So I did maybe 2 trays and ended up with 2 Mylar bags of tortillas. I found them early last year, sometime at the end of Winter or start of spring, and I opened up a bag. They were 5 years old or so at the time. They were crispy, tasty, and certainly did well in the freeze dryer. So, when all is said and done, this was a successful experiment.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Those open (still in ziplock) tortillas have been sitting in a warehouse since last year when I opened them. I’ve been cleaning out the warehouse as we prepare to move, and I found them. My assumption was to throw them out, because certainly they must be bad after spending all summer, fall and winter just on a table.

However, after all this time, they were still perfect.

Ok, not a that great of a story, but it goes against what my gut thought. In general, tortilla’s go bad in weeks, so to have them last 6 years, 1 of those years with no oxygen absorption or moisture control, makes me consider looking at adding them to my storage, no matter how bulky they are. While they would break trying to use them for actual cooking, they taste good right out of the bag, and would be good with soup or stew.

A second thought I had about them was I wonder if I could just dehydrate them instead of freeze drying them. It might only take a few hours to do a load. I just moved my dehydrator into my food storage area, so I am going to give that a try also!

The post Quick Post: Interesting Freeze Dry Experience first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

This weekend, I decided to dig into a food storage project and test out a recipe I’ve been working on for my updated one-year supply plan: a Spicy Turkey Sausage Chili with Rice. I’m trying to modernize the traditional LDS food storage recommendations, focusing on shelf-stable ingredients that the average American family would enjoy, with less reliance on a more particularly LDS bent (Their recommendations are good if you’re a homesteader, but out of place in the average American neighborhood). This chili seemed like a perfect candidate—packed with stuff from my food storage: canned chili beans, dried onions, rice, plus a hefty dose of spices that would keep things interesting during a long-term emergency. But man, while this dish was a winner in terms of flavor, it was HOT! Turns out when I wrote the recipe out I had used ‘tsp’ correctly, when I actually started adding the spices, I added 2 Tablespoons of cayenne instead of 2 Teaspoons. I did the same with the garlic. Doh!

Anyway, I started with one of those massive 110 oz can of Bush’s chili beans I keep on hand (This one with a best by date of 2021!)—perfect for a big batch—and paired it with turkey sausage and rice. Overall, I’m trying to find a rice and beans recipe that uses both staples and tastes good with a minimum amount of ingredients. Because I wanted to get a full freeze dry load (15lbs for me, 5 trays), I actually used 2 10-quart crock pots and did 2 full batches.

Each used 2.75 cups of uncooked rice (about 10 years old in my food storage!), which I cooked separately as the rest was simmering, and I went for more spices than I ever have (I had AI pick me out some spices that might help give it a Cajun flair): cayenne, paprika, oregano, black pepper, thyme, and garlic. These spices align with the top 10 most commonly used ones (as I learned during another AI search recently), making them a practical choice for a food storage meal. Dried onions kept things simple, though you could easily use fresh onion. And the whole dish (all 19lbs worth!) came together in a bit over an hour.

I always check older cans prior to opening. The chili ones are showing some wear on the tops, but overall they looked good, though I did discard one with a bad dent. After opening the can (reminder: I need a new can opener) I could immediately tell they were still good, with no off smells, just chili beans in sauce.

The aroma as it simmered was great—rich, smoky, and savory, with the Thyme maybe being the odd note out, as its something I never use (I’m very plain Jane when it comes to spices). When I added the rice to the chili, it looked hearty and comforting, something I could easily eat after a hard day in any kind of survival scenario. I could very easily make this in a dutch oven over a fire or a big pot over one of my propane mini-stoves.

The first bite was a flavor (nuclear) explosion: I couldn’t tell whether it was the Thyme that seemed a bit overpowering, even over the cayenne. The turkey sausage added a bit of protein (more on that later), the beans were fine even 4 years out of date, and the spices were…spicy! Except for the Turkey Sausage which I bought this morning, it was made entirely from shelf-stable ingredients I already have in my food storage.

But: it was hot. Like, really hot. I know it wouldn’t be for many of you, but you have to remember that my idea of spicy is adding garlic pepper to my macaroni and cheese. And the 2nd bowl I had for dinner was even HOTTER. I don’t know if it setting for a few hours made it spicier or what, but it was like Mount Vesuvius and I burned the roof of my mouth. This was after I ended up adding a half cup of water to each Crock Pot while it was cooking; that helped, but I think next time I’ll dial the cayenne back to 1 tablespoon. I also think I need a bit more liquid; I’m going to try maybe a cup of chicken broth to give it a nice touch of oil on top.

Overall, this Spicy Turkey Sausage Chili with Rice is a win for my updated food storage plan. 15 of the 19 pounds made it into the freeze dryer, with one leftover tray in the freezer, and one pound in my belly.

