According to Mountain House’s website, their pouch products, which previously were rated for around seven years, should be good significantly longer than that.

Mountain House makes a pretty good product, and some of their stuff is pretty good. I’m still a little annoyed with them over their snubbing small-time dealers several years back. But…personal feelings have no place intruding into logistics planning.

I have cases and cases of the Mountain House pouches in storage. Their ‘Pro-Pack’ stuff is just the ticket for stuffing into a 72-hour bag or caching in a bucket somewhere.

I usually figured the product would keep well past the seven year shelf life anyway, it’s nice to see a little confirmation of that.

H/T to The Metals Pimp for bring this to my attention.

I may not have a lot going for me, but Crom as my witness…..I will never be hungry.

I like pasta. I’ve cut back on it a bit, but I make a very nice bolognese sauce as well as a very nice tomato sauce. Anyway, the magic number for me for pasta is $1/#. When I can get it for less than that, I’ll stock up. The lower the price, the more I stock up. Pasta keeps quite well, and I use it fairly often…probably 2# a week. So, my  local Albertson’s had the stuff on sale for $.050/#. This was the same sale as they had last June. This time, I was merciless. Last summer was rigatoni, this time – ziti. (Who doesn’t love them some baked ziti????)

You know you’ve maxed out your shopping skill level when they start bringing out your purchases on a hand truck in addition to a shopping cart. The promotion was part of some ‘Monopoly’ themed contest they were having. That’s when it got amusing…

“Ok, 160 boxes of pasta, at fifty cents each…”

“And there’s a 10% discount for buying by the case.”, I gently reminded her.

“Right. So that’s going to be $80 less 10%….so….$72.”

I hand her the cash.

“And here’s your receipt and you get….177 Monopoly pieces.”

“I’m sorry…what?”
“You get 177 Monopoly pieces. Are you playing the game?”

“Uhm..no…but with 177 pieces I think I might have to.”

So….that happened. Joke’s on me, it’s going to take me *hours* to go through all those and check for winners.

Final analysis? For you numbernerds, the scoreboard looks like this:

Normal price: $298.40
Price with sale: $80.00
Case discount: – $8.00
Final total: $72 or $0.45/#.

The money shot

Now, yes, I could tuck away all that food but my habit as of late has been that when I find a *really* good deal on something, I set aside $20 and donate the food to the food bank. So, they’ll get about three cases. It’s ‘Karma Helper’.

Yes, there’s some math discrepancies going on. I think thats because they’re factoring a slightly different pricing schedule. Fact remains though: awesome deal.

Reminder: A dozen 10/22 mags for $104 delivered.
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Winter continues apace. A good time for indoor things like reloading, inventorying, re-arranging things, etc, etc.

Got together with one of the LMI the other day. He was asking me about the LDS cannery in town. I hadn’t been there in several years and since then they have changed their policy about food canning. See, it used to be you’d get a half dozen people or so, head up there, everyone put on gloves and a hair net, and you took your place in the assembly line process of canning food. Your task might be to scoop rice from the 100# bag into the cans, or your job might be to put the oxygen absorber in the can, or perhaps your job was to seal the can…you get the idea. Anyway, there was a certain amount of ‘sweat equity’ involved and having to work together with strangers. Normally, I do not like working with strangers but since these were strangers who shared my beliefs and goals it was rather nice.

And then, as usual, .gov stepped in screwed it up.

Health and safety, food handling regs, whatever….short version is that because of bureaucratic BS you couldn’t continue doing it the way it had been done. Instead, you go up there now and buy the food already canned. Heck,  you can even head over to the church website and order the stuff online at the same price.

So, I need to get together with my buddy and make an appointment to go up there and pick up a few things. I was going over my spreadsheet and I’ve a comfortable amount of stuff in storage but, for a few bucks, why wouldn’t you pad that stockpile a bit?

Between bulk stuff like rice, corn, and pasta, the long-term stuff like the freeze-drieds and dehydrated, the mid-term stuff like the canned meats and jarred foods, and the shorter term stuff, I think I could pretty much go quite a while without feeling hungry.

I remember reading “One Second After” and somewhere around three months into the story people were eating heir pets and killing each other for food. I recall thinking “Geez, that’s only three months…I wouldn’t be even making a dent in my stockpile at that point.”

As me and my buddy were talking about the tentative upcoming cannery trip, I mentioned that at this point I’m pretty much just ‘maintaining’ rather than ‘increasing’. I mean, the main needs are met, pretty much. All thats really left are the super big ticket items like the happy little fortified Middle O’ Nowhere house, the uber bugout vehicle, and a few expensive high tech odds and ends. But….that sort of thinking leads to complacency and that’ll cause you no shortage of grief in the long run. So….ABC.

Some things just bring me joy….free ammo (it happens), porn sites with easily hacked passwords, puppies, watching liberals discover the world isn’t what they thought it was, etc, etc. But two things that always soothe my soul are a) bargains and b) food. And sometimes, if the gods are smiling, a & b combine in one glorious moment.

Today? Apparently breakfast cereal was on sale. The real stuff, not the store-brand ‘almost as goods’. (Generic frosted flakes? “They’rrrrrrrrrrrrre…okay!”) So, with regular price being knocked down about 50% who wouldn’t stock up?

