How to Package Food for Long Term Storage

One large part of creating the emergency food store was learning how I could package food so it lasts a long time - 10, 15 maybe 20 years. In my regular food store everything, even the canned food has an expiration date so I need to rotate that food into my normal diet so that it does not go bad. This limits the amount of food I can really have. By being able to store some foods in such a way to keep them good for 10 -15 years this allows me to have a large quantity of basic staples such as rice, flour, lentils, mung beans, garbanzo beans and so on.

Food generally goes off when it reacts to oxygen, daylight and heat. This method strives to eliminate these elements to increase the life of your food.

Types of Food: I have found this method works well with non-perishables. I have personally used this method to store: rice, pasta, lentils, mung beans, beans, wheat berries, flour, corn meal, garbanzo beans.

You will need

• 5 Gallon (20x30’) mylar bag
• Oxygen Absorber 2000CC
• 1 x Food Grade Bucket - 5 Gallon with snap tight lid
• Household Iron or Heat Sealer

Instructions

• Take a mylar bag, open it up and place it in the 5 gallon food bucket with the opening upwards.
• Pour your chosen food into the mylar bag. Make sure it is not filled too high. You need to make sure that the open edges of the bag can come together relatively easy.
• Shake the bag a little to so that the food fills any air pockets at the bottom of the bag.
• Place 1x 2000CC Oxygen absorber in the bag. Please note that oxygen absorbers begin working as soon as they are out of their vacuum packet so you need to be sealing your bag relatively quickly after putting the absorber in the bag.
• Sealing the bag – I have found using a house hold iron a perfectly good way to seal my mylar bags.
• Take the open edges of the mylar bag, place them together and lay them flat on a table, or hard surface. This can be done without taking the bag out of the bucket. (My own method is to place the bucket on a chair nest to a table then have a wooden chopping board on the table that I lay the top of the bag on.)
• Turn on your iron and put it on low to medium heat. Run the iron along the open side of the mylar bag. This will make the two sides of the bag stick together. DO NOT iron all the way along but leave an opening of about 1-2 inches at the end.
• When you are ironing , iron a strip about no more than 2 inches deep ( Mylar bags are reusable so the less you have to cut open the more you will be able to reuse it). Iron from the bottom of the strip up to the opening, this helps get rid of wrinkles and creases.
• So now the open edge of your bag should be almost closed apart from 1-2 inches. Squeeze the bag so all remaining oxygen is being pushed out of the bag. Then seal the final 1-2 inches with your iron.
• Check along the seal of your bag to make sure it is sealed firmly. If not then go over it again with the iron.
• Push the bag down into the bucket and close the bucket with a snap lid.

Useful Tips

Food Buckets(food grade buckets have the symbol on the bottom with a 2 in the middle). Restaurants or supermarkets will usually have things such as frosting or pickles delivered in these. To be honest you can scour your local restaurants and supermarkets for these but it is a lot of effort to get them and clean them. I would advise against using buckets that have been previously used for other food stuffs. Yes your food will be in a sealed mylar bag but you do not want to attract rodents etc to your food store. Buckets can be picked up online fairly cheaply. Make sure the lid snaps shut tightly - I have had some dodgy lids in my time.

Mylar Bags - just make sure you get the right thickness and size. There are a couple of websites online where you can order these bags.

Oxygen Absorbers - instead of getting 2000cc you may want to get 500cc and then put 4 in per bucket. Oxygen absorbers come in vacuum sealed packets of 10,20 or 50. Once you have opened the packet you need to use the oxygen absorbers fairly quickly. You cannot reseal the packet.

Please note that these instructions are based on my experience of food storage. They do not constitute professional advice and therefore I cannot guarantee the success of your food storage endeavors. Please also visit the following video sites for comparable instructions on food storage using mylar bags.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW7_cTn6YpE

Emergency Preparedness - Food

How to Create An Emergency Food Supply

After Water, Food was the next priority. A few years ago in my housemates and I put together an emergency food supply. We bought a whole load of tins and rice and pasta, put them in bins and then forgot about them for a few years. So as you can imagine all the food had expired and was wasted.