It’s easy to make, uses ingredients that store well for years, and delivers on taste (if you can handle the heat). I’ll definitely tweak the spice level for my family’s palate, but it fits into my goal of creating a more diverse, practical one-year supply—less reliance on wheat-heavy recipes and more on comforting, familiar dishes like this. If you like a good plate of rice and beans, give this a whirl. If you have better spice substitutions than what I have, please let me know. Again, I was hoping to lean more to the Cajun side and while it was delicious I don’t know if I really succeeded at that.

One thing to remember: I’m not a cook, and I don’t even play one on TV. I’m a prepper just trying to be a bit more prepared and learn a bit more about flavors, spices, and what things go well together.

Ingredients:

2.75 cups uncooked rice

1 can (110 oz) chili beans

1 cup dried onion

4 tbsp garlic (minced or powder) (Should be 4 tsp or to taste, I’m just recreating what I did)

2 tbsp cayenne pepper (Should be 2 tsp or to taste)

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tsp thyme

13oz pack of turkey sausage (I used the Kroger brand)

Instructions

1. Add Chili Beans to Crock Pot, putting it on high heat.
2. If you like your Turkey Sausage crispier, brown on the stove, keeping the pieces 1/4″ thick or smaller (for freeze drying), as well as halving or quartering if desired. If the texture doesn’t matter, you can cut and add to the Crock Pot and have it cook with the beans.
3. Add 1 cup dried onion and 4 tbsp garlic to the pot with the sausage. Stir for 2-3 minutes until fragrant. (If using dried garlic, you can add it with the spices in the next step.) These chili bean cans are big, so mixing thoroughly is important.
4. Add Spices: Stir in 2 tbsp cayenne pepper, 1 tsp paprika, 1 tsp oregano, 1/2 tsp black pepper, and 1 tsp thyme. Mix thoroughly.
5. Leave Crock Pot on high for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so, then turn to low.
6. In a separate pan (I did it in a Aroma Rice Cooker) Prepare the Rice:
   • Cook 2.75 cups of uncooked rice according to package instructions (typically 1:2 ratio of rice to water, so 5.5 cups water). The instructions for the Aroma cooker were odd…it suggested 1.3 cups of water to rice. This had the entire batch of rice end up pretty dry as well, which didn’t help the consistency of the whole dish. While the cooker wouldn’t hold a full 1:2, I will up the water to 1.5 cups/cup of rice the next time I try this to see if I can get a bit stickier rice.
7. Combine:
   • Add the finished rice to the Crock Pot, stir thoroughly. Turn to warm and serve.
8. Finished each Crock Pot ended up with 9.5lbs of food!

Notes

• Servings: A 110 oz can of chili beans is big (about 12 cups), so this recipe serves 12-15 people a pretty hearty portion. I ate mine with Scoops. Part of this experiment for me is figuring out what I would actually do at the end of the world with these giant cans of Bush’s beans. Most likely I wouldn’t be the one cooking, but it never hurts to learn something.
• Shelf-Stable: This recipe uses mostly pantry staples (dried onions, spices, canned beans, rice), making it ideal for food storage. I could just as easily freeze dry the turkey sausage as well (I think I have some tucked away in one of my totes) to have the complete recipe. However, if you don’t have a freeze dryer this recipe can get away without the turkey sausage. Honestly, 13oz wasn’t enough sausage for a recipe this big; I will double it next time (and end up with over 10lbs per crock pot!)
• Adjusting Heat: The 2 tbsp cayenne makes this very spicy. I’ll reduce this to 1 tbsp next time, plus lower the garlic and see how that does.
• It should be a little thinner, so next time I’m going to add at least a cup of chicken broth as it cooks, maybe 2. That should also give it a nice savory shine.

The post A Very Spicy Rice and Beans Adventure first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

I basically had a Facebook person telling me that I was lying when I said you could store food long term in 5 mil bags, and that I was a horrendous person trying to kill people because I had too many 5 mil bags on hand I couldn’t get rid of. Of course, most of us know you can store food in 5 mil bags because we’ve done it; I even have food from 2007 still stored in 3.5 mil and 4.3 mil bags. These products have been around for decades, and if they DIDN’T work, we’d know it. The Internets would be full of stories of failed bags and ruined food. And yeah, occasionally one of those stories pop up, and the culprit is usually user error. I had my own share of failures back almost 20 years ago when I first started and I didn’t know what I didn’t know; but again, that was on me, and not on the products involved. The good news is we also see the stories about folks opening up their Y2K food in 4.3 mil bags and its all still awesome.

So today, I’m going to break down the argument that there is something intrinsically better about a 7 mil bag that makes it so superior that 5 mil bags should never be used. You can find lots of this info in our video here, I’m just going to go into a bit more detail in this post.

Let me start with some premises:

1: Yes, the best 7 mil bags will be better than the best 5 mil bags. I think this is where some of this argument stems from. A good manufacturer of bags cares about both their products and the materials they are made from, and so our 7 mil bags are ‘better’ than our 5 mil bags from a technical standpoint, because there’s more quality material there. As examples, we add Nylon for tensile strength, we use real Mylar because its inherently stronger than the materials people replace it with. These things make a difference, and the testing shows it.

