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Post by Cwi555 on May 8, 2019 0:48:38 GMT -7
We are performing some overdue rotations/testing of food stores. There were some pleasant and not so pleasant surprises in the mix.
1. Ova easy crystallized eggs we can put a firm don't bother date on them. Eight years is the max under ideal conditions. Anything past that is highly improbable under any circumstances. Going back to our records, five years would be a good cut off for them under ideal conditions.
2. Yoders canned bacon. At ten years, there was a ~25% failure. The failures uniformly had the can top indenting popping up. We tested the failures and found both PH and biological degradation. The cans of the same year and batch that did not show any expansion tested with a slightly raised PH, but still effectively edible. Taste was degraded significantly though. No cans at the eight year mark were found to be bad. We have segregated the ten year old batches to watch them, but expect them to go down hill fast. Still, eight years is a good run for canned meat of any kind. It puts it into intermediate range storage rather than the short term we had them figured for.
3. Del Monte #10 cans of fruit in syrup 12 years. Mixed results. Peaches were still good, pears still good but with a slight metallic taste. The mixed fruit cans failed to a fault. For the latter, we are bringing all cans within use by date to a food shelter and trashing the rest. It is unclear to me what caused them to fail and can only assume it's the combination at fault.
4. Dole #10 cans pineapple. We've tracked a test batch for 3, 7, and now 10 years. They are good a few months after their use by date, then no rhyme nor reason we can detect for why they fail after that. One batch number lasted through seven years, but was 100% bad at 10. I can only assume some inconsistant processes in the canning facilities is responsible. Most companies generally put them at 18-24 months for best by from the canning date. Dole did go 3 years with no problem, but fails to be on par with the peaches and pears.
I had some very old Mountain House fail as well. They guaranteed for thirty years and the beef stew, chili mac, and spaghetti made that. The chili mac is still going strong, but other two were significantly degraded in taste after 33 years but tested OK chemically. I was impressed to say the least. It's one thing to project via models, it's another to have empirical samples.
More later when we are done.
Edited to add;
The mountain house was not consistently stored in ideal conditions. Some of those cans had more miles on them than my truck after being carted around the country from place to place over the years.
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Post by cajunlady87 on May 8, 2019 14:05:08 GMT -7
I so look forward to reading these posts where someone relates their experiences with their food preps. These are much appreciated and many thanks for taking the time to post your documentation and first hand knowledge.
CWI you have quite a broad spectrum on your preps and gives us much information. I'll copy it and put it with my own food prep info. Again thank you very much.
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Post by Cwi555 on May 8, 2019 19:02:36 GMT -7
Datrex emergency food bar 3600 calorie. They claim up to five years. Stored at 72°F continuously, they have only lasted four years. I don't know their testing regime, but I suspect it's projection rather than empirical. A link to sort can sizes; food.unl.edu/how-interpret-can-size-numbersDel Monte #1 canned pitted cherries. This is something relatively new to us. The first batch number just made five years. No degradation of note to report. Green Giant #2 canned carrots, peas, green beans, and corn at seven years. All good except for some discoloration of the carrots and a very minor metallic taste on the peas for a single can. The latter had a minor dent at the rim of the can. Given the other two test cans on the same were without it, it had to be the dent. I will be cutting apart the can and testing it tomorrow. From visual appearance, it looks like a dull coloration around the dented area. I believe the can to be lined which was compromised by the dent. Del Monte #2 same as above, no changes to note from first year test. Taste is something that is highly subjective, but they did seem a bit duller to my palate. There was nothing in the chemical test to explain that except a very minor change in PH. Clif bars at five years, factory listed shelf life was three years; Chocolate chip - no chemical notation to mention other than PH. After five years it tasted stale, but still edible. Crunchy peanut butter - odd smell, PH swing, and slightly rancid. At three years there was no notable changes. Brought out one that was four years old, no problems with it other than slight stale taste. I suspect the test batch was compromised at some point given its a different batch number. I can't prove it, but it's most likely due to that batch sitting too long in a delivery truck. Overall impression is favorable. Chocolate chip is a definite mid term, will wait a year on the other until the four year batch makes five and retest. More later |
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Post by solargeek1 on May 8, 2019 19:30:40 GMT -7
CWI I can see the headlines now: man dies of food poisoning from eating past date food, but before he passes away manages to tell them "it wasn't the fruit cocktail, it wasn't the fruit cocktail"
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Post by Cwi555 on May 8, 2019 22:52:15 GMT -7
