12 Food Storage Myths Debunked

I've heard that storing food makes you a Target today we're going to address this and a bunch of other food storage myths hey Provident Preppers I'm Jonathan and I'm kyleen there are so many myths about food storage and people talk and some people don't really know what they're talking about we've got a lot of experience real life experience packaging food storage and using food storage for a lot of years and so we're going to debunk some of the myths that are out there about food storage including the one about whether or not it makes you a Target and then at the end of this video we're going to share with you what our recommendation is for having a food storage plan so let's get busy with number one all this food has to be repackaged and that discourages a lot of people from actually getting things done because saying oh it's too much work in most cases you're not going to have to repackage food now there are some things that do need to be repackaged especially if you're going for long-term storage for the most part there are a lot of foods that you you can go to the store and what we're talking about is just Building A well-stocked Pantry something where you have plenty of food in your pantry so that you don't have to go to the store for a few months number two the best if used by date is the date that food goes bad that is so not true this is a can of soup that we purchased back in 2015. now most of the time we try and rotate our food storage but this is something that we have just in case we have emergencies most of the time we eat from scratch but if we had an earthquake or something this would be great stuff so right now what's happening with this because it is 2015 is it's being fed mostly to our puppy you look at this it's still just fine it's 2023. it's what eight years old good yeah but it doesn't smell as good as my suit and that's why it's still on the Shelf so the best if used by date on the can it's not an indication that the food goes bad it's because the manufacturer has to store samples from each batch and keep them for a period of time so it's for the convenience of the manufacturer not to tell you when it's gone bad so you definitely want to be aware of food that has gone bad and we have from time to time had things like applesauce and tomato products start showing signs of going bad definitely you do not want to mess with that but in most cases these foods will stay good for a very long time as long as the can isn't damaged or bulged smells good looks good right right it's probably going to be just fine number three mylar makes food lasts for 30 years well um that's not true now a lot of foods will store in number 10 cans for 30 years but the mylar isn't quite as good an environment we hear so many people saying oh I'm going to put it in mylar and then it will last and that true there are certain foods that if stored in a cool dry dark location could last for 30 years we don't recommend that right we actually recommend rotating it but just because you stick something in a mylar bag doesn't mean that it's going to last long term all foods have a um certain life like here we've got some flour now I could repackage it a mylar or glass jars or plastic peat bottles but flour is still going to just have a limited shelf life and in fact we've got a whole video where we tasted older flowers so if you click on the card in the corner we'll take you to one of those videos or that video so that you can see what happens when flowers on the shelf for a long time I recommend about five years it's edible much past that it's just not ideal not ideal yeah and do remember that these mylar bags are very susceptible to rodents so you know if you're going to use mylar have a secondary container something that will keep the mice and rodents away from ruining that yeah number four food storage is expensive well let me tell you food storage can be expensive depending on how you do it but we have raised 11 children on a single income now that means that we had to get really creative in order to be able to feed our family which means it was Back to Basics we had a lot of beans and rice and oats and I made almost everything from scratch I shopped at the sale so that whenever something went on sale I stocked up so for us food storage actually made our daily living significantly less expensive and enabled us to feed a whole lot more people on a lower budget now number five food storage is a waste of resources and this one I could could not disagree more this is security this is peace of mind and as a worst case you're going to eat it in fact it's a very good use for your resources it's a way of hedging yourself for the future it's like an insurance policy we pay insurance policies every year we pay for our car and our life and our our medical and our home and that money just goes out there right and there's a reason you pay that well food storage is hungry insurance and I think it is definitely not a waste of resources now number six is the myth that commercially packaged food storage is the best I feel like it's absolutely not in fact we stay away from it when we can there are certain things we will buy commercially packaged for instance from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints you can get the number 10 cans with dry beans and white rice and potato flake things like that already packaged the price is really reasonable I think that's a great thing you can go to a place like Augustine farms and get some of their number 10 can Basics that's not the kind of stuff that I'm talking about I'm talking about the packaged food storage programs we got one that was sent to us it was a month supply in a bucket and when we went through it the ingredients it was like oats that