8 Signs Your Stored Food Can Kill You

I have been home canning foods for a long time now.I have only been
canning my own jellies,jams and preserves so far.I have pressure canners
but I have not gotten around to using them yet.I came across this article
and thought I would share it here.
I have learned,through trial and error,about properly canning your own
food.You can't skip any steps and you should always use recipes that have
been proven safe.I see videos on you-tube about canning butter,dry-canning
foods...Be very careful when,or if,you do these types.
I have dry canned crackers in the oven with NO problems.Even a year later,
the crackers were still good and crispy.I also put an oxy-absorber in the jars
that didn't seal.
A lot of mistakes that preppers' make is not using their stock or rotating it.
I have found that most of the stuff that I canned should be used up in about
a year's time. I have canned fruit juices that should have been used during
the winter.I wasted all that juice and time canning them.
Here is the article and it does have a lot of good information in it.Love you all,
Mama.
www.bioprepper.com...

a reply to: mamabeth

Thanks for the tips, I will have to check the link a little bit later.
My parents canned, every year, and of course taught me although I haven't in many years.
The last thing I canned was a surplus crop of tomatoes. They were fun to grow, and easy, and I couldn't give them all away but, I did manage to give away bunches.
Everyone got their fill of mater sammiches that year!

a reply to: mamabeth


Is one of them 'if it's pointing a loaded .88magnum at you'?

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

AHHH,no! If the lid is bulging it could be loaded with bad stuff ready
to blow up on you when opened.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

a reply to: mamabeth

Scary stuff that. I would never attempt it.

But it is odd to think my Grandmother, when a youngster in small town Missouri, her mom and Aunts regularly made jams and jellied preserves. They also quilted. I regularly use a quilt she made, dated 1913.

a reply to: TonyS

I hear you about being scary stuff. I did can butter a couple of
years ago.I still have the jars,they still look good and yellow,but...
I am going to throw them in the trash,jars and all.

a reply to: mamabeth

Better safe than sorry. My Grandmother's family consumed their preserves within a year. Mostly canning was to get them through the winter.

I wonder if corporate produced "survivalist" food is really as bacterial/virus free and long lasting as they claim or maybe laced with zombie drugs?

I feel a conspiratorial screen play coming on....

a reply to: mamabeth

I have canned toms, venison, pickles, ham, stews and jellies.

With high acid foods open pot or oven canning is fine.

But with the low acid I use a pressure cooker and the idea is to reach 220-230 degrees and that requires a pressure vessel, hence the pressure cooker. The pressure is like 10 psi (the numbers are on the gauge). This is all to kill the botulism that could grow if the temps don't get high enough and a perfect vacuum isn't formed.

Never had an issue, but am extremely careful.

I did research on butter, you can freeze butter for up to a year with no taste change, but it should be in a non-self defrosting freezer. I bought some LOL European style butter when it was on sale locally for three bucks a pound, we have eighteen pounds in the freezer now. It is good tasting butter. By freezing and rotating, we usually keep about ten to fifteen pounds of butter in stock, all bought when on sale at a great price. No need to can the butter, we have a generator if the power goes out for over a day so we can do each freezer for an hour a day. Taking out a roast or chicken or steaks or burger and putting it in the fridge keeps everything in the fridge cold while the power is out too, cooking it later on the grill in the summer or in or on the woodstove in the winter makes it easy to keep things going. Ten gallons of gas in rotation will keep the generators supplied for a month at two hours a day total.

We just make freezer jams, we also have frozen berries and lots of food in rotation in the freezers, this keeps the cost of our food down, buying spare ribs at a buck a pound and pork chops at a buck thirty a pound makes up for us buying half a grass fed cow per year. Our canned good pantry is well stocked and rotated, we could easily go a month without buying anything. It looks like the shelves in a grocery store, four shelves high and about fifteen feet long holds a lot of food, all bought on sale or in the case of canned meat, bought by the case. My kids love the canned boneless chicken and beef from a very good cannery in pensylvania, it is grown by the Amish people. It makes great stew and a quick chicken soup or stew. It is also great for camping. Better by far than buying the whole canned chickens, although they do taste pretty good in soup too.