CWI I can see the headlines now: man dies of food poisoning from eating past date food, but before he passes away manages to tell them "it wasn't the fruit cocktail, it wasn't the fruit cocktail" We test for Botulism, E.Coli, and Salmonella with the above. We used to send it off in the early days, but those worked well as parallel tested when we first started, so now it's house. Another thing we check is pH which is actually the first test. We use a Oakton WD-35419-03 Instruments Series pH 700 for this. For our purposes, the color test strips don't cut it. Food degradation often shows up first in very minor swings in pH. However it's viewed, any food that goes bad starts with a chemical change. That change affects the pH. Then there is turbitity. Turbidity is the cloudiness or haziness of a fluid caused by large numbers of individual particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye, similar to smoke in air. When combined in a slurry derived from the food and known quantity of deionized water, a reliable benchmark can be derived. The microscopic particles in question show up when food degrades and changes the slurry count. Last but not least is conductivity testing. A lot of people don't realize it can be used for testing food. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1745-4530.1991.tb00093.xThe general prepping community usually doesn’t have this sort of thing on their radar. To me that is a glaring hole in preps. Simply using pH color strips against known values is world's above average. Home canners should be doing this with every batch they make. You have to know where it started in order to know if it's changing. Chemical, physical, biological, and electrical changes are not a positive thing for stored food. Our purposes are not just the food we have now, but what we might come across should the worst happen. Not to mention what happens to food when consistent conditions are no longer obtainable. |
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Post by solargeek1 on May 9, 2019 13:20:34 GMT -7
Cwi555, you do know I was teasing you? Great info but my DH and I will not be able to do all that testing. So I will rotate foods, pay attention to smell/taste/popping sounds and hope for the best. But I will try to order the strips. I only do water bath canning and all of my foods are so acidic (I add extra lemon or vinegar) that I have to find ways to cut that acidity before use. If you have a recommendation that would be great.
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Post by Cwi555 on May 9, 2019 16:27:36 GMT -7
Cwi555, you do know I was teasing you? Great info but my DH and I will not be able to do all that testing. So I will rotate foods, pay attention to smell/taste/popping sounds and hope for the best. But I will try to order the strips. I only do water bath canning and all of my foods are so acidic (I add extra lemon or vinegar) that I have to find ways to cut that acidity before use. If you have a recommendation that would be great. Actually y'all can do any of those test. It's less than 700-800 (dependent on source) for everything I listed equipment wise. If that's a concern, someone can settle for the first links test strip and a basic pH meter for ~150. The hard part is knowing it's out there, which everyone who reads this will now know. As for teasing, honestly I wasn't sure. It wouldn't have been the first time someone considered going to much to the extreme. My standard reply is, it's no more extreme than arming yourself. For the price of a quality handgun, you can assure food poisoning from your preps doesn't kill you should you survive a collapse. |
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Post by sirderrin on May 9, 2019 17:11:01 GMT -7
Cwi555 , you do know I was teasing you? Great info but my DH and I will not be able to do all that testing. So I will rotate foods, pay attention to smell/taste/popping sounds and hope for the best. But I will try to order the strips. I only do water bath canning and all of my foods are so acidic (I add extra lemon or vinegar) that I have to find ways to cut that acidity before use. If you have a recommendation that would be great. While I respect CWI555 100% and major kudos on the testing and passing on of info.. I will file away that certain foods have a better chance of being good then others.. I suspect 99.9% of us will literally be winging it and when you look at a can it tells us a story - any bulges or seepage? Yep using that is a gamble... but in the reality of the shtf? I only know of a few things that will store basically indefinitely... Honey, white Vinegar(most vinegar), rice, salt (sea in particular), pure vanilla extract, corn starch... While storing food is a great option. it seems to me more then about 3-5 years of stored food seems an over effort bound for failure in the end.. I think that working on a balanced plan of planting and storing and keeping food based on a basic mid 18th century tech of planting, storing and canning to mid 1950s canning tech would provide us with a far better chance of survival? Most of that tech can be worked with hand tools and wood stoves of various sorts. Some of the "kitchen wood stoves" where quite ingenuous in how the routed heat and allowed for cooking and baking... duckduckgo.com/?q=wood+kistchen+stove&t=ffnt&atb=v69-1&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=2kjuoT6w_zY He is basically clueless about what he has but that is an awesome cooking stove.. I think we "sometimes" over think stuff... our past combined with modern knowledge can greatly enhance our ability to survive..