One valuable thing I learnt from this experience is that you have to try to deal with people with where they are at. People are often enthusiastic to start with, make all sorts of promises to go into action and change their lives and so on but then events take over and before you know it you have 6 bins full of rotten food. So this time around I tried to create our food supply based on our collective regular eating habits. Having 2 months of freeze dried food sounds great but unless you live with arch survivalists, or em preppers then getting them to lay out the cash for such an investment can be really challenging.

Step 1

Was to look at the non perishable food we as a house and people in general eat on a regular basis. Cornflakes every morning, pasta once per week, pinto beans, refried beans once per week, almond milk every day and so on.

Step 2

I created a meal plan for one month based on that list of food. So 3 types of breakfast, 3 types of lunch, 3 types of snacks. I also broke down each meal into the individual items ( tinned salmon, rice etc) and the size of each portion needed for one person I then wrote up a plan and rotated them throughout the month. Below is a link to the meal plan I created.

Meal Plans For Emergency Food Supply


I have to admit that I am no Michelin chef but I figure the meals I have created would be welcomed during an emergency.

Step 3

I then broke down each meal in terms of portions. So how much rice per person per meal, how much almond milk per person per meal etc. I then calculated how much of each ingredient I would need per person for one month

Your Emergency Water Supply - Creating a Plan

n average our lives demand 30 gallons of water per person per day.Water is second only to air in terms of survival importance. I can go two weeks without food but only a matter of a couple of days without water. Creating a safe air supply in still on the drawing board so my Emergency Water Supply has to be my top priority.

When Would I Need My Emergency Water Supply
In all my preparations to start with I have tried to brainstorm under which scenarios would I need my water. Doing this allows me to create a fairly complete picture in my head of the kind of supply I need, what else I might need in addition.

One thing I have noticed with Emergency Preparedness is when thinking of scenarios my mind tends to go to the more dramatic (California will fall into the sea, terrorists will poison the water supply , nuclear explosions with contaminate the water table etc) but the more mundane possibilities tend to get overlooked.

For example I live on a well, so it is quite likely that the pump could break down, combine this with heavy snow, an industrial strike, personal sickness etc and the consequences are potentially huge.

How Much Do I Need
Well 30 gallons per person is completely not doable unless I want to fill a swimming pool. Experts suggest that you need to drink at least 2 liters of water per day. I live in Colorado so in high altitude I want to up that to between 2-3 liters, then that leaves another liter for cooking and washing - so I am calculating on 1 gallon of water per person per day.

Action Plan
So after working out how much I need and running through different scenarios I created a plan that I have compiled into the following four posts ( Click on each to take you to the post)


1) Emergency Water Supply – Creating a Plan
2) Existing Sources of Emergency Water in Your House
3) Emergency Water Storage for One Month
4)Creatng an Emergency Water Kit for Evacuation
5) Outside Sources of Emergency Water - Carrying and Filtering



Click Link to Read Next Post

Outside Sources Of Emergency Water - Carrying and Filtering

The last stage is to find out about the location of any ponds, lakes streams or rivers in the area. Have written directions/instructions on how to get there.

Carrying The Water
Lets say you have a lake nearby and can go there to get water. One of the best ways to transport the water would be in your wheelie bin that you normally use for your trash. These are highly likely to be very dirty inside so you will need a heavy plastic sheet to fit inside to keep the water as clean as possible. You will also need some buckets and perhaps a pump siphon if the water level is very low.

Filtering and Purifying the Water
Other than having my water filter these are two ways in which I found out how I could filter water.

1) Put a coffee filter in one of the funnels, pour the water through to remove any sediment or dirt. Then boil the water or add water purification tablets.

2) Cut the bottom off the coke bottle. Stuff a white sock into the neck of the bottle - allow the water to drip through the sock and the neck - this should remove all sediment and dirt then boil or add water purification tablets.

