Gunner Quinn
As a followup to my article, “Just-in-Time Food Storage” (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) this article is to share with the reader the results of my freezer-bag food-storage experiments.
The first article was for those who don’t currently have any food stored but plan on doing so at the last minute if it looks like the Schumer may be soon hitting the fan. While this wait-and-see method is highly discouraged and defeats the whole purpose of prepping, two methods were presented for those who’ll still be procrastinating anyway.
Method 1: No special preps, just get some food! This involves A) stocking up on a few hundred plastic freezer bags ahead of time which you’ll be using in the future anyway, and B) having a shopping list made far in advance. The freezer bags would take up very minimal space on a pantry shelf. This isn’t the best long-term food-storage method, is highly discouraged, and it’s based on the premise that something is better than nothing. For long-term prepping, don’t even consider using freezer bags in place of proper food-storage containers.
Method 2: Buy a $50 insurance policy. This method also uses a shopping list made far ahead of time. Unlike freezer bags, Method 2 requires buying some items that probably won’t have a future use if the feces never hit the fan. But isn’t that the nature of car, home, and health insurance, we buy hoping we’ll never need it?
The necessary items in this food-insurance policy for just-in-time (JIT) preppers are: mylar bags, oxygen absorbers, and if you don’t already possess a clothes iron or a hair straightener, a mylar bag sealer. The bags and oxygen absorbers take up very little space so they’re easy to store and/or hide from judgmental friends and relatives. They’re so simple to use that a twelve-year old could learn how and be bagging away in under 15 minutes. As an example, a mylar bag is filled with beans, a small postage-stamp sized oxygen absorber is added, the air is pushed out of the bag, then the bag is sealed shut with a clothes iron or mylar bag sealer. That’s it.
Aside from the benefits of food retaining nutrients and lasting longer in an oxygen-free environment, the oxygen absorber creates a vacuum and pulls the bag tightly around the food. This flatness allows them to be stacked better for storage. A freezer bag, on the other hand, retains air so the bag of food remains floppy, making them harder to make into even, solid stacks.
Using mylar bags is a standard method of storing food for the long term and is very reliable. There are dozens of articles on SurvivalBlog and elsewhere on using mylar bags so I’ll refer the reader to those. There’s one thing that’s not always mentioned with mylar bags: if they’re sealed as close to the top as possible, there should be enough space between the seal and the zipper so that after being emptied, the bags can be reused and resealed.
For a last-minute food-storage program, using mylar bags is the most preferable method. As with any type of JIT food storage, the huge downside is getting the timing wrong and finding yourself at Walmart with the rest of the mob having a slugfest over that last bag of pinto beans.
While Walmart won’t have mylar bags or oxygen absorbers on hand during the final food fight before the grid goes down forever, they can be ordered online at Walmart.com in various sizes. Some come prepackaged with oxygen absorbers, with others they must be purchased separately. Mylar bags are also available at other online retailers.
The remainder of this article refers to using freezer bags for JIT food storage. Some of the conclusions arrived at are based on my experiences with weevils, pantry moths (aka Indian meal moths), and flour mites.
For the experiments I purchased most of the bags of food from Walmart. The corn in 50 lb. bags came from the feed store. Based on the rapid food turnover at Walmart, it’s likely the time is short between the food-packaging companies and the customer so I was guessing it would be pest-free. The corn I bought at the feed store was almost certainly going to come complete with weevils living the high life, which proved to be the case. It was likely the previous year’s crop and had sat in a silo somewhere before being bagged into 50-lb paper bags. As feed corn, it was only minimally cleaned to remove most of the small pieces of corn stalks and pebbles.
How Airtight Are Freezer Bags?
Before bagging any food, I wanted to know how airtight freezer bags are. I inflated and zipped closed some bags, then held them under water to pressurize the air. While the zipper was airtight, a few tiny amounts of air were coming out from each end of the zipper indicating minuscule hole sizes. These were likely to prevent pests from getting inside the bags once filled. After some internet research, I also discovered that almost any type of thin plastic film has microscopic pores large enough for air molecules to pass through but small enough to keep everything else out.
Storage Techniques
For this experiment I used the following foods, bags, and totes.
Large tote with loose lid, all foods in double freezer bags:
– 2 bags of feed corn infested with weevils, each with 2 oxygen absorbers, one in an inner bag, one between bags.
