Best long term survival food

Also dry wheat berries (grains) last a long time (~20-30 yrs if kept airtight & cool?). Just get a grinder (make sure you can do manual grinding if no power), and grind some when you want to make some very fresh homemade whole-wheat bread.

Dry pasta lasts a long time too. Whole-wheat pasta is more nutritious, but regular pasta tends to last longer, I think.

For dry rice, white lasts longer, but is much less nutritious. It makes a good filler starch. Brown rice is healthier, but many people say it doesn't last as long. Parboiled is a compromise between the two.

For dry beans, no two types of bean have exactly the same nutritional profile, so it's best to store up different types of beans for better, all-around nutrition. And rotate through them during the week if you are relying on them for proteins, amino acids, etc.

Beans & rice, with appropriate seasonings, make a complete meal if you rotate through your bean varieties. You can live for years on that stuff if you have to. And it's cheap.

Pasta is rather bland without any sauce & seasoning, so consider storing some apple cider vinegar for (health tonics &) pasta salad. You could also consider buying or making some tomato powder to make some sauce with. Be careful of the acidity of tomatoes, as it tends to eat the lining out of cans and then it goes bad over time, at least tomato sauce does this.

Of course, store as much dry seasoning (salt, pepper, & other spices) as you can because stored dry foods often have very little flavor on their own.

Granola, energy & protein bars are great, but are very expensive to stock in great quantities. And I question their shelf-life relative to the shelf-lives of rice, beans, wheat berries & pastas. But they are good for situations when you are on the go & can't stop to build a fire or use a stove.

And that is what MRE's & emergency food bars are good for: eating on the go and when you cannot use a fire for any reason. But MRE's only store for a few years, which is far less than the 20+ yr shelf-life you can get from dry foods such as rice/beans/pasta/wheat, etc. that you have to prepare by cooking.

Another (expensive) thing you could try if space & weight are critical factors are meal replacement powders and/or a blend of Spirulina & Chlorella algae superfood powders (if you can tolerate eating fish food), but I'm not sure of their shelf-lives. If you do go this route, consider growing your own organic algae, both for your own self-sufficiency as well as to eliminate possible health risks of algae grown in the wild.

If you have a year or more supply of dry foods, be sure you also have a year or more supply of water specifically to cook those foods with. They require a lot of water to re-hydrate as they soak & cook, so be sure you have enough extra water stored to cook with. Some people recommend 1 gallon of extra water per person per day just for cooking. This is in addition to your daily drinking water allotment of 1 gallon or more per person per day. (or more in hot climates or seasons)

Many people also use pressure cookers to cook these dry foods. Pressure cookers are very efficient both in the fuel used as well as the water used to cook the food. They are however a bit noisy.

Another way to cook them is to use the insulated thermos slow-cook method, which can be found online. One advantage to using this method is that you can literally be cooking your food in your rucksack while you walk, ride or drive.

bleached flour and pasta can be frozen for a few months to kill off any bugs!

Honey. Will keep indefinitely.

My aunt Mable's fruit cake. Still have some from 60 years ago.

Yeah, I've had old vacuum-sealed bags of grains (at the fishing camp) fail & lose their vacuum before, and bugs hatched out in them. It was a mess. Had the grains been frozen first to kill the eggs, I don't think that would have happened.

In fact, I've had about a 50% failure rate with off-the-shelf vacuum sealers (with clear plastic vacuum bags) that you can find in the outdoor sports stores. If I were to ever do it again, I think I'd buy an industrial vacuum-sealing machine, and use Mylar bags, as the consumer grade stuff is junk.

Chickens.

Look at all the poor places where you see 2 - 4 - 8 chickens pecking about.

Eggs, eventually meat and some fertilizer.

Cleanliness an issue of course.

We have 16 now in a secure back yard coup and run.

They get garden and household scraps.

Doing our best not to throw away left overs in a dump.

Their poop will latter go in the bottom of our raised beds.

We even feed them lawn mower clippings.

Bugs and yellow jackets are a delicacy.

========

We put away honey too.

Can be expensive and requires the skill of say a master gardener equivalent.

I had spam as a kid and liked it then.

Interesting to learn how we saved the Russian Army with this stuff.

Nikita Khrushchev was very thankful.

I can't speak to its shelf life.

What the bees eat.

.

The answer is: none.

Because everything that stores long-term is useless without fats.

And fats don't store unless we're talking unhealthy shit like Crisco.

To take it a step further, the best survival food is fish.

Live next to a lake, river, ocean and you can fish the rest of your life and the stock will replenish on its own.

Your answer is: fish.

A recent data point for me too - surprised !

Let the body shut down between meals dose not cause muscle wasting

Darn - trying to remember the source to cite it - a YouTube on intermittent fasting research

Coconut oil stores just fine - a high MCT fat very healthy

That's the thing with long-term survival storage foods: eventually, you will run out.

If your threat-profile suggests that you need a long-term food solution that's longer than what you can reasonably store, then you will need renewable sources of food. (and it's a good idea to have such food sources anyway to increase your resilience in general)

So renewable food sources like a fish pond, a garden, a grain field, an orchard, chickens, rabbits, goats, pigs, cattle, etc. can keep your family fed for generations (as long as you don't lose your food sources to theft and disease, etc.)

Stockpiling 101: Which Foods REALLY Have The Longest Shelf Life?

[link to www.offthegridnews.com (secure)]

2 years isn't long-term IMO, especially when compared to Crisco's 10 year shelf.

When it comes to storing fats for decades, there really are no healthy choices. Even regular olive oil only lasts 2 yrs. Processed saturated fats like shortening/Crisco are the only long-term storage fat that I know of.

For healthy renewable alternatives, as mentioned above, animals (incl. chicken or duck eggs) & fish fats are better, assuming you can raise the livestock. Other than that, homemade cheeses, homemade yogurts, greenhouse avocados, greenhouse coconut palm trees, and seeds & nuts are options (including sunflower seed plants, and walnut trees, etc.)

Great post. Thanks

30 yrs....