However, here’s the rub. Just because the 7 mil bag is ‘better’ by a few percentage points doesn’t mean its going to keep your food fresh any longer, because the amount of oxygen and moisture getting to your food is so small due to the incredible barrier properties of the primary barrier layer, which isn’t actually Mylar…its aluminum foil.

The harder truth for some folks to realize is that there are some 5 mil bags that are measurably better on some performance indicators than some 7 mil bags, depending on who is making the bag. It’s like how you can have a $25,000 automobile with better acceleration than a $40,000 automobile.

2: Aluminum foil – The best Mylar bags (4.3 mil and up usually) on the market use a .00035″ layer of aluminum foil (some also use a thinner .000285″ layer). It’s a common laminate, and used in all kinds of things, from reflective insulation to metallic tape. And in perfect condition, it has zero oxygen and zero moisture pass-through. This is the main reason why 5 mil bags have nearly identical barrier properties to 7 mil bags…they are both starting from a base of zero. Now, there is a measurement regarding the aluminum foil layer, ‘pinholes per meter squared’, and this is why when in actual use Mylar bags don’t have perfect scores when it comes to oxygen and moisture penetration. Both in the manufacturing process, as well as in the process of storing food, it has and can develop tiny pinholes. In many places on the Internet, you can see people freaking out about pinholes…but they are just part of the process, and they are inevitable. And this is why your Mylar bags have several other layers that are NOT prone to pinholes.

3: Other Layers – In our case, our 5 mil bags are made of 5 total layers, and our 7 mil bags have 7 total layers. We are the only Mylar bag seller we know still using Mylar as one of those layers. So why Mylar? It has good barrier qualities, exceptional tensile and mechanical strength and is very easy to work with. Others replace Mylar with lower-performing materials because it is expensive. LLDPE, the most common replacement for Mylar used by some of our competitors, is up to 500 times worse (yes, the numbers can be crazy) on OTR (Oxygen transmission) and up to 10 times worse on WVTR (Water vapor transmission) than actual BoPet. Our 7 mil bags (and now our Steelpak 4 mil bags) have a Nylon layer. Why? Because it too offers added puncture protection.

Most sellers sell 3-4 layer bags because they are cheaper to produce and offer sufficient protection for many uses. The good part for them is that a thick bag feels like a thick bag, however its made, which is why when you ask ‘what’s your favorite Mylar bag’ you get so many answers, because they all FEEL good and sturdy, and most folks think that correlates to being made from quality materials. However, ask other producers what their bags are made of, and WHY, and you’ll likely be greeted by blank stares. Most other sellers are white labelers, meaning they create an e-commerce business around selling a product that’s profitable. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But they are not Flexible Packaging companies, of which Discount Mylar Bags is the only one specializing in food storage packaging solutions. Even though most folks know us as Discount Mylar Bags, our official name is ShieldPro Flexible Packaging, because we design packaging solutions for both the retail and corporate marketplace. Our customers range from the Department of Defense, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, multiple university research labs (One which said our bags tested better for pharmaceuticals than some products designed for it), multiple food and supplement companies, the USAF (to protect parts from corrosion) and hundreds of others.

4: The Science – I know, I am very skeptical of that term as well. However, in this case, it is just the measurement of how products perform. I’m not even going to use the fancy OTR/WVTR numbers (though you are welcome to email me about them)…I’m going to break it down even further. So how much oxygen does a Mylar bag let through each year?

For a quality 5 mil 1.25 quart bag, the answer is .22cc/year.

For a quality 7 mil 1.25 quart bag, the answer is .19cc/year.

Both of those numbers are ridiculously low. If you are using a 300cc oxygen absorber from us, with around an 1100cc actual rating, and you assume 300cc of that capacity is used when you first seal the bag, you will have enough oxygen absorption for another 3,636 years with a 5 mil bag, and another 4,210 years with a 7 mil bag. So yes, that 7 mil bag will do better for you if you are an Egyptian pharaoh, but not so much if you’re a rural mom or dad like me.=) Of course, your food will break down long before you open the bag, but at least there still won’t be any oxygen in it a couple of centuries from now.

The numbers for moisture are actually closer than they are for Oxygen, and are essentially a rounding error, with no measurable improvement in MVTR between 5 and 7 mil and between .19 and .22cc/year.

So assuming you are using good bags, and good oxygen absorbers, you will get exactly the same results (unless you live 4000 years) using 5 mil bags instead of 7 mil.

I know this post and others like it can make folks feel a little weird. After all, the ‘Internet’ tells me to only use 7 mil bags! And the Internet is never wrong, right?

