Food Storage Experiment: Week 2

This week I focused on eating food that has a shelf life of at least a year. It turns out that most packaged food in grocery stores these days meets this requirement. So it has become, in my opinion, pretty easy to live off food storage.

I discovered that many canned foods have a shelf life of at least a year, often 2 years. Food manufacturers obviously have an incentive to quote the lowest shelf life possible so that they can get you to buy again sooner and to avoid lawsuits.

I found a website (stilltasty.com) that has an extensive repository of shelf life data. Unfortunately, although the website is really well put together, when I was at the store comparing the shelf life printed on the food packaging with what stilltasty.com quoted, I discovered that stilltasty.com was often wrong. They often quote a shorter shelf life than what was printed on the packaging of the actual food.

Rotation

I realized that you don’t rotate specific cans of food per se, you rotate boxes of food. I will be buying boxes of cans of food, and each box will have the same expiration date. So a whole box goes bad on the expiration not simply the can in the front of the line of your little can rotator shelf thingy.

Greenhouse Food Storage

I am creating a vegan food storage (no animal products, except for maybe fish). In addition, I also wanted to have fresh food available  and I realized that this is possible by growing food year round in green houses. This would be something I would be continually doing, which, is something I wanted to do anyway. So this is great!

Variety

I think variety is one of biggest if not the biggest goal to strive for in creating  your food storage. So I plan having fresh food from the green house, canned food from the pantry, and grains and other staples from long term storage. I’ll also have a month of freeze dried food for some sort of unforeseen emergency situation where nothing else is available.

All in all, everything is going really great. I’m really excited about all of this, and am glad I’m doing this. :)

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