– 2 bags of feed corn infested with weevils, one oxygen absorber in inner bag only.
– 2 bags of feed corn with weevils, frozen for a week before adding to tote.
– 2 bags of rice, each with 2 oxygen absorbers
– 1 bag each of home-grown black beans and Atchafalaya cowpeas, frozen for one week
Small 3-gallon tote with gasketed lid, all foods in double freezer bags with 2 oxygen absorbers:
– 2 bags of feed corn with weevils
– 1 bag of freeze-treated feed corn
– 1 bag of rice with 2 oxygen absorbers
– 1 open container home-ground corn meal
– I also added live weevils and pantry-moth larvae to the tote
Sitting on a pantry shelf:
– 2 double freezer bags of freeze-treated feed corn and 2 oxygen absorbers
– 1 sandwich bag of fresh home-ground corn meal
– 1 pint mason jar of fresh home-ground corn meal
Heritage seed collection in gasketed totes:
– Lots of different kinds of seeds in various packaging and various harvest years
Half-full, open 5-gallon buckets containing pantry moths:
– 1 bucket of home-grown dry Atchafalaya cowpeas
– 1 bucket of home grown Cherokee Trail of Tears black beans
2-Quart mason jar, ¾ full of store-bought flour purchased in standard paper packaging.
What to Look For During Periodic Inspections
With any type of food-storage program, it’s pertinent to do periodic inspections for pests. With freezer-bag storage, the clear bag makes inspections easy. Look for tiny food particles seeming to hang in the air inside the bag. These are fine strands of webbing and will be early indicators of things like pantry moths.
These fine strands of web generally get missed so next look for light-colored very small grains in the bag. They’ll be on whichever side of the bag was the bottom during storage. These grains, known as “frass,” are the waste products of certain pests. They’re fairly uniform in size and shape and look almost exactly like dry yeast. Among the grains will usually be small insect parts. Over time any fine web strands will turn into mats of webbing. In powdered foods like flour and cornmeal, the frass particles are harder to see but clumping can occur due to web threads.
Look for anything that is off-color from the rest of the bag contents. One of the 2-quart jars I use as a flour canister had an off-color area on the top of the flour. Viewing through a hand lens, I could see flour mites. These are nearly invisible to the naked eye, as are flour lice. Since the jar lid is only off long enough to take flour out for a recipe, the mites were no doubt in the bag of flour when it was first poured into the canister.
Oxygen Absorber Results
When used under the proper circumstances, oxygen absorbers work as a “pesticide” by depriving any living organisms of oxygen.
What I discovered on the first inspection a month after packaging was that oxygen absorbers don’t work with freezer bags. That was a surprise and a disappointment, but may not be necessarily pertinent in a well-rounded short-term JIT food-storage program, or for those who can overcome the downsides of eating contaminated, but non-toxic food. More details later.
Based on the underwater air-leak test and the fact that plastic film isn’t airtight, I knew freezer bags wouldn’t keep the room oxygen out forever. I still expected any insect pests inside the bags would be killed quickly enough before enough oxygen seeped back into the inner bag. As the absorber removes oxygen from whatever container it’s in, it creates a vacuum inside the container. With an airtight heat-sealed mylar bag, this vacuum pulls the bag tightly around the contents. With mason jars, the vacuum pulls the center of the lid down and creates a seal in the same way it does when canning. Since the oxygen absorption process takes a few hours, and since freezer bags aren’t airtight, apparently enough air is sucked back into the bag before the oxygen absorber can do its job to kill pests.
I wondered how long insects can “hold their breath.” After a little internet research, I discovered that by closing their breathing spiracles and slowing their metabolism, some insects can live for hours, and some insects up to days, without oxygen. That capability is one more reason why oxygen absorbers won’t work with freezer bags.
Results of Killing Pests by Freezing
As mentioned in the first article, for those with adequate freezer space, freezing bags of grains and beans after filling is the preferred method to kill any pests that may be present. For a full-year JIT food program, this will require freezing a minimum of 100 bags.
Freezing bags for one week successfully killed all stages of the weevils that were present in the feed corn when it was bagged. It also killed the eggs and larvae in the bags of cowpeas and black beans.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)
Read the full article here