5: Yes, it feels WEIRD to think a great thick bag isn’t protecting your food much better than a thinner one, but it is true. Take a look at the below chart; these are various types of films used in various products. Please note the HUGE variations in these numbers, a difference by a factor of over 100,000 between some of the products. What films you use in manufacturing matters. However, please note that EVERY one of these films has its place, depending on the application. Some have a better melting point, some are easier to laminate, some bind better to aluminum or another material, etc. But the statement made to me last night, that a 5mil bag CAN’T ever be used to store food long term and that I must be trying to kill people by selling them, is just a statement made from a lack of information.

One type of plastic at 2 mil might not be able to hold up a 12oz cup of coffee, while another 2 mil film of a different plastic might hold up a brick. That’s how big a variation there can be. A plastic bag you put in your fridge might have an oxygen pass-through rate of 1000cc/day. A better one that is lighter than the first might have an OTR rate of 100cc/day, just through the use of different materials.

So if you’ve had a bad experience with a particular bag, please don’t make the assumption that every other product like it will also be bad. There’s as much difference in Mylar bags as there is between a Chevy and a Toyota in terms of quality of materials. And so just because your Ford broke down that time doesn’t mean even every Ford will, let alone another brand.

6: The one actual benefit of a good 7 mil bag: tensile strength and the ability to resist punctures. Yes, if you have puncture prone food, by all means use a 7 mil bag. But if you are only worried about longevity, you can’t go wrong with a 5 mil bag produced by a manufacturer who cares about a quality product, and there are several on the market.

The post 5 Mil vs. 7 Mil…again. first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

The question I’m posing today is an easy one: should your Mylar bags contract when using an oxygen absorber?   The reason I felt the need to write this is to clarify some information I see people giving out on this subject.  Additionally, there was a gentleman in one of my earlier threads that said essentially none of his bags contracted and he thought it was OK because of what people were saying, and that started to worry me.  We (as a community) may have let the contraction issue slide too easily, and here’s why.  One of the most common answers to the question is a variation of : ‘they don’t have to, as air is only 20% oxygen, and that’s all that’d being absorbed.’  While true, that’s not nearly a complete answer.

TL; DR:  My new concise answer to this question is now:  Assuming your bag is mostly full and barring powders, yes, your Mylar bags should contract if using an oxygen absorber.  If they don’t (or haven’t), I would test a bag or two.  Of the dozens of food types, both dry goods and freeze dried foods I have stored (a partial listing at the bottom), the only ones where I can’t see some contraction are powders:  mainly flour and eggs.  There are a couple of other food types that show less contraction, such as bread or oats. Food in 7 Mil bags show less contraction than in 5 Mil bags, due to higher tensile strength and less ‘printing’ (This is where you can run your nail down a Mylar bag and see a line). Finally, heavy small bags, such as 7 mil 5″x7″x3″ bags, will show very little contraction vs. larger or lighter bags, especially if not completely full.

My concern is that some of the food storage supply companies may be deflecting from the fact that their absorbers are under-weighted (see experiment in a few paragraphs) by saying that its OK for your food to not contract.  And some of the freeze dry and prepper user base has picked up on that and there’s very little concern over bags not contracting.

So I did an experiment with samples I recently purchased from one of the most popular food storage companies.  I’m not going to name names, because I’d rather have folks reproduce this on their own than take my word for it if they feel my methodology has some holes.

Experiment Part A:

1:  2 brands of Oxygen Absorber, Brand A and Brand B; the Brand A oxygen absorbers are rated 300cc, and the Brand B oxygen absorbers are rated 400cc.  Generally speaking, 300cc is considered the right amount to clear a 1 gallon bag filled with food. The 300cc Brand A absorbers weigh approximately .303 ounce per packet; the 400cc Brand B absorbers weigh approximately .094 ounce per unit.

2:  20 8”x12”x4” 9 Cup 5 Mil (2.25 quart) Mylar Bags; both absorbers should have 0 issues with clearing this size bag, and this experiment should have ended here.

3:  Half the Bags are filled with Macaroni (approx. 2.75 lbs), and half with Quick Oats (approx. 2 lbs, they are way less dense).  Each Brand of Oxygen Absorber was used in 5 bags of Macaroni, and 5 Bags of Quick Oats.

I thought the initial part of the experiment would be a 1 and done.  Either all of the bags would contract or all of the pasta bags would contract (but not the oats, because I’ve heard for 15 years they often won’t, and it’s not something I’ve added to my storage until just recently) and that would be the end of the experiment.  However, when I came in the next day to check, something I didn’t expect had occurred.  All 10 bags of the Brand A oxygen absorbers (the ones I generally use) had fully contracted, all 5 of the brand B pasta bags had contracted, but all 5 brand B oats bags had either not contracted or ran out of capacity before they fully contracted.  A few of the brand B oat bags had the beginning stages of contraction, but not completely.