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Post by crashdive123 on May 10, 2019 8:13:33 GMT -7
The white rice I am using now is 13 years old. It was stored in 2L soda bottles with nothing else added.
The brown rice I am using not is 9 years old. Same deal. I always read that brown rice goes rancid because of the oils. This did not (stored under kitchen cabinets).
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Post by Cwi555 on May 10, 2019 22:47:59 GMT -7
The white rice I am using now is 13 years old. It was stored in 2L soda bottles with nothing else added. The brown rice I am using not is 9 years old. Same deal. I always read that brown rice goes rancid because of the oils. This did not (stored under kitchen cabinets). It can and does go rancid under the right conditions. One of those conditions is air. Dry rice with bran doesn't initially break down anaerobicly (bacteria in oxygen free environment). It breaks down chemically. A sufficient quantity in an airtight container will produce enough gas during initial break down to stop the secondary microbial breakdown which does require oxygen. The only time rice doesn't break down is if it's been totally stripped of bran and any oils in the washing process. Rice like that will fill a hole but has little nutritional value. |
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Post by cajunlady87 on May 13, 2019 16:17:43 GMT -7
The white rice I am using now is 13 years old. It was stored in 2L soda bottles with nothing else added. The brown rice I am using not is 9 years old. Same deal. I always read that brown rice goes rancid because of the oils. This did not (stored under kitchen cabinets). Well done! I don't know where I went wrong but I threw away 5 gallon buckets of white rice which had many large oxygen packets at different levels throughout the buckets. It had an old smell and taste which I couldn't hack eating. Such a waste. |
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Post by cajunlady87 on May 13, 2019 16:19:55 GMT -7
CWI, maybe you should make this post a sticky so it doesn't get buried and we could add to it. Thanks again for taking the time to share this important info, and that includes others who added their own observations.  |
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Post by Cwi555 on May 13, 2019 17:30:09 GMT -7
The white rice I am using now is 13 years old. It was stored in 2L soda bottles with nothing else added. The brown rice I am using not is 9 years old. Same deal. I always read that brown rice goes rancid because of the oils. This did not (stored under kitchen cabinets). Well done! I don't know where I went wrong but I threw away 5 gallon buckets of white rice which had many large oxygen packets at different levels throughout the buckets. It had an old smell and taste which I couldn't hack eating. Such a waste. Oxygen packets can be counter productive in rice. They are typically made of a mix of iron powder, clay, and salt. Iron oxide aka rust (Fe2O3·nH2O and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH), Fe(OH)3), is a chemical reaction binding moisture and oxygen. The clay and salt are there to slow the process. Change the size of the iron powder and swap silica for the salt and you have a mix that reacts much faster aka hand warmers. This is where it gets squirrely. Metallic Fe (iron) reacts with CH4 (methane) to form Fe3C (Iron 3 Carbon aka iron carbide) and H2 (Hydrogen 2). Iron carbide is not going capture moister or oxygen in that mix. I could go on with chemical reactions of the salt and clay in that mix, but the bottom line is, once it started, the rice will no longer be edible. The rat in the wood pile is the methane. That is produced anaerobically when rice begins to break down. That tells me your rice was already well on its way to breaking down before it went in the bucket, i.e. it was old. You may have come straight from the store and dropped it in the bucket, but straight from the store is no promise of its storage conditions prior to your acquisition of it. For all you know it sat in high temperatures and or moister in a warehouse, truck, or ship. It could also have sat on a pallet for 2-3 years before you ever saw it. Oxygen absorbers are great for long term storage of new quality rice, but they can destroy the rice prematurely if it had already been in progress of degrading. Crashes lack of anything added tells me the methane was produced, but it was sealed away preventing oxygen from furthering the degradation. In effect it created it's own environment. That is assuming it wasn't heavily washed at the front end. |
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Post by Cwi555 on May 13, 2019 20:11:43 GMT -7
Fyi; an argon purge settles any and all arguments. It will also slow degradation that was already happening. It's heavier than air and requires just a little stirring in to set up for long term. It's ideal for grains with thin brans such as rice.
Co2 is better for things like green coffee beans, dried corn, peas etcetera. It too is heavier than air.
Nitrogen will work well with anything, but it can be a pia to load properly since it's considerably lighter than air. It can be best used in sealed hoppers where it can be loaded via valve purge from the bottom up.
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Post by olebama on May 21, 2019 18:43:07 GMT -7
You mention that co2 is better for some things. Will it not work for the rice?? Thanks so much for this info.
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