had a ton of sugar in it and cream but it wasn't cream it was like artificial everything and I'm looking at the label thinking if I ate this this is gonna kill me it was all marketing be so careful of marketing and I'm not saying you shouldn't buy any of that there are some freeze-dried food Foods out there that are a really good thing for me a lot of them have too many preservatives and salt and I would rather eat from scratch now that being said remember I'm the one that's always making my suit from scratch and I'm not buying the cans well I buy them but we don't use them very often so it depends on you and your personal preferences but my my personal preference is to buy the foods that we normally eat and stock up on those and not depend on some marketing hype and overpriced food storage I totally agree and and remember this is very expensive food you have to know what you are getting if you want to go that road that's fine but make sure you understand because the way it's couched is often you're thinking meals and in fact they're talking about servings so you have so many servings but in in many cases that doesn't even get you close to the calories you need for the day and probably not even close on any of the nutrients and we encourage you to start with the basics that are much less expensive and then if you've got the money and you want some of those fancier things do it now number seven is that food storage is too complicated there are too many rules to remember and I don't know all of what to do or how much to store whatever just it doesn't have to be complicated you could do a spreadsheet like Jonathan and it could be very complicated or you can do it more like what I like to do where I just have a place for everything right I have a place for proteins and I have a place for um like rice and beans and things like that and that's more kind of what I do but it doesn't have to be any more complicated than going to the store and buying extra and making sure that your pantry is full or that your freezer is full that's as complicated as it really has to get number eight Doing It Wrong is deadly and in some extremely rare instances I suppose that could happen but in most cases it doesn't you you understand some of the basics and Mama tell them a little bit about the basics the big concern is botulism right that I'm going to kill my family because of botulism so there's a couple important points I I want to share with you and the first one is that you need to choose foods that are good candidates for long-term storage if you're doing long-term storage if you're just buying a can and putting on the Shelf you don't really need to worry about it but the food needs to be low in moisture like 10 or less when you're putting it into a reduced oxygen environment it should be low in fat so there are three components for botulism one is moisture one is pH and the other is water Acuity so there's a lot of different factors that play into that but the cool thing that you need to know is that say you did by some remote chance get botulism in a dry good well by cooking that at 185 degrees for at least five minutes you're going to kill the toxins that can make you sick so just think about that if you're just really freaked out and worried about it make sure that you're cooking your food now one of the borderline items that a lot of times we're worried about popcorn it usually runs about 13 moisture your risk of botulism is super low with pot popcorn it's a dry good it meets all the the criteria for good shelf stable but what I usually do with popcorn is I'll buy it in the container already packaged and you can see it's already sealed and they have packaged this appropriately so most of the time I'll just buy it like this and put it on my shelf and I don't worry about it the other thing that I'll do is if I buy a big 50 pound bag I'll put it in either glass bottles or plastic sheet bottles but I won't use an oxygen absorber because I don't want to create that low oxygen environment and create that risk don't stress if you're really worried about that canned food and already packaged Foods or like in the number 10 cans that you're you just buy you don't have to worry about it at all because they should have packaged it appropriately and there are some great resources out there if you don't know what the moisture level in it I'll leave a link in the description of this number nine overwhelming everything that I have to know and do and quite frankly just simplify it don't make it so complicated just buy extra stuff when you go to the store for instance I call this the Costco mentality right so when you go to Costco you don't buy one can of something let me just interrupt here I'm not us fan of spam this is a salmon this is a salmon this is a Sam thing so that's because we love him but that's okay whatever okay but but this is a good package to show you because when you go to Costco you're not just buying one there are eight in here so if you just think about um doing it with that bulk mentality it's less overwhelming you just buy a few at a time instead of one at a time and before you know it you've stocked up just make sure that you're putting it in a good place where you can organize it and you know what you have because the disorganization can be overwhelming and this is the proverbial elephant sometimes we look at the whole elephant and and there's no way I could eat that but a bite at a time a step at a time like I like to say small steady steps just continuing to do it and we get there all right number 10 we have to store whole wheat this is food storage right that's just a standard that's what this is what you do not everybody needs to have you've got to have whole wheat right now we have whole wheat absolutely we have