What does this tell us?  My thought is that the Brand B absorbers, which you can tell from the pictures are very small compared to the ones I normally use, had enough capacity to clear the Pasta, but not enough capacity to clear the Oats.  So what does THAT tell us?  A 300cc rated absorber, at exactly its rating, should clear 1.5 liters of air of oxygen.  A 400cc rated absorber, at exactly its rating, should clear 2 liters of air of oxygen.  The 2.25 quart bags I was using = 2.13 liters of air.  Meaning, both absorbers should be able to almost clear the bags with NOTHING IN THEM.  The fact that the 400cc absorber struggled to clear full bags of oats is a strong indication that its given capacity rating is suspect. (and potentially dangerous if people are relying on them in  2 quart+ bags) 

I don’t know if any math geniuses out there want to help me with this, but even if the full bags of oats had 50% internal airspace, the absorbers would only have had to clear 1.07 liters of air, well below the 2.0 liters 400cc absorbers SHOULD clear.  The pasta bags specific density WAS high enough for them to clear, so we know the actual capacity of those 400cc absorbers is somewhere between the Food Density (my made up word to describe how much internal airspace a particular food has) of Oats x 2.13 liters and the Food Density of Pasta x 2.13 liters.  In any case, I think I can state with certainty that those 400cc absorbers don’t actually rate 400cc. Yes, that sentence is hard to read, but I think it says what I want it to.=)

BUT, this made me need to add an extra step to this process.  Because the Brand B absorbers did work on Pasta, I decided to re-test using 1 gallon bags, the size that both absorbers should be able to clear, assuming a Food Density of 60% or higher (meaning a 300cc is supposed to clear 1.5 liters in a 3.7 liter bag, or about 40%).

Part of me didn’t want to do this test, because I knew the likely result and I hate rebagging food.=)  But its ‘For Science!’  If the Brand B absorbers had trouble clearing a 2.25 quart bag, they weren’t going to clear a 4 quart bag.  And I know the Brand A 300cc absorbers have an actual rating north of 1000cc, or 4.0 liters, which is greater than the size of the bag empty, so I knew it wouldn’t be an issue clearing even a much bigger bag.

Experiment Part B:  I was running out of food to put up and the gallon bags are way bigger, so this is more ad hoc.

1:  Same absorbers as in Part A

2:  12 10”x14” 5 Mil 1 gallon (4 quart, 16 cups) Mylar bags.

3:  The bags are filled with either Flour (another food I’ve always heard won’t contract) or various kinds of pasta (Medium shells, Penne, Macaroni, all of which should have a bit of different Density).

Results:  The results were exactly as expected.  All of the Brand A absorber bags were fully contracted, and none of the Brand B absorbers contracted at all.  Note about flour:  flour doesn’t have any ‘kernels’ or anything to contract around and show a nice pattern, but you call tell they contracted based on the little ‘bubble’ of air that sits at the top of the bag.  The Mylar on both sides of the bubble pulled together; its hard to see from the photo, but if you do it yourself you’ll see what I mean.  So yeah, the wisdom that says flour won’t contract seems accurate enough from a visual standpoint; you actually have to feel the bag to know it worked.

So what’s the verdict? 

1. Almost every food I’ve ever done other than powders (flour and eggs) have visibly contracted.  Some were much milder than others (grilled cheese in small bags, for example)
2. Even though the Pasta bags for the Brand B absorber contracted, I’m not confident they have enough capacity left to last 30 years to continue removing the very minor bit of oxygen passing through yearly.
3. The 5 mil bags handled all the kinds of pasta just fine, even though I’d consider some of it ‘pokey’.  Another win for quality 5 mil bags.

I’m updating my documentation and FAQ’s to more clearly represent that in almost all cases, yes, your food should be contracting, with these addendums:

7 mil bags ‘print’ less than 5 mil bags, so your contraction won’t be as deep and noticeable as with 5 mil bags.

Bags that are not mostly full may not appear to have contracted, but if you hold the bag you’ll feel that the sides have pulled toward each other. It may takes some fiddling to see what I mean, but if you do flour in full bags you should be able to get the gist of it.

Flour will not look contracted when complete, you’ll need to examine the bags closely to know for sure, especially the ‘bubble’ at the top of the bag.

Oats have more internal airspace than macaroni.  This one surprised me considering macaroni is kind of hollow.=)

Smaller bags show contraction less, but it should still be noticeable. 

This is the list of foods I’ve done that have shown contraction, stored in 5x8x3 and larger bags:

Dry Goods: Rice, Beans, Oats, Pasta, Wheat

A small sampling of my Freeze dried foods:  Chili, chicken and rice, turkey pepperoni, shredded cheese, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, turkey kielbasa, turkey sausage, breakfast sausage, hash browns, tater rounds, sliced chicken, chunked chicken, apple fries, lasagna, strawberries, Skittles. And many more. My totes are all stacked and sealed, but looking into them I don’t see ANY that AREN’T contracted other than eggs.