I know from experience that they’ll stay fresh in their sealed bags well into next year. And I’m the kind guy who, when he feels lazy and hungry, will just have a giant bowl of breakfast cereal  for dinner.

More importantly, its part of the Alpha strategy – buy it cheap and stock it deep when prices are low. Way I reckon it, I’m good on breakfast cereal for the rest of the year.

Need more milk though……..

The “emergency-food” industry has long sold tubs of dehydrated fruit and freeze-dried beef stew to keep until disaster strikes

The selling point is the food lasts for years. For companies, that is also the drawback. Customers can stock up once—a “one-and-done purchase,” said Greg Allison, vice president of marketing for Blue Chip Group Inc., which makes hundreds of different freeze-dried entrees.

So he and others in the business are asking, Why wait for Armageddon?.

There is some truth to this article. Once you drop the coin for a five years supply of freeze drieds you pretty much never have to buy them again. So, the vendors need to find another way to keep the market active. Rather than sell the complete meals, they should focus on the components. FD veggies, fruits, meats, etc, in bulk are nice for making your own meals. That’s where the money is going to be.

The Blue Chip Group mentioned in the article is the outfit we know as Augason Farms … an outfit I recommend for their wonderful variety and convenient packaging.

Yup, freeze drieds (and other long-term foods) are expensive, but after a long day of hanging looters and fighting off UN troops nothing will taste better than those freezedried porkchops, mashed potatoes, corn, and apple sauce.

H/T to Friend Of The Blog, http://harryflashmansblog.blogspot.com/

It doesn’t happen that often, but while rummaging through the food stocks I came across this:

Note the can on the right. It’s a bit tough to see on a two-dimensional plane, but that thing is bulging like BIll Clinton’s trousers at sorority party. (And before you get worked up, that can on the left isn’t leaking…it just picked up some liquid that was on the counter when I sat the cans down.)

As you know, when a can is bulging it’s a sign that you’ve gone from having stored food to having the one of the basic building blocks of botulism poisoning.

My experience has been that high-acid foods like tomatoes are the ones most likely to have problems. As I think back, every can failure I’ve had has been with high-acid food.

Age? Well, these cans have been sitting in the classic ‘cool dark place’ at slightly less than room temperature for the last eight years. Eight years isn’t that long on canned foods, but these cans were from a boutique grocery and were imported from Turkey. I’m gonna guess that high-quality enamel-lined cans are not exactly a mainstay of Turkish food processing.

Anyway, the moral of the story is next time you’re dinking around in your stored food take a gander at things and check for defects.

I’m still slightly amused when I walk into a supermarket, find a good deal on something, and the checker’s response is one of confusion when I tell them I’ll take several cases of whatever it is.

Today’s example…….

Me, I love pasta. It’s bad for me in the sense that it’s pretty much just straight up carbs, but I’ve been moderating my intake for the last couple months and am being sparing about the use of rice and pasta. But..my ‘magic number’ is $1/# on pasta. I have magic numbers for lots of things. The Magic Number is the price at which I will go deep on purchasing something. For example, a can of Coke is about $0.29-31 each when I go to CostCo and get a case. But, if they have a sale or someplace is selling it for, say, $.20/can, I’ll buy several cases. Glocks? At $300  for a used Glock, I’ll take all you have. (Some things, however, you do not buy at a discount. For example, I will not buy ‘bargain’ condoms.)

Anyway, less than a buck a pound for pasta is my magic number. Turns out my local grocery was selling it for $0.50/#. Turn around, walk back to the front of the store, put back the basket and get a cart instead. “I’ll take two cases of the rigatoni, please.” The confused look starts to creep across their face. Look, I know what a case is, I know how many are in a case, I know how much they cost…now go get me two cases. Yes, I know what I’m talking about.

Do the math. That wound up being 80% off the normal price. But..a normal price of $2/# seems a bit excessive. But still….score!

Once in a blue moon, when I’m sales-raping their inventory, they’ll ask why I’m buying so much stuff. I’m not going to say “I’m one of those paranoid survivalists”, so instead I tell them I either cook for a day care or nursing home, or, more often, I tell them I’m buying for a food bank. (This last one is a very good cover since the items are on sale at blowout prices….seems reasonable a food bank would jump at it.)

So, off to the basement to stock the wire shelves with food. As an aside, pasta and rice are my favorite staples. They keep well, are amazingly versatile, and can be used to stretch other foods or are just good by themselves. Some butter, olive oil, garlic, crushed red peppers, and salt, sauteed for a few minutes and then stirred into hot pasta makes a fast, hearty, and amazingly cheap meal. Drop in some canned chicken or tuna and you’re set.

Sale runs for another couple days, so I’ll be getting another couple cases. So, today’s bright spot in a world of suckage: food security.

Just a reminder that the Mountain House Cans group buy is still in it’s formative stage. If you’re interested, details are here. If you’ve already gotten the info and you know what you want, you should send me a list so I can add it to the ones I already have and we can see if the threshold for minimum order ($3500~) has been met. If you don’t know whatyou want yet, thats fine too, but try to have a list ready by the end of the month…which is when this thing either launches or gets scrubbed.