a whole week um because we use it all the time right I cook with it make sure to pull off I cook with it and we enjoy it John loves whole wheat bread and we have the Grain Mill and that's what we do but because we do that doesn't mean that you have to do that just store the foods that you normally like to eat because that will make sure that you're rotating it that you'll stay fed and that when you need to use that food storage it won't be change for you right and those dietary changes not only can they be hard on your body but they can be hard on you emotionally too number 11 you never have enough and and for some people this definitely is a problem they don't know when to stop um and definitely we should not stop our preparedness efforts because we are continually rotating we're continuing continually using and but there has to be wisdom and there has to be reason and you know there are Financial constraints there are space constraints and and we have to live within those we have to make it work for us so it shouldn't become our slave it should become our servant I think that we need to have enough food storage to get us through hard times right um and we don't know how long those hard times are going to last and that's when you just have to listen to the spirit and pray about it and say okay how much do I really need but we have we have people that we associate with that seriously have rooms and rooms of food storage and I'm not sure that we really need that much I think we should really be reasonable because I believe that the best is yet to come we're going to have hard times and we need to get through that but the best is yet to come and this is very individual again this is something that you CA you decide you know we're not basing this off some list that somebody put together this is you deciding what's appropriate for you and your family and your loved ones and then making that happen so now that's number 12 is storing food or having food storage makes you a Target well first if you're going to the store and you are buying massive amounts and everybody's seen you go out with all these cart loads of food um it could it could make you a Target but that's not the way that we stock up like we stock up by doing the Costco thing or when something like these canned soups they went on sale 99 cents a can and I bought whatever amount I needed I like to Target enough for a year um just because that's that's us right because that's kind of the sales cycle but if you're just buying stuff when it's on sale it doesn't look like there's a big deal and nobody needs to know that you're having that you're stocking up the other thing is don't tell people about it don't go bragging and saying hey I have a year supply of food what do you have no no no don't do that do you want to be a Target it's your it's your verbalization of what you have now I know you're looking at me saying well look what you're doing and yeah we're on YouTube and we're we are targets but we encourage you not to be a Target the last thing we want to talk about is Our advice we recommend that you have three months worth of food that is just what you eat every day like you've got your meat in your freezer if you're eating meat you've got butter in your freezer or whatever it is that you want to keep in your your freezer you've got all kinds of shelf stable foods that you normally eat so that you wouldn't have to go to the market for at least three months and then the longer term Supply you get to decide how much you have there but those are the dry goods and things that you have in your number 10 cans and seriously the least expensive place that we know of to purchase quality basic food storage is from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints home storage centers and I will leave a link you don't have to be a member they don't ask you any questions you can also buy it online from them in some of the foreign countries you can't get it but here in the continental United States it's really easy to be able to get that now let's talk Comfort Foods okay emotionally when really bad things are happening you need something that says life is still good and a lot of us food our culture very much revolves around food and so there are some foods that you may want to have in your food storage now I personally don't drink any carbonated beverages but I have some dear friends who can't survive without Diet Pepsi in fact when coven started and we had gone to the market and we saw one of our friends and she was of Diet Pepsi because for her that's what she needs that's her comfort food and for me it's chocolate for John it's peanut butter we all have our own versions of comfort foods and you make sure that you have a nice supply of that in your food storage because you know the myth that everybody around me is going to be happy if I don't have chocolate is definitely a myth bad miscalculation okay and then the final thing seriously Only Store what you eat make it otherwise it's just a waste and we have made this mistake several different times and I think I've talked about the time I bought salmon that had the bones and the skin in it and I know some of you love that but for me totally freaked me out because I thought it was supposed to look like tuna so make sure that you're not looking at it saying oh this you know we might really want this someday buy what you really eat and now for the question of the day what myths have you bought into comment below and thanks for being part of the solution thank you

Channel: The Provident Prepper

Views: 558,012

Keywords: Best food storage items, foods to store, wheat, rice, beans, potatoes, chocolate, food security, hunger insurance

Id: rppPqBz-sd8

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023