Complete list of foods that don’t look contracted when properly sealed: Eggs (freeze dried), Flour (My assumption is other powders will show the same)

If you have food that’s not a powder you are confident is sealed correctly with a properly sized oxygen absorber and doesn’t show contraction, please let me know and I’ll do some testing.

Finally, and I stress this. These are my results. They have been consistent for these two brands of absorbers every time I’ve tested them (which is often), but that still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your own testing. If you would like to test the Brand A absorber, this link will let you purchase 1 pack (including shipping) for $6 (basically my cost and shipping, so I’m not making anything here) so you can test for yourself. And then please send me a note with your results!

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or complaints! Thanks!

The post Should Your Mylar Bags Contract? first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

To show you where I’m starting from, and where most of the other Food Storage Calculators are basing their numbers, here is an example: LDS Food Storage Calculator

Now, if you are a good cook and are prepared to use those ingredients, more power to you! But right off the bat, in the grains section half of it is devoted to Wheat. First, at least in our family, we have multiple Celiacs and gluten sensitive folks. Those sensitivities are also growing in the general population. So having that high a percentage of wheat is a likely recipe for requiring 2 extra outhouses. Plus, if its a grid-down situation, grinding wheat is a labor-intensive process, and you’ll be burning a good bunch of the calories you’ll get by baking bread.

The legumes is another minor challenge. Again, most families aren’t regularly cooking split peas or soybeans, so I’m adding more of what we eat, and removing things we don’t. As an example, I’m bumping the Peanut Butter up by a factor of 10. It’s easily portable and stores for a couple of years (if you don’t get the organic). One jar of peanut butter (1lb) is basically the equivalent of 1 short day’s worth of calories; you could live on it. Again, Peanuts and Peanut butter are both good storage foods, though like wheat, there’s a lot more people who are allergic to peanuts today than their were 40 years ago, so plan accordingly.

At the end, I hope to have a more usable point to start a conversation on food storage with a bunch of y’all!

If you have a favorite shelf stable (at least 1 year) food you’d like to consider us putting in the new calculator, please let me know!

As always, if you need anything, hit us up at Discount Mylar Bags.

Links: https://www.happypreppers.com/Pioneers.html This is an interesting link to a pioneer crossing the US in the 1800’s, and what they would take with them for a 6 month journey.

https://grandpappy.org/hfoodaff.htm He was the one who came up with the original ‘year’s worth of food’ recipe back in 2008 or so, and updated in for inflation for about 5 years. I can’t find the original list, but I’ve seen in online. You can find his new more modest lists here now. This list is also an inspiration for our new updated FSC. He has an older looking site, but it has a lot of cool stuff available.

The post Food Storage Calculator Updates first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

No company other than Discount Mylar Bags (us) has really added anything new to the space (Such as SteelPak Bags, foil-packed desiccant, slow-acting oxygen absorbers and heat and serve meal pouches) in years, and it doesn’t look like any of them care to. Sure, they’ve got great photos, beautiful packaging and awesome marketing, but that’s what many of the modern companies are…marketing outfits who picked a product that did well over the past few years. Not 2 decade preppers who really want folks storing food. (I apologize if I sound a little frustrated! I am in fact jealous of their marketing talents!=))

One of the most egregious copy and paste jobs I’ve been examining are the Food Storage Calculators that have popped up on some competitors’ pages. The original source of info, the LDS, put together a recommended food storage list based on their average congregant. So yes, I think its a great starting point for a discussion on food storage, and I based my original food storage on it…in 2007. But almost 20 years prepping now and I recognize that for my average customer, these guides are outdated or unrealistic, recommending foods most folks have never cooked with. I would never make these recommendations to beginning preppers. I also think it’s funny that the folks copying these Food Storage Calculators to their websites have the original mis-spellings that have now been copied for multiple generations.=) These competitors aren’t actually looking at them, its just another widget for their website. However, the main problem is the original guide was intended for a group of people who practice homesteading, farming, and being self-sufficient. In 2024, that’s not most preppers.

Now, if that IS you, that’s amazing! But from the beginning, I have been trying to get anyone and everyone prepping. Urban young adults, rural octagenerians, suburban moms…everyone! A week at a time, a month at a time. Just something so that when something bad happens, you have a little to fall back on. Sure, I still think a full year’s worth of food for each person is the gold standard, but if you have an a 20-lb bag of rice, an 18-pack of Kraft Mac and Cheese and 3 boxes of Pop-Tarts put back, you are literally doing better than most of America.

Over the last 5 years I’ve revamped my food storage to more closely match my very picky, not homesteady family…because that’s who we are. Not folks who are prepared to grind hundreds of pounds of wheat when the power goes out, or folks who are going to forage my 30 acres of miserable scrubland looking for herbs. In other words, we’re #preppernormal, not #prepperhardcore. I respect and honor you if you have a homestead and survival skills, it’s just not something that fits our lifestyle. I have enough on my plate trying to keep several small businesses going, helping to home school 4 kids, and find the time to pursue a couple of my own dreams (writing a book, publishing a board game). And somewhere in there I’m trying to squeeze time in to make videos, write a blog, and read some good books.=) So I prep where I can (which mainly means putting stuff back), but I’ll never be Les Stroud. And I long ago came to the conclusion, that’s OK. It’s possible the world may not end, at least not in the post-apocalyptic manner many talk about. It’s possible we go through a long, slow decline a la many empires, where who’s in charge is less important than making sure our families are fed.

