Food preferences

[The Heretic]

How are you going to keep your freezer going W/O power. Gens won't last long and gas supplies will dry up fast.

I have enough fuel to run the genset long enough to eat any food in the freezer and fridge first and to dry the meat into jerky if I have to. I don't plan to use the fridge and freezer long term at this point, they are only for modern convenience and any foodstuffs in them would be consumed first if the power went out long term.

You only need to run a genset for about an hour each day to keep foods in a well insulated chest freezer frozen if you are careful about opening it. I currently keep it running under 0* F. If it was winter I would have to run the genset even less (every winter I have lived here the temps have gotten below freezing and my freezer is in the shop that is only partially insulated).

When I retire and move, I will have enough solar power to run most of my house, including the well and refrigeration.

The power goes out from time to time here on the mountain, usually during a storm (last weekend it went out in the middle of a sunny hot calm day, not sure why, but it only lasted for a few seconds). The outage lasts anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. I have yet to need to actually use the genset in an outage (yet, it works, I have tested it).

I also have a 12V cooler (it won't freeze anything, but it will keep things cold).

 

[Oathkeeper1775]

How are you going to keep your freezer going W/O power. Gens won't last long and gas supplies will dry up fast.

Long enough to turn the meat into jerky. Ran a 5K for 9 days back in 2008; freezer never approached +10F

 

[mjbskwim]

A person should have adequate canning jars for the meat ,just in case.
I've been thinking on this when I moved.Would there be outages? Would I need a generator to keep it frozen? Should I just can meat?
Turns out we did have a outage years ago for some time.The big lines in Montana kinda swung together.We have hd folks working on the lines around here so we have had outages enough to stop clocks,nothing more
If we did have a big problem with our infrastructure and we had a mass break down of the power grid,then canning your frozen food would seem to be the correct path.
I mean I had enough meat in the freezer that over half would spoil before I ate it

 

[Siglvr]

I love Mountain House (MH), in fact, if you go that route, get the #10 tins for long term storage. Put them in the coolest spot in your house that you can find. (Corner of the basement is perfect if you have one, then they are out of your way as well). You should get 25-30 years shelf life with the #10 cans. The smaller packages will go bad much sooner (7 years) and the taste is beyond disgusting. Mt House claims that you can now get 12 years out of the pouches, from my experience, that might be optimistic. However, they have improved their packaging, they say, so they might have it dialed in.

The real joy of the #10 cans is that you figure out how much food you'd want to have in the event of some strange occurrence, like say worst case scenario an EMP burst. Then wait for a sale: buy it, mark dates and contents with a black felt tip pen, stuff it in a corner and forget it.

<broken link removed>

As far as your worry about too much salt. Not a concern here. If and when this stuff gets tapped, it's either going to be for a very short duration or going to heavily rationed so very little is eaten daily. This is emergency food only. We won't be doing the American calorie diet at that point. As the end of shelf life approaches will be be integrating small amounts into our diet and rotating the stock. Unfortunately (or fortunately) end of product shelf life will be coinciding with end of our lives (we're past middle age, so we might not even be alive to do that and our kids can deal with it. We did a 5 gallon bucket of beans in a Gamma Lid bucket (Winco has these) as well. I'm not sure how long that is good for, but at this time the beans are well over a year old, and occasionally we dip into it to make a batch and ensure they are still good (so far so good). We have a dehumidifier in the basement to keep the humidity down so that might be a factor as well.

As an aside, Mountain House claims the longest "proven" storage time of any freeze dried food, but I'd recently read a review that had MH taste way below many others. I haven't boughten anything I haven't tasted and love, but your goals, tastes and needs may be different than mine and it would be worthwhile to examine what you are doing. For example, if you want to be using it regularly for backpacking and will be rotating it that way, going with a better tasting product would be better for you. I rarely use freeze dried foods for camping any more and only wanted long term emergency provisions that took minimal care and monitoring.

Good luck!

 

[Siglvr]

Oh, some current info about salt. Dated 8-14-15 (the entire thing is a good read): http://reason.com/archives/2015/08/14/government-health-tips

the government has been telling us we've been eating too much salt for years. The Food and Drug Administration claimed that lowering salt intake would save tens of thousands of us every year. Overbearing nanny-state groups lobbied the government to regulate salt as they now do trans fats, and Americans turned to low-sodium diets in huge numbers.

One of America's leading advocates of spurious science, New York's Michael Bloomberg, persuaded more than 20 companies to drop salt levels voluntarily. Yet according to studies published in recent years, our salt intake wasn't dangerous at all. Even the CDC has been forced to admit that it was wrong. And the low levels of salt recommended by the government not only were unnecessary but also have been dangerous for our health.

"There is no longer any valid basis for the current salt guidelines," said Andrew Mente, one of the authors of a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. "So why are we still scaring people about salt?"

Well, because that's what government does best.

More here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/