Questions About Mylar Bags And Long Term Storage

[nu2solar]

I have a few questions regarding packing and storing food for long term.

1. Is there a site about quantities needed per person somewhere? A good recipe book for stored foods?

2. If I get the food grade 5 gallon buckets, can I do smaller mylar bags and oxygen absorbers in each one? I would like to store some food very long term..but once I open them there is no way I will be able to consume 5 gallons worth of food.

3. Do you have to have a "gama"(?) sealed top?

4. Where are the best places/prices for these items?

5. Does anyone know of a video I can watch for prepping? I retain much more by visual aid.


Thank you

[RevJammer]

Hey Nu2... thanks for the post, some questions I have had also... I have subscribed to this thread!


RJ

[Dennis G]

I have a few questions regarding packing and storing food for long term.

1. Is there a site about quantities needed per person somewhere? A good recipe book for stored foods?

2. If I get the food grade 5 gallon buckets, can I do smaller mylar bags and oxygen absorbers in each one? I would like to store some food very long term..but once I open them there is no way I will be able to consume 5 gallons worth of food.

3. Do you have to have a "gama"(?) sealed top?

4. Where are the best places/prices for these items?

5. Does anyone know of a video I can watch for prepping? I retain much more by visual aid.


Thank you

you can get food grade buckets for free from most pastry shops, they get all their goods in them and throw em away.

Buy a vacumn sealer machine, when you open the bucket vacumn seal what you dont need, or else get some mason jars and put the stuff in there...you are just keeping it from bugs and varmints...

I like gamma tops, easy to get to the stuff when you want

Google for your info... mylar bags for sale

Google for videos...videos storing rice long term...or storing beans long term

when you buy cans, buy double what you normally buy, you can quickly build a few months of food (of what you ACTUALLY eat normally) reserves just with cans... ALL canned stuff is good for a year or two....AT LEAST

I fill up a closet in the guest bedroom, not in attic, not in garage...before you know it, you are rotating your canned stuff

develop an inventory list...keep it updated...

when storms come I dont need to rush to the store...knowing that I have a few months of food on hand is a great feeling... half is in long term buckets, half in cases of canned goods bought at costco.

Life is good - good luck in your storage.

Dennis G

p.s. for recipes, go to amazon.com and search for long term food recipes, or stored food recipes...lots there...also there are many long term food sales place...google emergency food or survival food storage.

[NCLee]

Nu2solar, just my 2-cents, as I don't use the products that you mentoned for long term storage. That's for several reasons. In no particular order:

(1) I use a FoodSaver vacuum sealer with the attachment to seal canning jars. IMHO, a vacuum sealed glass jar is the best way to store most dry foods. No need for O2 absorbers has most of the air has been extracted. Mice and bugs can't penetrate the glass. Storing the jars in a dark place protects from light just as mylar film does.

(2) Vacuum sealed bags, in portions that are appropriate for the item, store well in plastic buckets without any need for further prep work. When an item is stored loose in a bucket, all of the contents are subject to anything negative, such as insects or a mouse cutting a hole in the bucket. When the contents are packed into individual packages, the likelyhood of all of the bucket's contents being comtaminated are lessened. If a mouse gets into a bag of beans on the bottom of the bucket, the rest of the beans are still OK for use as long as the bag is still intact.

(3) I don't store with the intent of packing xyz away on the shelf for 10 years. We follow the golden rule of food storage - store what you eat and eat what you store. Thus, we keep our food rotated. Buy and/or preserve when available (either in-season as in garden vegetables/venison or when on sale as in turkeys/chicken broth). Store in quantities, plus extra, that'll go to the next time availability is best. Chicken broth is an example. This goes on sale around the holidays (Nov). I buy enough then to last until the next holiday, plus extra. Between those two dates, we use the broth, thus keep pantry inventory recycled.

One important part of this is that if/when the SHTF, I'll have the freshest possible supply of food on hand to help tide us over. With any food storage method, the quality and nutritional value declines over time. If we eat what we store, we get the best from it, and rotation extends the long term best, too. (Hope that makes sense.)

Beans and rice have a 30 year shelf life, if properly stored. http://providentliving.org/content/display/0,11666,7798-1-4224-1,00.html That's great from a pack it, set it on a shelf, and forget it standpoint. However the downside is the older the beans and rice get, the harder it is to cook them. It takes more water and more fuel, when both may be scarce. Right now I have both of these stored in 2 liter sanitized soda bottles in a pantry that's been mouse proofed. That's all the storage protection, IMHO, that I need for those two products, as I'll be using them well before 1/2 of their shelf life as passed.

The link above is a good starting point to learn more about food storage. The LDS are experts on this as food storage is a part of their faith. Also download this PDF file. It's over 200 pages of information that can be the basis of your food storage program. http://athagan.members.atlantic.net/PDF/PFSFAQ4-0.pdf It covers many of your questions and will also answer many that you haven't thought about asking yet.

FWIW, I suggest that you print this out and make it a permanent part of your DIY self-sufficiency library. Set your print specs to print on both sides of the paper, set the quality to fast draft. These will cut down on the amount of paper and ink used.

