survival food sucks....please give me recomondations for bulk food (bags of beans, lentils, oats, etc) for $2,000 budget

Most crackers (saltine type you buy at the store) don't keep very long at all - even vac sealing does not help.

I read a long discussion about this at one of the major prepper sites a year or so back when I found a great buy on saltines and thought they would be an excellent addition to the pantry.

"Pilot crackers" are said to be good for storage. I've never had them, myself.

[link to www.google.com.pr (secure)]

lots of things , some even off the shelf in supermarkets will do like powdered potato , egs powdered milk Coffe & the such .

Dry vacuum packaged is the best .

I was saying that about the people who don't. They just don't know what it takes. Learning at the last minute is going to be bad for them. I'm glad you have a green thumb.

I have stocked up on premix desserts. I figure desert once a week will make a nice change, keep up morale. Also have bought bulk mixes as suggested above.

Biscuit mix will lose it's leavening power if kept too long, hence baking soda+cream of tartar to make baking powder to perk it up.

Soak beans, lentils and rice over night to shorten cooking time.

To cook beans and other foods requiring a long cooking time, use a Dutch oven slow cooker. Bring your food to boil for about 5 minutes in the Dutch oven. Prepare a thick nest of blankets or newspaper for the Dutch oven in a sturdy box or a milk crate. Put the hot pot down into the nest and cover it with a thick layer of blanket. The food will continue to cook for several hours. Just like using a crock pot. You should experiment and keep records of cooking times for your beans, rice, meat, etc.

Lol...that is monsanto UN eugenic agenda 21 typical jewish front garage entrepreneur. ..

Nice except you might be low on your salt figures.
Salt is a preservative, used for centuries to preserve meat from spoilage before the invention of refrigeration and freezing. It is a nice alternative to smoke curing all your meat.
In our society, salt has a bad reputation, a undeserved one. Salt in a reasonable varied diet is not a problem. Just in a junk food, commercially processed food diet.

So if you plan on hunting bigger sized wild game, you better have lots of salt to help preserve your meat. Salt will likely become the "new" gold, for survivors of a SHTF situation.

I stocked up on saltines and the basement did not stay cool enough during the hot summer to keep them well. I opened a box months later and though it smelled a little rancid, I thought I would try one. I chewed it up and it tasted so awful and not only that, it literally burned my mouth.

All of those crackers went into the trash, not even into compost heap.

Pilot bread, rye crisp and other rye flat crackers are designed to keep. Saltines are not.

two crates of Pot Noodle - I recommend 'Bombay Badboy' and Chicken & Mushroom flavour - and a box of beef flavour Monster Munch.

you'll also want one of them water filter tubes so you can suck water straight out of the toilet bowl or puddles

It's very good to have extra food in the house, and a little of everything across the board. I never run out of stuff, I buy more before it's gone, and buy in quantity when stuff I use regularly goes on sale.

On a daily basis my diet is about 75% fresh produce, the rest being dairy products and a little bit of rice or oats, maybe.

So over time my pantry storage has shifted from being a lot of canned goods that I don't actually eat as part of my diet, to making sure I have herbs, spices, teas, olive oil, coconut oil, vinegar etc.

I still have a lot of beans and lentils and rice that I stored from a while back, and some canned goods (threw out some very old cans recently to make room for new stuff). I hardly ever eat beans anymore and hardly any rice.

The old rule "store what you eat and eat what you store" is such a sensible rule. One change in my life is that I have a proper freezer for the first time ever and I can keep more frozen fruits and vegetables longer than I used to be able to. I have bought some already frozen stuff to stock up on and I have bought fresh produce on sale and frozen it myself with good results.

Not sure what I'm adding to this thread except to say once you make sure you have a few weeks of good supplies on hand, don't go too overboard on stuff you don't normally eat, it will just go to waste. Some stuff goes stale really fast, boxed potato flakes, crackers, any kind of cereals, they go rancid, they get bugs, if you're buying for long term make sure you are paying the premium price for long term packaging or that you make a project out of it and invest in the things you need for preservation.

Well it's always fun to think about this stuff. I was just going through some of my storage the other day and threw some stuff out and need to replace a few things. It's never "buy it and forget it", it becomes a lifestyle and needs maintenance, thought and flexibility.

I'd spend less than you are planning and save some aside for future experiments and the learning curve.

Do you cook all the time now? I do, I cook everything from scratch. Packaged food holds almost no appeal . . . . .

For baking, the baking soda will not provide leavening unless mixed with some acidic liquid (buttermilk, lemon juice, yogurt) or with cream of tartar.

To make baking powder, combine half a teaspoon of cream of tartar and quarter of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. This provides the equivalent of one teaspoon of baking powder. To make self-raising flour add one teaspoon (or equivalent homemade) to 110g of plain flour
[link to www.bbcgoodfood.com]


Cream of tartar: Potassium bitartrate
Frontier Natural Products has 1# for $11

Good ole fashioned yeast is also nice to have, but it has a limited shelf life unless made into a culture.

I just purchased food grade 5 gallon buckets with lids in the bakery department at Walmart for $1 each. Walmart had stopped giving them away and saw they could make a little profit because they were in big demand. I can't tell you how many people stopped me in the store asking why I was buying so many buckets. I didn't tell them, but they already knew.

Learn how to grow you own.... I did, but the cops don't like it !

Don't forget herbs, spices and condiments. Even bland food can taste much better with these additives and some herbs/spices - like oregano, cinnamon, etc - also have some medicinal value.

For meat preservation, here are directions for "pocket soup" or "portable soup" which is the ancestor of bullion cubes and beef essence but without the MSG. This is what Lewis and Clark stocked up on to make soup for the expedition.

