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What dried good items do you folks purchase for your food storage?

8K views 61 replies 27 participants last post by  kappydell 
#1 ·
I was wondering what you folks by dry good wise for your food storage system? Do you buy like oats, beans and spaghetti.
 
#49 ·
"Dehydrate any peppers outside, there are fumes."

True that. Onions too.
Actually I do most dehydrating outside in the summer, to keep the heat out of the house. Sometimes when it's too humid outside, I do have to bring the dehydrator inside in the a/c (much reduced humidity) to finish up a batch.
 
#55 ·
Rodents can even chew through cement board. Buckets are pretty thin but I think to chew on, rodents need an edge to get a bite on so the top edge is where they go. I think the rounded sides are too big and smooth for them. But that's a guess, if anyone has had buckets attacked I'd be interested in how. I have never had buckets attacked but have had plastic chewed on, not to get to food but chewing is just what rodents do.
 
#57 ·
Yep, they like to chew. I don't see plastic except as a short term barrier that is easily cleanable. I've seen them chew and open some pickle buckets decades ago in a restaurant store room. Rat got more than he bargained for there, but cleaning it all out I also saw the round buckets also made nice nesting areas too. I'll stack buckets up now, but never side by side.

Banking on round buckets misses that the tops, lips, and bottoms have edges.

I think that it's the lack of a lure that is the best alternative to metal. No smells from well sealed and cleaned mylar put in clean containers on clean racks in a cleanable room with pest control measures.
 
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#58 ·
Rodents can be very determined, however I do not store foodstuffs in areas that I do not check often and that my cats do not have access to. Good barn cats excel at rodent & snake patrol, and love to climb among food storage containers. I have more trouble with humidity, at least I did until I researched methods for preenting rusting on metals. A thin coat of food grade mineral oil keeps rust at bay, so my canned goods store at least twice as long. Six years and counting. I think part of the 'secret' to reliable food storage is not to put it away somwhere you never go, and never check on it or use it.

If you follow the basic tenet of storing what you eat, and rotate your stock by eating what you store, you can keep tabs on potential problems and prevent same while learning to use stored foods & keeping them fresher.
While it is true that not all foods store 20 years, those shorter-storing foods are simply rotated more frequently. Easy-peasy. Of course, it does help to have a recipe collection of ways to use those stored foods, and it helps to know how to cook under various austere conditions (it is fun to practice open fire cooking anyway) but some times I think folks are making it far more complicated than it needs to be (aided and encouraged by the food storage companies who are profit driven (and dont mind stretching the truth to get you to buy the more expensive storage items versus the common feed store grains or brocery items which cost far less. Packaging them in mylar with O2 absorvers is easy to do at home, and plastic bulk pails are readily available from wal mart among other places. (You only need FOOD GRADE if you do not use mylar or food grade liners) OK, I guess that makes me a cheapskate....so be it. I like my own cooking and recipes better than the pre-made freeze dried foods anyway, and I like knowing what is in those canned goods I personally put up. I can use the money I save for other preps, like traps or ammo.

To go back to the original question, I buy the bulk of my food preps at the feed stores (whole corn, whole wheat), grocery stores (shop the sales for converted white rice, pasta, legumes, flour, sugar, salt and the like), and only order mylar & oxy absorbers. The cost of shipping more than doubles the already high prices of pre-packaged storage foods and are not worth it for me. I have more time than money and will put up foods myself. We use plastic pails, the storage items with the pound down tops and oxygen absorbers; the currently being used foods are in gamma lidded pails, or in locking heavy duty totes readily accessible to the kitchen, and the actual in the process of being used goods are in 3 quart plastic jugs (cranapple juice jug, recycled) or in 2 liter soda bottles that handle and pour easily for cooking and they keep nicely in the kitchen close at hand. A serach of OLD cookbooks that actually teach cooking, not meal assembly, helped me to collect a base of recipes using the longest storing staples effectively (Oil, for example, goes bad a lot faster than solid shortening; sourdough will effectively make your bread making yeast last forever - I know, I kept some going for 6 months during a job layoff, LOL.) You can do a lot more than you think using basic grocery store pantry staples, so they are my biggest go-tos.
 
#60 ·
Good barn cats excel at rodent & snake patrol........If you follow the basic tenet of storing what you eat
Not everyone can have or wants a cat. You don't need a cat to store food. Cleanliness and barriers serve better than a cat.

Preppers do not need to see "store what you eat" as fundamental dogma. They just need a rotation and QC plan. Eating fresh food is far more common and likely better for your gut biome.

It seems that preppers get hung up on group think conventions without examining the difficulties and the actual needs. Sometimes the right answer is one level up and more flexible that the rote dogma.
 
#59 ·
I have no rodent worries myself. My store room is stuccoed, not plastered, but cement stuccoed, inside and out and virtually air-tight. You feel significant air resistance opening and closing the 8" thick door. I just put in two small metal soffit vents as sometimes I use it as a guest room. I don't even get spiders in there.

I really like stucco for pest proofing since anything like irregular fitting boards, etc doesn't matter, you just stucco over it and make a single pest proof surface that keeps out even the smallest insects.
 
#61 ·
I knew an old stucco guy. He used to rail on about modern so-called stucco. Hand him a beer and wind him up.

It was amusing but he wasn't wrong. He never got the volume of work he wanted but he got the older rich folks calling him. They passed his name around between them. So his bills got paid. But I think his true unstated gripe was that he got no work on middle class new home construction. He felt everyone wanting stucco should have it done right and not the fake trash he kept seeing in the new neighborhoods.
 
#62 ·
Dogma, schmogma....I never follow blindly, but test everything to see if it suits MY situation. I agree with you IamZeke, not everyone can use my methods, I just say how I do it. My ways wont work for everyone, but maybe give them some ideas they can modify to fit their situation I use the store what you eat concept as an easy way to naturaly rotate stored foods, and get used to eating sorage type foods ahead of actual need. (Id sure hate to break out the sgtorage food and find out I loathed eating it!) But I expect others to modify my ideas to suit their own situation.
 
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