pickling and canning traditions. Worried about a soup? Up the acidity. pH test strips are kinda scientifical but they are cheap and easy to read. Serious canners use 'em these days so you should too.

Industrial long term storage techniques: irradiation.

How could we discuss longterm food preservation and storage techniques and not talk about irradiation? We can't tell how much of our supermarket food is irradiated these days because the fine folks at the FDA decided it wasn't important we label such foods. But by subjecting foods of all types, grains, dairy, meat, anything, to the radiation coming from spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants, we can kill all of the bio-nasties. So food can then be sealed and much like canning, it can last a long, long time. Besides that I think this practice is idiotic and bound to have bad consequences, I have nothing more to say about it.

The End. Pretty much.

At least for now. We'll be revising this every now and then as the Spirit directs us. Filling in some more details. It's sort of supposed to turn into a home-and-field guide which people refer to while actually living this lifestyle. We'd be very glad if you linked to this page or shared the link with your friends. It might not get much better from here but it probably won't get much worse.

Other resources.

A comparison of two leading "food storage units" or "food storage kits".

I'd like to get a comparison chart of different food vendors going because it's so hard to figure out what the "best" deals are. Until then, a couple vendors stick out in my mind for various reasons.

Walton Feed has been in this business for a lot longer than it's been fasionable. I have heard of some problems with delivery, but they are among the first to put together all-natural units that were designed by a nutritionist. For years, their site and it's info has been a resource to all food-storers. Their Deluxe 1-year supply delivers 2830 calories per day and has nice variation.

Another outfit that caught my attention is Pleasant Hill Grain with their one-year food storage unit coming in at 2820 calories per day.

Both of the units above are highly cost-competitive and bring our cost-per-day for food down to around $4.00. I don't expect to see many deals better than these. Note that each of these vendors has cheaper "basic" food units but man, do they ever lack variation and niceties. Myself, I always find myself skipping ahead in the list of foods to see if they have some form of chocolate. If I got a week or so without some kind of chocolate I kinda feel deprived. Like there ain't no little special thing in my life. Kids also crave nice sweet things like dried fruits so you have to pay attention to the little stuff. And both of the units above are dehydrated, vegetarian units delivering maximum value for the dollar. What might make the difference to me? Calling both vendors before I buy and making sure they have everything in stock and can deliver in a predictable period. Folks, this market has got really competitive and organized but more and more people are buying this stuff so supply is becoming a bit unpredictable. Also, what containers they come in. These days I favor buckets over cans. Cans rust. That's a bad thing. At this point I can't be bothered to compare freeze-dried food units because if you are talking freeze-dried, you can afford it. If you want middle-of-the-road, get one of these dehydrated units and supplement it with some freeze dried goodies.

How many calories do I need per day?

Very good question. In the 2800 range for men and around 2000 for women AT NORMAL LEVELS OF OUTPUT. In stress situations, add 15% more. With hard work, 15% more above that. In extreme cold, another 20%. See, depending on your situation, your nutritional requirements can seriously fluctuate. Not to mention the fact that stressed people tend to want to munch out because it's reassuring to them.

An often uderstated benefit of these rawer forms of food units is that you are getting grains and legumes that can not only be ground into flour and baked, they can be sprouted to give you fresh vitamins and minerals. Sprouting is really easy and cheap. No freezedried kit can give you a fresh salad.

Final note on economy, overall foods from these types of suppliers have gone up about 30% from what they were 5 years ago making them AN ABSOLUTE STEAL in this cost-per-calorie range. 30% is the LOW END of price inflation in food. I'd bet the reason we're not seeing even higher prices for these storage food units is that this industry is getting more competitive and more efficient. Plus, we are highly efficient consumers that demand top quality and bottom price. I can absolutely PROMISE you that food prices will continue to rise and so will these storage food units.

There is another thing our bro MOT has been laying down for us, we can start to buy shipping containers full of things like wheat or barley or rye but no mixing. Whole container loads of packaged grains. And we drop them in various cities where people can pick it up their own cars and trucks and save on shipping costs as well as get in on a really good deal. The trouble with MOT is that you never know where he is or what he's up to.


This is my buddy Brian Frank's thing. It seems a lot of people we know are getting into programs like this. With this program you can get into the MLM scheme or just buy the product. I looked at signing up to get my 3 free meals but I've never participated in an MLM scheme. I didn't feel like starting today but if and when I do, you can bet it will be with Brian Frank.

The folks at Bushcraft On Fire make really neat videos on bushcraft and outdoor living. If we did videos they might look kinda like these.

We'd be honored if you shared this page with friends.

If you have friends who make preparedness products, shoot us a line using the email address described below. Some of the stuff in our advertising collumn is just that: ads served from Google or whatever. We're more interested in including friends and people who actually produce things for themselves. Tell them to get in touch, don't be shy. We're all in this together.