Posted on 06/14/2022 8:44:54 AM PDT by blam
Buy extra.. I just made tuna salad today for the first time in a long time. 3 cans now plus celery and shallots for 2 people. I see less tuna, more water.
Plus bullets.🤔
I thought I made good enough money for a non doctor non lawyer type...but the way property taxes are way way up plus inflation plus my retirement accounts crashing look out for the poor house.
The absolute worst thing is doing solid financial planning for 45 years of a career, scrimping, saving, denying ourselves a lot of things to make it to retirement, and then watch it all flushed down the drain by the politicians and their incredibly stupid decisions.
I hear ya. We’re exactly at that place.
If you’re buying rice and beans for long term dry storage let me suggest you also buy some dried mushrooms and dried onions. Plain rice gets really frikken boring.
“As I said, unless there is botulism in the can, or the can’s seal is broken, it is quite safe to eat even years after the ‘use best by date’.”
And as I said, no, it isn’t.
Survivalists should avoid rancid fats and oils at all costs.
You’re confusing the reality that eating some rancid food will typically only cause an upset stomach with the idea that your body somehow derives nutritional benefits from rancid food.
Because humans are not scavenger animals designed to live off of dead animals the way vultures and buzzards for example are, our bodies will try to reject foods that it cannot process. Rancid fats and oils that are absorbed in digestion do a lot of free radical damage and deplete the body of certain vitamins.
The point of eating is not merely to temporarily abate feelings of hunger. Our body needs nutrition to survive. Depending on a person’s body composition, the average person can go weeks with zero calories before the body goes into starvation mode. The body will first burn off junk and waste through autophagy. It will deplete glycogen reserves and draw nutrients stored in fatty tissue. Then it will begin burning fat and some muscle tissue as a protein source. Your body will be in ketosis and run mostly on fat though. When this fuel source runs low it will begin using tissue from organs, and this is when starvation kicks in and threatens to kill you.
Because your body will not get nutritional benefits from whatever is rancid (i.e. the fat and oil part of the food), it is generally better to not eat at all than to eat rancid food.
However, in an emergency, it would be reasonable to try to remove the rancid fats and oils from some foods. Nuts will almost certainly have damage to the protein and be contaminated with other threats like fungus that will kill you, so always throw out bad nuts. But meat could be boiled and drained to get rid of fat.
Bottom line is that prepping is the opposite of accepting emergency conditions as normative. Stockpiling food that is going to go bad is a very bad idea. The article presents the idea of storing canned meat as an investment, but it also points out in the article that this food expires.
You are correct that the use by date is not an expiration date, but this kind of food is not designed to be kept indefinitely. It does go bad. It may not kill you immediately in many cases, but it will kill you.
If you prefer to be stubborn about it, all I can say is I warned you. I also don’t want others here to make decisions based on bad advice. And storing canned meats (that contains fats and oils) for decades is a very bad idea.
“do a lot of free radical damage and deplete the body of certain vitamins”
This is basically all you can point to in all your fearmongering. One little extra oxygen atom. That’s the entire danger of the fats in canned meats going rancid. Those oxygenated atoms are of course present all the time in all sorts of foods we normally eat every day, in some quantity, and our bodies repair the damage they do, every day. Big whup. If you are really scared just stockpile some more antioxidants and vitamins.
“Plus bullets”
Was telling 2 coworkers today to remember Mad Max and the value of a shotgun shell. Of course that is a fictional movie but it illustrates the potential value.
Bullets last decades. Canned goods maybe 10 years. Bullets are fungible assets with a long shelf life. In difficult times they only increase in value.
We got an Alexa, by the specs I have seen, it is better.
“Those oxygenated atoms are of course present all the time in all sorts of foods we normally eat every day, in some quantity, and our bodies repair the damage they do, every day.”
The problem is that you aren’t talking about a tiny amount. The longer these fats and oils sit on shelves, the more rancid they will become.
Similar to your description, the foods we eat contain poisons, germs, bacteria, particles of roach carcasses, and roach and rat dropping. In tiny quantities they aren’t going to kill us. In greater quantities they become more and more deadly.
Again, we are discussing survival food. If you have something in your pantry that has passed it’s “best by” date by a few days, weeks, months, and possibly even years, the greatest risk you have from rancid fats in meats (assuming there is nothing else wrong with them) is just like you say. Upset stomach. Some free radicals and vitamin deficiency. All easily treated and cured in most cases.
This scenario is a far cry from a pantry full of expired meat you are depending on to survive, and which is very rancid from being years past it’s shelf life. That scenario is life threatening and entirely preventable. Why store something long term when you know in advance that it is going to degrade and lose it’s nutritional value and threaten your health?
There are shelf-stable meat and egg packages that are designed to last for decades. They have almost no oil or fat because those don’t keep. A better strategy is to store these and other survival foods and rotate any fats and oils to keep them fresh. When these run out in a survival scenario, you can barter, buy, or otherwise obtain fats and oils that are fresh. The good news is that these are probably going to be the cheapest and most accessible food products in a food crisis anyway. There is no need to make a survival situation worse by using food in ways it was not intended to be used, and there is certainly no need to make that your basic game plan in advance.
Bottom line, in the context of what the article is about, “investing” in canned meats by buying up large quantities is only going to be successful if there is a near-term food crisis. A better bet is dry rice and beans with oxygen absorbers. Longterm storage of meat and eggs is expensive. Raising these is the best option if possible.
But if you or anyone on the forum some day awakens in the middle of a food crisis and has to rely on old canned meats, I hope you will remember my suggestion to boil or otherwise cook it to remove the rancid fats. It will be safer, healthier, and tastier.
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