DIY Food Prepping

Several people have asked us about how to do your own food prepping, the DIY approach. It would be nice to buy a years worth of Mountain House food and have the pallet delivered to the front door but a lot of people on limited budgets pale when they see the prices for such supplies and figure that they just simply can’t afford to prep.

I know we did at first. But then we started looking at what food supplies meant, what was available, what we could do ourselves that wouldn’t cost several months pay all at once or tote up a sizable chunk on a credit card. The more we looked, the more we researched, the more we realized that we could do the job ourselves.

Containers:

Lowes sells food grade buckets and gasket equipped lids for around $5-$6 each. You can buy them one at a time or in a stack of a dozen or so. They are essentially the same type of containers that many emergency food sellers use. Theirs may be square while the Lowes buckets are round but that’s a minor issue. I spoke to one Lowes manager last year and he said that early on the buckets had the Lowes logo on them but so many people asked for plain ones they could write on that Lowes actually stopped printing logos on them. Several of the managers I spoke to said that those buckets (and lids) were one of their best selling items. Somehow I doubt that people are buying food grade buckets with gasket lids in which to store paint.

What to put in them:

So you have buckets. What do you put in them? This is where imagination, creativity and experimentation come in. Think of the basics you eat; protein, carbs, fats. Look at the shelves in your kitchen. What are they stocked with? Next time you’re at the store start looking at the shelves not just for what you normally buy as most of us do but for what ELSE is available. Look with the mindset of  what can be put on the shelf for a long period of time and still provide a varied menu and sufficient nutrition. You might be surprised at the variety of things available at low cost. Spam in varied flavors, canned meats (beef, turkey, chicken), beans, pasta, the old college favorites Ramen Noodles, freeze dried coffee, salt and pepper packets, powdered milk, various bottled sauces to spice up foods, oatmeal, Cream of Wheat and other types of dry grain products.

There’s another factor to consider as well. Dried beans, that you buy in the grocery store, are not just a food source but a SEED source. Right now we have two large containers in our kitchen of bean plants about 9 inches tall and growing well. They are simply a handful of dried beans from a bag we bought at the grocery store. We were interested in how well they germinated. We expected 75% to 80%. We got something like 98%. There is the issue, of course, of them being hybrid vs heirloom, but even hybrid beans will breed back to sustainable breeds within a couple generations. While grocery store beans are not a substitute for a good collection of heirloom seeds they are a good addition that can provide both nutrition and alternative seed stock.

Someone told us “But they don’t sell big bags of beans.” thinking in terms of 50 lb bags of the sort of bulk item so often discussed in prepping articles. We went to a Walmart when looking for dried beans. We found 4lb bags for under $4 each. We loaded up. It doesn’t take many of those fill a 5 gallon bucket. Oddly the 4 lb bags sold for less than a dollar a pound. The larger and smaller bags were OVER a dollar a pound. That’s the type of item and cost factors to look for. You might be surprised at the wide variety of long shelf life food you can find in a regular grocery store or Walmart or Sam’s Club or Costco.

That’s especially true when you seal them up on top of the original packaging in vacuum bags and in buckets with oxygen absorbers in them.

How to Distribute it:

So you have a collection of food. How do you break it out into buckets? There’s two different approaches and you’ll want to use both.

First think in terms of complete menus. Start taking items from your supply and put them together in meals. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. See how many of the various items you have bought that it takes to make a days worth of food, then a weeks worth. Some things like oatmeal or beans you might realize have to be repackaged in smaller containers. Think Vacuum Sealer. Alternately simply use Ziplock bags and rely on the sealed bucket alone. I prefer the vacuum sealer to provide an additional level of protection.

So break out bulk items like beans or oatmeal into smaller packages, perhaps enough oatmeal in one package for 3 days of breakfasts with 3 days worth of powdered milk to go along with it.

Once you have a days worth of food, see how much room that takes up in a bucket. Now, how many days of that menu can you put in a single bucket? Perhaps 5 cans of meat, 5 days worth of beans/pasta, 5 days worth of oatmeal/Cream of Wheat and powdered milk, plus some sugar, spices, a Bic lighter or matches and some extra Ziploc bags, maybe even a roll or two of toilet paper. Portion  it out so that a single bucket provides everything for X number of days of food.

Why, since it’s not the most efficient use of the space?

You want to build up a supply of buckets of “grab and go” food. If forced to leave you can grab some of the buckets that you know contains X days of food to take with you. In an emergency if you are forced to flee you don’t want to have to stand there with your food supply and decide a bucket of beans? a bucket of oatmeal? a bucket of rice? If it’s truly an emergency that forces you away from your stored food you want some of it organized as complete menus to simply grab on the way out of the house.

Once you have sufficient “grab and go” buckets (and how many is a personal decision only you can make depending on your circumstances) then you can start bulk storage. Entire buckets of beans, entire buckets of canned meat, etc. When you are dealing with dry foods I suggest repacking it in smaller portions. 5 gallons rice is a LOT of rice and once you open it you’ve broken the seal and the oxygen free environment. If it is sealed in say 2lb-5lb portions you can’t put as much in each bucket but what is in it will keep better once opened.

Sealing Buckets:

There’s several ways to seal your buckets. They range from the nitrogen packing using nitrogen tanks or dry ice to simple oxygen absorbers. We won’t go into the Nitrogen packing since that requires special equipment and you can research it yourself it you are interested. The dry ice method is not difficult. Drop a small piece of dry ice in the bucket after you have it packed and wait till it fills up with “fog” Since CO2 is heavier than air it fills it from the bottom up pushing the normal “air” out the top until the bucket is filled with CO2. Seal it and you have an oxygen free environment.

Problem is when we pack food in the evening or on the weekend there is never a convenient chunk of dry ice on hand. It means driving to the hardware store or grocery store to get some.

Oxygen absorbers are the simplest and easiest method. You can buy bags of them cheaply on Amazon or Ebay and many other online sources. They come sealed in a plastic bag and it is almost a necessity to have a vacuum sealer on hand to reseal the ones you don’t use. We won’t go into the calculations for how many to use in each bucket. That varies depending on what you have in the bucket. There are many, many sources of calculations on the internet for the correct number of oxygen absorbers of which size to use. Err on the generous side.

The biggest advantage to them is the simplicity of use. Once the bucket is packed with food you drop in the requisite number of oxygen absorbers then put on the lid. The gasket type lids are easier to put on with a mallet since it takes a good amount of pressure to push it down until the gasket seals.

A good way to become familiar with the procedure is to seal up one empty bucket with oxygen absorbers then let it set for about a week. Then unseal it. You should hear a significant “WHOOSH” of air into the bucket when you break the seal. That demonstrates that the oxygen absorbers did their job and captured the oxygen in the bucket producing a partial vacuum.

Reality of DIY Food Storage:

Using basic techniques and food supplies as we’ve described is not going to produce 20-30 yr shelf life food like you can buy from the professional manufacturers who have freeze drying and nitrogen packing canning and sealing equipment. Realistically the food stored this way probably has a shelf life in the 5-6 year range, probably a good bit more. But to our way of thinking it’s better to have a supply of food that’s good for 5-6 years that you actually HAVE than a supply of 20-30 yr food that you DON’T have because you couldn’t afford it.

The Lighthouse Survival Team