[link to www.foodtimeline.org]

These are old time language, but in essence they slow cook the meat with seasonings for a long time till it is very thick, then they strain out the seasonings and slow cook it for a long time till it is like glue, then they strain again and pour it into little cups and cook it for a long time until it is really stiff, then they turn it out of the cups and dry the little cakes. When dried out they separate the cakes with paper and store in a tin.

This will last forever they say.

There is another way of preserving meat called confit. Spam is a confit and will last forever. The NW Indians made a high nutrition confit of salmon which was a very valued trade good. Poultry was often preserved as a confit in Europe.

"Confit as a cooking term describes when food is cooked in grease, oil or sugar water (syrup), at a lower temperature than deep frying. While deep frying typically takes place at temperatures of 325–450 °F (163–232 °C), confit preparations are done much lower—an oil temperature of around 200 °F (93 °C), sometimes even cooler. The term is usually used in modern cuisine to mean long slow cooking in oil or fat at low temperatures, many having no element of preservation such as dishes like confit potatoes.

In meat cooking this requires the meat to be salted as part of the preservation process. After salting and cooking in the fat, sealed and stored in a cool, dark place, confit can last for several months or years. Confit is one of the oldest ways to preserve food,[citation needed] and is a specialty of southwestern France."
[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

After processing, the meat confit is kept in crocks or jars and a thick layer of grease seals it from oxygen and bacterial contamination.

Pork and poultry and good for preserving this way, beef is not so good. You can find recipes on the internet.

You can make dried meat out of roast beef, venison, elk, by cooking it, then cutting into small pieces and shredding it. Pound salt and pepper and chile powder to taste into it and then dry it in your dehydrator or a low (less than 250 degree) oven. It will keep for a long time, but not forever.

$2,000.00 to spend.

After prepping for 20 years, This is my advice;

1. Excalibur dehydrator
2. own garden
3. freezer for meat storage ($100-200) look around
4. store dehydrated foods in baggies in storage totes
5. [link to www.offthegridnews.com]

Dehydrate real food for emergency. Fruits veges and meats have 10-15 year shelf life with little space needed. The grains and beans are not a main staple. You need a protein source. Chickens and rabbits are the easiest.

When you start down the rabbit hole of food during a disaster, the simple cheap stuff, usually GMO flour based is poor energy food. Adequate to get you through disaster but the shops wont open with your fave foods for awhile. After time you realize the question is a lifestyle changer. Dehydration works for the paleo diet. Yes, buy the bags of oats but find the protein source that works for you.

No zombies allowed.

^^^^THIS. Read the article at link. Nutritional value of seeds, grains, and beans increases tremendously when sprouted!!! You can make sprout salads, add to soups, slow-bake sprouted wheat bread etc.

2 words:
Mountain
House

Mountain and a house is a great thing but as far as food, cans of Goya beans (prepared, meaning its already spiced) and minute rice is all you ever need.
Lots of protein and minute rice can be cooked over outside open fire in a couple of minutes.

Remember, you can't count on electricity to cook.

Last Edited by natasha77 on 09/15/2015 12:28 PM

pancake mix made with water & rice krispies.

Turkey Spam, canned chicken breast, tuna

I recommend hot sauce, Mcilhenny's Tabasco sauce, as a cure to make anything edible even MRE's...

Mormons are the best at food storage & have a wealth of knowledge. It is part of their belief to have a year's worth of food stored at all times.

Here are some great websites and an AWESOME video:
[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

[link to everydayfoodstorage.net]
She also has a book and youtube videos

[link to providentliving.lds.org (secure)]
Food storage & gardening information

This. Gun and bullets and a hunting license. Deer. Squirrel. Turkey. 1 deer for the entire winter.

Then a ton of salt. And herbs for cooking. Lots of preservative herbs.

Lentils and rice go far. If you have water.

If I had 2k I would get water, and tea, and hummus in plastic tubes, and lots of canned meats for the winter. Pickles, and other preserved food. Dried fruits and lots of kinds of nuts. I got a thing for pumpkin mix and milk right now, in a blender, to drink, not a pie.

Cooking oil would never be soybean, which is called "vegetable" these days. Cooking oil would be grape-seed, coconut, peanut, olive, and sunflower. Coconut is o-kay I guess but if you want to stretch it, lard from pork drippings is a way out.

As long as I had stuff for cold weather drinking everything else is good, that means egg nog, coffee, chocolate drink, and other warm things. Soup is your best friend in winter.

Freeze dried is a waste.

If you can bump up your budget a bit, I would recommend getting a freeze drier. I recently got one, and I love it. I haven't actually added anything to my SHTF supplies because we have been sampling it 'till it's all gone. My last batch was beef steaks, rhubarb, and ice cream. Freeze dried ice cream is incredible! I used my home made goat milk ice cream, and some store bought low carb. Both are like candy, but goat milk ice cream gets pretty crumbly. Any fruits or veggies can be freeze dried, but straw berries are another one that will be hard to put in storage. They are so good, we haven't actually gotten any in the vacuum packs yet.

Search Augason Farms

The Sawyer Mini is a better filter. It filters more water (100,000 gallons) and is .1 microns as opposed to Lifestraw's .2 microns.



[link to sawyer.com (secure)]

I've tried most of the long term survival foods, and Mountain House is "OK", but Wise foods are really good. The lasagna is great. For a couple grand, you could put up enough to feed a family for about a year, I think. I haven't priced them lately, it's been a while since a bought long term storage FOOD.

50lb. salt block is only $5 at the feed store. Grab a few and wrap them up to keep them dry.

That reminds me. I'm running low on A1 steak sauce for my balls.