To clarify the earlier responses - don’t add water to your honey. You don’t need it, trust me. I know it’s hard to believe, but that gunk in your honey jar isn’t dried out, just crystallized. As mentioned, gently heating it (I find a microwave works fine, but I do it in 10 second intervals, because it really doesn’t take as long as you’d think) is all you need.
Adding water risks diluting the remainder of the honey enough that bacteria could start to grow in there. The reason honey doesn’t allow bacterial growth is because it’s so concentrated, there’s not enough water or oxygen in there to support aerobic bacteria. (Anaerobic, like botulism, is another story.)
That’ll be the sugar content (maybe the acidity too, a bit). Plus the usually aseptic packaging.
It’s not in stasis though - so enzymes and other chemical processes are still at work in a preserve/jam - which could result in it becoming inedible after a while.
To continue the hijack, as an active member of the LDS church, I do try to have a years supply for me and my family. I try, but if I had to servive on it, it would be a fairly slim and bland year. I’m working on it though.
It has really come in handy, though. When I was laid off - no grocery bills. When I was a kid and my dad’s mine went on strike, we didn’t have to worry much about food. Every winter when the roads close, we don’t really need to worry.
RIght now, the turbulance if the local source river has shut down our water treatment plant and we are no on day 3 of a boil water/no water cycle. Our stored water is really helpful right now, and you can tell which of our neighbors have supplies as well.
Cooking isn’t that big a deal. As noted above, you can make porridge. Or you can mix flour and water, bake, and make hardtack. Not interesting, but it will preserve life (and keep damned near forever)
Almost everything that’s a naturally occurring food will rot. You have to specially prepare foodstuffs if you want them to last.
You can also capture some wild yeast and have real bread after a week or so. All you really need to make bread is flour and water, all other ingredients are optional.
Canned food stored at moderate temperatures has a safe shelf life measured in decades. Basically, if the can is intact and not bulging, it’s probably safe to eat. You could probably eat WWII C-rations that were stored in a cave, vault, or other stable-temperature environment without any ill effects. They might not taste all that great, since they weren’t noted as being particularly yummy even when they were first produced. Canning is about the best the average person could do to preserve foods for the long term.
Freeze drying is optimal in a lot of ways. The resulting product is very light since there’s no water content, most vitamins and minerals are preserved, and the flavor is usually unchanged. The only problem is that you have to keep it dry, and if you want to preserve the lightness factor you have to compromise on the toughness of your packaging. The processing is also not something the average person can do in their kitchen or basement, which means it’s pretty much limited to commercial use.
Your stove won’t work, but mine will. (I know I’m not average, but neither are the people who stock up on wheat.) I’ve got a bow saw, a wood stove, and a dutch oven. I’m also building a smokehouse, and building a hot smoker/oven into the firebox. Not that I stock up on food to that extent, but I do buy flour by the 50 lb bag, as it’s much cheaper and I make bread every week.
As Sleel said, you can capture wild yeast, but many people bake their own bread and have yeast on hand. It’s easy to start and maintain a starter culture from commercial yeast. My bread only has flour, salt, yeast, and water, and it’s better than anything I can buy.
You can capture your own yeast (I’ve done it - it’s fun), but you can also just cook and eat flatbreads - in fact, in a survival situation, that’s probably more likely anyway, as they’re quicker and simpler to prepare and easier to cook
Spoiled food won’t necessarily poison you, it most likely will just taste bad and provide lower nutritional value.
So in that sense, you can eat most things for a very long time - limited only by the amount the food rots away and disappears/loses food value. Grains will last forever in dry weather.
Food poisoning is a different issue and not connected to spoilage. The organisms that spoil food are usually not the same organisms that will make you sick and are usually not just lurking in the air. If your food were sterilized and then left in a sterilized cabinet to spoil for a few months, nothing would happen to you if you ate it.
Mayonnaise is a good example. I recently read that if you leave an opened jar of mayonnaise in your cupboard, it might taste a bit “off” after a while, but it wouldn’t kill you. It would be a bit like leaving your olive oil out too long.
According to fella bilong missus flodnak, a veteran of many years in Heimevernet (=Norwegian Home Guards), the real name is DMPB, Død Mann På Boks (=“Dead Man in a Can”)
He has some interesting stories about coming across cases in warehouses with German labels on them, and the officers wondering if the contents were still usable. In the 1990s :eek:
To expand on what Rusalka said, not only are the organisms that spoil food usually not the same organisms that will make you sick, the time course of toxin production and spoilage is often different. For example, if your dried fish, fermented tofu, or vichyssoise are contaminated with botulism spores and packaged with too much water and too high a pH, it doesn’t take months or years for a lethal quantity of botulism toxin to build up. And if the cook contaminates potato salad in the morning with staphylococci from a cut on his finger and leaves the potato salad out all day, by evening you can get a really unpleasant case of food poisoning from it. Mycotoxins such as aflotoxin and ergotoxin might take longer to develop because fungi don’t grow so fast but still, the risk of food poisoning is based primarily on the risk the food was contaminated before storage and secondarily on the storage conditions; length of time in storage is generally going to be much less important.
The important concept here as far as food safety goes is that few bacteria or fungi likley to grow in stored food produce toxins harmful to humans. On the contrary, foods are often intentionally contaminated with bacteria or fungi to improve their shelf life, taste, or for other reasons, e.g., kefir, some cheeses, wine.
Tangential question: several jars of jam in my fridge have what looks like the same crystallization as honey appearing on the surface. The first time I saw it, I thought the jar had molded or something, so I threw it away. Then I realized they all had this. Is this a result of the temperature of my 'fridge, or did all my jam just go bad at the same time?
How long does jam generally last, anyway? CalMeacham: I have some condiments in my 'fridge that must be several years old. We only have call for Worcestershire sauce about twice a year, for example. I think I bought that bottle the same year we moved up here, around 2003.
