# How to preserve food for as long as possible (thought experiment)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [August 26, 2018, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322 "2018-08-26T22:59:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2018, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/21 "2018-08-27T04:32:38Z")
Put a pig in suspended animation with you.
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### Author:  [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2018, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/22 "2018-08-27T04:55:38Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#):
>
> So I have located an extremely seismically stable salt mine which geologists assure me will remain untouched for billions of years. I have constructed a chamber there.
Not trying to fight the hypothetical, but you really need to specify what conditions the food will be exposed to, because nowhere on or near the surface of the earth is “stable” over geologic time. Essentially _everywhere_ is subject to dynamic geologic processes - exposure to extreme temperatures and pressures; or uplift and erosion.
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### Author:  [@Projammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Projammer)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2018, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/23 "2018-08-27T05:15:00Z")
We need more details about the specific dietary requirements post revival. If it’s just calories, just pack some pure sugar in a glass container sealed with the before mentioned molten glass technique. While sugar isn’t a mineral, it is a crystalline solid which only decomposes in the presence of heat. Not a problem in a salt mine.
Also not a problem if you’ll require certain minerals, glass them up in a vacuum or inert gas container and you’re fine.
It gets tricky if you have to have particular organic compounds. Not my field, but keeping them stable for extended periods can probably be tricky. Having germinated at least one 2000yo seed indicates it is promising though.
> [@Peter\_Morris](#):
>
> I don’t know the answer, but to those people advocating dried food that can be reconstituted with water, remember it be ready to eat within 30 minutes. Can you name any specific dried foods that will last forever, but don’t require hours of soaking?
You won’t have to reconstitute a complete steak or carrot or whatever. Take your freeze dried food and grind it into powder, then vacuum pack and irradiate to kill off any straggler microbes. Just add water and you have an unappetizing but nutritious paste. Add enough water and you’ll have a tasty broth.
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### Author:  [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2018, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/24 "2018-08-27T06:12:35Z")
Sorry for the confusion. I definitely did intend the 100 years in the OP just to be an example. I’m quite sure that sufficiently well packed canned or dried food could last a century, no problem. The interesting question is how long could it last, and what storage techniques might you need.
What sort of water container would keep the water fresh but still be open-able for millenia? How long would dried food last? What if it was freeze-dried? What if it was suspended in pure helium? Etc.
As for the conditions in the room, the atmosphere and temperature will remain effectively unchanged. That’s just part of the hypothetical.
And no, I can’t suspended animate a pig, that would obviously render the entire question pointless.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2018, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/25 "2018-08-27T06:48:03Z")
> [@TSBG](#):
>
> at some point plate tectonics are going to come into play for even the most “stable” location, no?
No.[Not necessarily](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaapvaal_Craton).
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### Author:  [@brossa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brossa)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2018, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/26 "2018-08-27T16:35:15Z")
Water sealed in a glass ampoule of arbitrary wall thickness, perhaps resting in a stone receptacle, should be pretty stable.
Proteins have half lives, and they break down spontaneously over time. The precise definition of ‘break down’ here is somewhat hazy - on one end it can reflect loss of function due to changes in the protein’s shape, then there’s the breakup of the protein into smaller fragments, and finally the amino acids themselves will racemize, or randomize their chirality, with the D-forms being not biologically available and thus useless to eat.
The half life of a protein depends upon its particular amino acid sequence and local conditions. Cold, dry, pH-neutral environments preserve protein better than warm, wet, acidic ones. Freeze-dried meat stored under dry inert gas in another sealed ampoule in a freezing environment would last a good long time. Bone collagen, for example, is estimated to be immunologically detectable after ~2.7 million years at 0 deg Celsius. Older than that, and you have something made up of amino acids that isn’t recognizably collagen anymore. Maybe you could eat it, but no guarantees. Some of those amino acid breakdown products are liable to be nasty, like putrescine. More stable proteins, like osteocalcin, might be detectable for 110,000,000 years (data from [here](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi4hI-00o3dAhUC2oMKHXdUCX0QFjAAegQIAxAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.biochemist.org%2Fbio%2F02403%2F0012%2F024030012.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2uVn7_9QXgxbnRGlYgrd_o)). Again, that’s ‘able to be detected as osteocalcin with modern chemical methods’, not ‘good to eat’.
I like the idea of a big chunk of rock candy submerged in honey (or maybe silicone oil?) in a sealed glass container. The liquid could add some hydraulic support to the container walls. Again, rest the ampoule in a custom-cut stone canopic-type jar.
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### Author:  [@Qwakkeddup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qwakkeddup)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2018, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/27 "2018-08-28T03:14:59Z")
Just steal a food replicator from the USS Enterprise NCC 1701.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [August 28, 2018, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-preserve-food-for-as-long-as-possible-thought-experiment/820322/28 "2018-08-28T20:30:31Z")
If we’re talking spans greater than thousands of years, I’m not even sure how an answer would be possible. We haven’t had food preservation technology for long enough to get a good baseline for how well it works on those timescales.
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