Basic Food Storage: Long-Term Food STORAGE

As you gather food for your family, you begin to wonder how best to store it.  Sooner or later, you run out of shelf space in the pantry and realize the food is going to have to be stored somewhere else. Fortunately or not, there is no one size fits all solution to storing food.  There are several factors to be taken into account, and what you choose really needs to be adapted to your specific situation.  As all these factors are pretty much equal in importance, the order in which they're presented is irrelevant. 

1.  Where do you live?  Is it a desert?  Then plastic is great and you have no concerns about rusting cans.  Or is it an area of moderate or high humidity?  So plastic won't be as perfect and cans have to be protected from rusting.  Likewise, dehydrated items can't just be stored in Ziploc bags; moisture will eventually get in.  Vacuum sealing in glass is required.  Do you live in earthquake country?  Plastic is better, and glass needs to be protected as much as possible from breakage.

2.  Where are you going to store this food?  If it's going under the bed, or especially if it will be replacing your box springs, you'll want cases or buckets perfectly uniform in height.  (Unfortunately, jumping on the bed will no longer be any fun.)  If it's going in the basement or crawl space, you need to be more concerned about protection from moisture and rodents.  Can food safely be stored in your attic or garage?  Well, it depends on how hot those places get.  Sugar and salt aren't affected by changes in temperature and don't even need to be rotated (well, ok, iodized salt should be rotated if you want your salt to stay iodized).  Honey will crystallize at cooler temperatures, but it doesn't need to be rotated, either.  These items can be stored in your least accessible locations.

Unless you live in a desert, do not store plastic buckets directly on cement or concrete--moisture builds up underneath the buckets.  (Even if you do live in a desert, plastic apparently shouldn't go directly cement or concrete.  For twenty years we stored all our buckets directly on the garage floor and never noticed any condensation beneath the buckets nor an off taste to the contents of those buckets.)  Plastic is not actually perfectly impermeable to water, so put 2x4's under your buckets to let air circulate below.  For that matter, #10 cans also should not go directly on concrete or cement--the cardboard absorbs moisture and rusts out cans.  We didn't realize this when we moved from the desert to the insanely humid Midwest and lost quite a few cans to rusting.

If you don't live in a desert, long term storage cans should be dipped in paraffin--both ends--to prevent rusting.  If you are storing them in cardboard boxes, the whole can should be dipped in paraffin--cardboard just wicks too much moisture to the cans and the cans can rust from the sides as well--anywhere they make direct contact with the cardboard.

3.  How old are you?  How much strength do you have?  Buckets are usually four, five, or six gallons.  A four-gallon bucket holds about 27 pounds of wheat.  Are you going to be able to maneuver those buckets around?  It's not much of a problem when the buckets are filled with oats, but sugar is an entirely different matter.  A four-gallon bucket is easier to move than a six-gallon bucket.  For some people, buckets are easier to move than cases of #10 cans.  (Side note:  If you are using buckets, you are really going to want a few bucket wrenches.  They're cheap, and a critical tool as we age and finger strength wanes.)

How far are the buckets from the kitchen?  Will you be able to access the bucket easily when you need it?  I keep all the basics in buckets with gamma lids in the pantry, but if the buckets weren't convenient, I'd probably store #10 cans in the kitchen.  If you can't easily access your food, you won't rotate it.  Simple as that. 

4.  Expense.  Cans are rather pricey, about one dollar per can, and that can really cut into the food budget.  For my family, when TEOTWAWKI hits and we are making everything from scratch, we'll be going through about five pounds of wheat per day.  It doesn't make sense for us to store our wheat in cans.  Buckets cost about the same as cans initially (for the amount of food that can be stored--about thirty-five pounds of wheat in six cans, or about thirty pounds of wheat in a five-gallon bucket that costs six dollars), but buckets can be re-used.  However, buckets can also be gotten for free.  I loved Price Chopper in Liberty, Missouri, for being able to get loads of buckets there.  Grocery stores with bakeries are a good possibility.  I've never had any luck getting buckets from Wal-Mart.  Doughnut shops are often your best best for free buckets.  Some people get pickle buckets from sandwich shops, but it can be really difficult to remove the odor and you might not want to risk tainting your food with eau de pickle. It will work ok in gravies and herb breads, but nobody wants essence of pickle in the chocolate chip cookies.

You can also store food (and water) in soda and juice bottles, and this option works really well for singles and small families, especially for items that you don't necessarily need in large quantities.

5.  What are you storing?  Like mentioned above, we don't store our wheat in cans--we just go through it too quickly.  We put as much as possible into buckets because we rotate our food pretty well.  But one item that never goes into anything but Mylar or #10 cans is powdered milk.  Too much light penetrates the buckets, and in this case light causes rapid deterioration in both nutritional value and taste.

Here at the ranch, we store food in every way.  Most long-term storage goes into buckets, except the milk, which is always in cans or Mylar bags.  Juice and soda bottles are for water storage.  Dehydrated foods, nuts, and spices are vacuum-sealed in canning jars.  Freeze-dried foods are in their original tins.  

This is what I do for my family.  It isn't necessarily what will work for your family.  And even what works for my family now won't necessarily work for us in ten years, when all the children are gone and when buckets become too heavy for me to handle.  I'll probably have to start using cans.  Even now arguments could be made for storing foods differently.  Maybe I should put more in plastic and less in glass due to the potential for earthquakes.  But the shelf-life of oil is much greater when stored in glass as compared to plastic.  There are so many trade-offs.  Only you can decide what is best for your situation.

11.02.18