Survival Savvy Sources of Water
Lets hope it never gets this far but I have read how the arch survivalist can get water in even the driest of terrains by doing the following.

• Dig a hole and place a cup at the bottom of the hole
• Gather together as much shrubbery and plants as possible and place them around the cup in the hole.
• Cover the hole with a plastic sheet sagging over the cup. Apparently the plants expire water which collects on the plastic sheet and drops into the cup.


1) Emergency Water Supply – Creating a Plan
2) Existing Sources of Emergency Water in Your House
3) Emergency Water Storage for One Month
4)Creatng an Emergency Water Kit for Evacuation
5) Outside Sources of Emergency Water - Carrying and Filtering

Creating a Emergency Water Kit for Evacuation

So I had the water in the house covered now I needed to think about what to do if we need to evacuate the house, perhaps on foot. Ideally I wanted enough water for my room mates (+1)for 3 days but water is extremely heavy so I had to settle for 1 gallon per person. I got a large storage bin on wheels from Lowe's and then put the following items in

• 3x2.5 gallon containers filled with water.
• 7 x 16 ounce water bottles
• Water filter (I avoid filters with infra red, UV systems because they have a chip/circuit board in them and therefore rendered useless in the event of an EMP (Click here for more info on EMPs)
• 4 Funnels (varying sizes)
• 2 Foldable water Carriers ( The kind used for camping)
• Tea bags
• Styrofoam cups
• Harder plastic cups
• Siphon (pump)
• Heat pack with stove for boiling water
• Pan - for boiling water
• Waterproof matches, and lighters
• Coffee filters - (explain later)
• White socks
• Empty Coke Bottle
• Water purification tablets
• Small note pad and pens - to keep track of who has had how much water

So here is my thinking. I have one gallon of water per person which could be enough for 2 days. The smaller bottles also contain water but will be used along with the funnels to ration out water amongst the group. The water carriers are in case we find a source of water and can fill up.
Tea, styrofoam cups, heat pack stove stand and pan are for having something hot to drink
Heat Pack, Stove and Pan are also to boil water for purification purposes.
Waterproof matches and lighters for lighting the stove.

Everything else can be used for filtering/purifying water which I explain in my post Filtering Water. Be sure that the bin is on wheels and that a smaller person could pull it along.

1) Emergency Water Supply – Creating a Plan
2) Existing Sources of Emergency Water in Your House
3) Emergency Water Storage for One Month
4)Creatng an Emergency Water Kit for Evacuation
5) Outside Sources of Emergency Water - Carrying and Filtering

Emergency Water Storage for One Month

I live with room mates so we are a total of six people. With all preparations that I have done I factor in one extra person because you never know who will be visiting. So 7 people, 1 gallon per day for 30 days is 210 gallons. So what I did was get 3 55 gallon barrels from Emergency Essentials then factor in the 50 gallon water heater. We also have a bubble tank for our well which is another 10-15 gallons and we have 2x5 gallon jugs which puts us just over what we need.

If you decide to get the water barrels then you will also need a siphon, a wrench, some buckets and water purification/preservation solution which is available from Aquamira and is good for up to 5 years according to their literature. Make sure you tape the siphon, the wrench and water purification solution to the tank so they are exactly where you need them when you need them. I wrote on the date that I filled them up as well.

Other things You May Need
In an emergency one important thing is to be able to ration the water amongst the people in your house so also get 2 or 3 measuring jugs and 1 water bottle per person and a way to keep track of who has had what.

You want to be conscious about how you use the water. If people are using the water to wash themselves, or dishes, or clothes then it might be worth getting a small child's paddling pool and have people wash in that. That way you can keep the dirty water and use it for flushing the toilet.

Handy Tips
If you are eating canned vegetables then conserve the water that is in the cans and use this for cooking.

1) Emergency Water Supply – Creating a Plan
2) Existing Sources of Emergency Water in Your House
3) Emergency Water Storage for One Month
4)Creatng an Emergency Water Kit for Evacuation
5) Outside Sources of Emergency Water - Carrying and Filtering