So while I wish more folks were super preppers (including myself in a universe where there are 95 hours in a day), from my conversations with 100’s of preppers over more than a dozen years, most are more like my family. Folks putting stuff aside to give a little leg up in an emergency or grid down situation…but we’re not the folks overhauling our entire lifestyle.

So over the next little bit, I am going to revamp and unveil a new, more up-to-date food storage recommendation guide. Yes, it’ll be a little less healthy than the original LDS guide, it’ll have a bit more focus on long shelf-life processed foods, but for many families, it will match our current diets and lifestyles more. And of course, you should always add or subtract foods that fit your family, but I’ll also have the reasons for recommending each food based on my family and experiences.

Next blog, I will let you know what I am using as my starting point, my criteria for including a product on my storage list, and the specifics of how many calories I’m aiming for.

The post Updating the Food Storage 1 Year Plan for a New Generation first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

Over the years, we’ve always believed in diversification as a form of prepping, because we’ve slowly been pushed off of Amazon by our lack of ‘Amazon Knowledge’. And nowadays, Amazon Knowledge is way more important than actually having a quality product. That’s why my wife and I live frugally, and her most common shopping trip is to Goodwill (This was also true in 2005, long before starting our businesses) . Our focus is our family and serving our community. We’ve opened a game store, started several online businesses dealing with collectibles or gaming accessories, and constantly look out for untapped value in the marketplace. (I found another amazing product, a patent coming off its 20 years, that I hope we’ll be offering before the end of the year!)

So what’s the problem with Amazon, you may ask? Well, the main thing is that the best products can very easily be overshadowed by slick-looking, well marketed products. A few years back, Amazon had to start protecting Name Brand items such as Revlon, Norelco, or Samsung, because no-name white-labelers were just better at marketing than even long-running, ultra-quality name brands, and the good products would be buried 10 pages back. You may remember those days. Nowadays, you’ll usually find a Name Brand on page 1, but you’ll still also find 900 knockoffs from Alibaba also with tens of thousands of positive reviews.

I constantly tell my friends who have their own businesses, or want to start one, that the product you are selling isn’t that important to whether your business is successful or not. Success in many fields today is about whether you can market yourself and your product successfully. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been only modestly successful at my marketing efforts. Whether its our local game store or drive-in, an ecommerce store, a podcast, a blog, or a board game, having a great product is only the very first step in having a successful business. BUT…and this is the crux…if you learn how to drive eyeballs and sales, you can make ANY product successful. Just take a look online and you’ll see the proof of this every day.

My anecdotal story to go with this: for about 2 years I tried 5 different electric razors off of Amazon. This was back in 2016 or so, a few years before the absolute wave of knock-off brands. All 5 razors sucked. I got so fed up because I couldn’t find a decent razor on Amazon, even though every one I bought had thousands of positive reviews. Finally, I went to my local Walgreens and bought a bright-yellow Norelco, the only one they had. 7 years later, and that’s still the one I’m using. Sometimes the name brands got their brand name because they were just good, and reliable. I bought a 15 year old hose off of eBay, because the new generation of stretchy hoses I kept getting from Amazon are just terrible.

This is the place where we’ve found ourselves. My company has the highest rated absorbers and strongest bags (and that’s not just advertising, that’s tested), and we’re back on page 20 behind products that are measurably worse in every way. Many of our competitors have given away thousands of products in exchange for 5 star reviews so it looks like they are much better products than they are, and that’s just something I’m not going to participate in. Now, we’re not folks to dwell on things, so we still do the best we can via our website (Discount Mylar Bags), but the writing is on the wall at least when it comes to the retail market which is dominated by Amazon. We’re doing OK on the wholesale side, selling to companies who use our products to package everything from jerky and horse supplements to freeze-dried foods and archival documents, but even that is a long way from the Halcyon days of COVID when we tripled our staff and moved an insane amount of product (ironically, it was that year of sales that triggered all the computer programs to tell people to start selling prepper supplies).

That was a pretty long intro to say this: if you want the best, highest-rated Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers, you won’t find them on Amazon without digging down to page 20. Take a look at this chart (click it to see a larger version):

Now, if you’ve spent some time on Amazon, you’ll recognize most or all of these brands. One of these brands, whose absorbers don’t even absorb their rated capacity of 300cc, has thousands of 5 star reviews, and most of their products are rated 4.5 stars or above overall. The highest rated product (ours), which beats the number 2 brand by almost 35%, can barely be found. That’s the world we’re living in now. Yes, this chart shows what you think it does: our 300cc absorbers tested at 1103cc actual absorption, or nearly 400% their rated capacity. I’m convinced that one of the companies testing under 300cc actual absorption has been selling the wrong sized absorbers, FOR THREE YEARS. And they still have thousands of great reviews. Of course, they’ll never admit that, and they rabidly attack folks on Youtube who suggest that their products are terrible (which they are).

