long term food storage

As I mentioned in my last post, it is estimated that 300lbs of grains, 60lbs of legumes, 75lbs of dry milk, 20lbs of fats, 60lbs of sugars, and 5lbs of salt could sustain the average adult for one year. My family has four people, so we need to store 4x those amounts. We decided because of taste preferences and familiarity to break it down like this:

Grains- 1,200lbs= wheat 400lbs, rice 375lbs, brown rice 25lbs, oats (quick) 200lbs, oats (rolled) 100lbs, corn 100lbs

Legumes- 240lbs= beans- black 100lbs pinto 40lbs white 60lbs, lentils 20lbs, peas 20lbs

Dry milk- 300lbs nonfat dry milk (this is actually a year supply item because it needs to be rotated unless in absolutely ideal conditions in which case it would last as long as rice)

Fats- 80lbs= oils- olive 50lbs vegetable 5lbs canola 5lbs, shortening 20lbs (these are year supply too for rotation reasons)

Sugars- 240lbs= sugar- white 150lbs brown 50lbs, honey 40lbs

Salt- 20lbs table salt

Wow, right? Don’t get overwhelmed. 25lbs of salt is $3.99 at Costco.  Boom! Done with a whole category! =o] Seriously though, just take it one step at a time. Start with the items that you don’t need special equipment to prepare, would only need water to make, and are already familiar to your family- like rice. Building food storage takes time. So make a plan (including a budget!) and stick to it.

Just a little side note about my legumes section: I have never cooked with lentils or dry peas. Once I try out some recipes these percentage divisions may change. They are both valuable to have for sprouting, even if we don’t actually use them to cook with though, so again, I’m just going to have to see how my experiments go…

I feel like I need to do some explaining about oxygen absorbers here. I didn’t know much about them, but after a little research and practice I feel more confident. Here is a site that was especially helpful: http://www.sorbentsystems.com/o2absorbers_1.html

To know how many oxygen absorbers to put into your food storage bag you need to know how much oxygen there is trapped inside. To do that you need to know the volume of your container when empty minus the volume of the food you put inside. Once you have the amount of space left ‘around’ and ‘on top’ of your food you will have the ‘air volume’ and can figure out the grade of oxygen absorber you will need to soak up the oxygen in that air. Confused? Just go to that page and see if you can make sense of their way of explaining it. Here is a useful table:

container type - volume in empty container
#10 can - 3,980 cc
5 gallon plastic pail - 18,942 cc
6 gallon plastic pail - 22, 730.4 cc

And a useful example, both from that site:

We want to know what size oxygen absorber to use for a 5 gallon bucket of rice.

1. We determine from the table above that there are 18,942 cubic centimeters in a 5 gallon plastic bucket.

2. The rice weighs 35 pounds which converts to 15,876 grams.

3. 18,942 (cc) container volume - 15,876 (g) rice = 3,066 cc residual air volume.

4. 3,066 (cc) residual air volume x .205 (oxygen fraction in air) = 628.53 cc oxygen volume

5. Since the size of oxygen absorbers are rated and named according to the amount of oxygen they absorb, we know that a 750 cc oxygen absorber will be sufficient for this bucket of rice

Now, I made some videos to help you (and me! Teachers are the ultimate student, right?) learn how to store your food long term. The first one I did was way too long to load on this blog so I put it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf6JsR1zUTI and then here is the second part of that same night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzTEvzr0kPM

i have made some follow up videos since that first day but i just tried to load them all for like an hour and then when i posted it there was nothing in the post. lame. so i'll try again tomorrow. i'll also post our go-to sites for supplies then (which were also eaten by cyberspace), but now it's like an hour past my bedtime...