I just stock about fifty pounds of bread flour and around forty pounds of all purpose organic flour. Buying it on sale is the best way to save money on this stuff. We make most of our own bread and cookies and pies using the best of ingredients at very reasonable costs. The thing is you need to replenish the pantry when things go on sale, buying them at the full price is not acceptable. We usually buy either creamettes noodles or IGA noodles for the soups and dishes, getting them on sale and stocking them saves about half on the cost. We also have a pasta machine and we stock some dehydrated eggs we bought on line, we still have enough of those eggs to make fifteen dozen eggs.The LOL european butter runs about five fifty a pound, getting it at three bucks a pound makes it possible for us to have great tasting cookies and foods.

With the specialty flours I have, I can toss together nutritious cookies that taste really good and you could live off of for two months without taking a noze dive in health. WE have the good dried eggs so we can make cookies if the SHTF No use suffering, you need a little cookies to go along with the ten cans of coffee in rotation.

Another thing, with our system, we have tossed probably twenty cans of food that have been recalled, because we watch the food recalls, we do not get sick, the info about the poisonings comes out three weeks after you bought the food, if you use it right away, then maybe you would have gotten sick. Acid foods are good for six months after expiration date, base foods are good for a year. It can go longer than that but the taste does start to go down and of course, no matter what, check to see if there is a problem with the can seal, if it blows out of the can like a catfood we had, it is no good. My mother had a can that exploded outward when she opened it, it was within the expiration date too. Always smell the product and take a little taste when using can goods, some micotoxins in excess will remain even after cooking.

Make sure that moths have not infested your drygoods, a friend of mine had dinky moths, the moths someohow cut a hole through the plastic and layed eggs in the bags. I never saw anything like that, the supposedly sealed bags all had little caterpillers in them, we threw out three quarters of his drygoods, destroyed by little wood pile moths that are now here, they were never around here till about ten years ago. What a pest, you can't spray bug spray on your food pantry, flypaper did work but took quite a while to get rid of his moths.

a reply to: rickymouse

Freezing flour will make it last decades. It kills the eggs that are in it that make webs eventually moths. Do you keep any stores of sugar?

You have a very good food preservation plan, I am impressed.

a reply to: rickymouse

Really appreciated the good information you posted.The plastic that the
moths cut through,was it a bag or a container?

a reply to: mamabeth

Just eat the caterpillars. Full of protein and grainy goodness!

originally posted by: seasonal
a reply to: rickymouse

Freezing flour will make it last decades. It kills the eggs that are in it that make webs eventually moths. Do you keep any stores of sugar?

You have a very good food preservation plan, I am impressed.

WE have about ten four pound bags of pure cane sugar in rotation. We would take half of one freezer to store all our flour, we just keep rotating it.

originally posted by: mamabeth
a reply to: rickymouse

Really appreciated the good information you posted.The plastic that the
moths cut through,was it a bag or a container?

They chewed through the bags. He had the stuff in a cupboard in the heated shed.

We put lots of our stuff in plastic and metal storage containers, to make sure bugs and mice do not get at them. Hopefully no squirrels will get in the house, I just had a squirrel chew a big chunk the size of a computer mouse off the vent area of a five gallon gas can full of gas in my covered area. Not too cool, he did it on top, could have been on bottom. I had to strain all the gas before dumping it into the truck because the plastic fell into the can.

a reply to: mamabeth

Don't throw out your hard work, open one and check it. I've eaten jam I made 2 years later and it was fine. Canned food does not need to be eaten within a year. That's just plain silly.

a reply to: Jerseymilker

The canned food I was talking about that should be used within
a year is the juices.I had canned a bunch of fruit juices and I did
end up throwing out the grapefruit and orange.I still have the grape
and berry.
I had canned those in 2015 and just recently threw them out.They
had changed color and when opened didn't smell good.The old adage,
when in doubt throw it out and I did.

a reply to: mamabeth
Thank you mamabeth, I should be dead by now... glad I'm still alive.

a reply to: mamabeth

Thank you for sharing the information. Will check the website out.