In closing, hope these thoughts are useful and help you to get started.

Lee

[Southerngirl]

@ NCLee:
I tried the link http://athagan.members.atlantic.net/PDF/PFSFAQ4-0.pdf and I couldn't get it to work. I'm interested in that information as well and would like to print it... could you check it and see why it isn't working?
Thanks for sharing all that info!

[grumble]

Try this:
http://athagan.members.atlantic.net/PFSFAQ/

It takes you to the FTP index page for the site, and you can get smaller "chunks" of the PDF document.

[NCLee]

Thanks, Grumble, for chasing down the replacement link. I didn't realize the one I posted was broken. (sigh)

Here's the HTML version I found with further checking. http://athagan.members.atlantic.net/PFSFAQ/PFSFAQ-1.html#Table%20of%20Contents

FWIW, this is an example of getting information while it's still available. And to have hard copy of the most important resources. Don't know what happened to the original link I posted. In another instance, a huge site with tons of info that I used to reference has been taken down. Last I checked, the mirror site is still available, but for now much longer I don't know.

Learned this lesson with yet another site that took down their wealth of information due to a copyright disagreement resulting from a personnel change. I didn't obtain the info there, when it was available. Site dealth with subjects my grandmother would have utilized. Site was unique in that respect. Now that knowledge has disappeared.

Lee

[NCLee]

Nu2solar, just thought about another site that may be useful for you.

http://www.grandpappy.info/hself.htm

It's well worth your time to simply explore this site. Not only for food storage, but for the other aspects of self-reliance, as well.

Lee

[bookwormom]

thanks for those sites, the tire sandals look very promising. How many miles are they good for?

[nu2solar]

You guys and gals are great. Thank you for all the info and the links. I have been busy and haven't had a chance to get back here. Since DH and I got back home to TN last week, we are coming up with a very long list of how to perfect our Off Grid Home. Lots to do...and lots to research. It will be a very busy spring and summer.

Thanks again!!

[S2man]

Welcome, nu2. Ditto on everything NCLee said. Our first plateau was getting two-weeks' of food on hand. Then we seemed to reach another plateau when we had three months' on hand. At that point we didn't 'have to' buy anything, so we could just purchase items which were on sale. Our latest plateau was when we reached six months' worth, and started using buckets. Now we're buying food in 25 or 50# sacks.

Here are some of our findings and experiences:

1) Here is an LDS food-storage quantity calculator which I've found handy http://lds.about.com/library/bl/faq/blcalculator.htm . Just plug in the number of adults and children and it will give you the quantities of food needed for one year. In fact, I went to it so often that I replicated it in a spreadsheet. Then I added a column for my quantities on hand so I could inventory and compare with their recommendations. I find it useful for finding holes in my storage. e.g. OMGoodness, they say I need 40# of X, but I only have 2#.

Of course, as Lee said, store what you eat and eat what you store. Some of the recommendations from that calculator may not fit your family's diet. Also, I think their recommendations include food stuffs you will need for processing/storing your harvest. e.g., they said we need 120# of sugar. That sounded like way to much for us. But when I had determined we are using 75#/year now, then add in sugar for canning and curing, it sounds about right.

Peggy Layton has a series of Cookin' With X books: Cookin' With Home Storage, with Potatoes, with Powdered Milk, with Rice and Beans... But my wife has done fine just looking for recipes for cooking from scratch instead of from processed foods.

2) I initially bought a variety of sizes of mylar bags, intending to use them to store food in smaller usable amounts, as you said. In a 5gal bucket they are fine. But for stacking on the shelf or in the kitchen they are a pain. So we bought a bunch of air-tight canisters into which we move smaller quantities for kitchen use - 2# of this, 5# of that... They stack well in the cabinets and we can see what the contents are, instead of turning our heads sideways to read a label on a mylar bag.

3) Love the gamma seal lids. New stock is sealed in a bucket with perhaps an H2O absorber, as appropriate, and the oldest stock is being eaten out of the bucket with the gamma lid.

We've put by wheat in mylar bags, with O2 absorbers, in buckets, with the intent of 20 years storage, as we don't grind our own wheat regularly. But the rest of our buckets get rotated on about a 2-3 month basis. So a tight lid and an H2O absorber have been adequate for items such as rice and sugar. Then the gamma lid is sufficient while we use the open bucket.

As you said in No. 2, you just can't eat 5 gal. of some items before they would go bad. Like Lee, we vacuum pack more perishable items, like powdered milk and dehydrated veggies, in jars. We select the size based on how quickly we use the item.

4) Hmmm. Retail is pricey. The freebies are nice, but we go to town infrequently and couldn't find a good supply of buckets. I ended up buying food-grade buckets from a guy on ebay who works at an ice cream factory. Buckets which held raspberries or strawberries aired out quickly and lost their fruit odor.

5) Hmmm, again. I am more of a written learner. I've seen videos on youtube about individual tasks, such as sealing mylar bags, etc., but not a complete course. Sorry, I can think of videos on WHY to prep, but not how to.

Good luck, and have fun. It feels so good to see to stockpile of food, fuel, or what have you, on hand.