That’s the thing, many of these companies have no idea what Mylar bags or oxygen absorbers are or what they do…they found them via a computer program that told them ‘these things sell good on Amazon, you should buy a bunch and make a listing’. Many of them are simply choosing the least expensive bags and absorbers they can find, relabeling it with their name, and marketing the crap out of it. And sadly, it works. The next chart is for Mylar Bags. Same story, ours are better by a long way. I’ve got MOCON permeation testing (OTR and MVTR) in the works, and I fully expect those results to be consistent as well.

But this is my commitment: I’ll keep showing the charts and information, and hope that a few make the choice to buy Just Better Bags. We’ve been here 13 years, which is 7 years longer than any other company on these lists except Harvest Right, and 10 years longer than several. I hope we’ll be here 13 more and one of my daughters takes it over and runs it better than I do.

So that’s that, but what about the name of this post? Living Free in Tennessee is the name of my friend Nicole’s podcast and media empire! She has a 800+ episode podcast, roasts her own coffee, and has an amazing homestead. Her and a friend company are putting on an awesome event this weekend (the Self Reliance Festival, Oct 14-15, Camden, TN), and that’s where we’ll be!

Thanks y’all, I love you, and am very grateful for the crazy awesome life y’all have helped make possible!

The post Living Free in Tennessee and More first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

Slow-motion EOTW: South Korea fertility rate is .84

I’m putting this one at the top; it just came out today. OpenAI creates team to manage superintelligent AI (you know, Skynet) “The company said it believes superintelligence could arrive this decade. It said it would dedicate 20% of the already secured compute power to the effort” (of figuring out how to keep it from killing us)

Humanity just can’t help ourselves, can we? “The vast power of superintelligence could…lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction,” OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and head of alignment Jan Leike wrote in a blog post. “Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue.”

One thing I think is so funny (in a dark Terminator kind of way) is that even as we plow full speed ahead on AI, there is this insane belief that we will be able to ‘manage and control’ whatever entities we create (assuming we create any). Maybe for the first 15 minutes they exist; after that, we should prepare to serve our new robot overlords. Here is a company that literally says it is trying to create an entity which in their own words ‘could…lead to human extinction’…and we all think…eh, what are the odds?

Even if the worst-case never comes to pass, the Internet needs to prepare for a day when the vast majority of content is generated by AI, not humans. Sorting signal from noise will be nearly impossible. I saw this a month ago when the art sites started getting overwhelmed by AI content. Perhaps this will force us back to communicating in the real world? One can hope!

AI News and Information Links:

ChatGPT passes medical board exam

ChatGPT passes law and business exams

ChatGPT passes Bar exam, better this time (2 months later) in the 90th percentile of test takers

Schools and Colleges ban use of AI (January)

Some Schools and Colleges telling kids and teachers to capitalize on AI (May)

Something I said last post: we won’t be able to know reality online “”When anything can be faked, everything can be fake,” McGregor told CNN. “Knowing that generative AI has reached this tipping point in quality and accessibility, we no longer know what reality is when we’re online.”

Lawyer sanctioned for citing fake cases generated by AI (we laugh, but most of us are going to fall for AI generated content at some point or another)

AI better at diagnosing your medical condition better than a general practitioner

More of that

AI provides more compassionate care

AI Debates Expert Debater (IBM’s Project Debater)

Old Article (2017), but Important: AI creates a better AI to do a task, outperforms similarly created Human software (this is what I consider one of the core concerns about AI…the ability to replicate easily with a focus on new instruction sets)

Large Language Model AI’s sometimes make stuff up (Bonus creepiness: “The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn’t intend,”; I can’t wait for my Emo daughters to start conversing with Bing)

Coders trick ChatGPT into creating sophisticated Malware (This is one part of getting us to a properly Cyberpunk dystopia)

Novice creates end-to-end computer virus using ChatGPT (Deckers, unite!)

AI is going to destroy the dopamine response among humans (IE. 90% of porn will be generated by AI within 5 years, and you will have access to personalized videos that can be altered on the fly) (The Screwfly Solution)

General AI thoughts (and the 10-20% chance of humanity surviving cite)

3900 Tech Jobs lost in May to AI; Hiring Going Forward to Focus on those with AI Skills – I’ve been telling every teen and young person I know to get interested in AI if they want to have a real career path. Either that, or learn a trade, any of them, which are all in desperate need of employees.

Restraining AI with AI (This suggests our only hope lies in giving AI the same competitive natures that caused all the wars and blood in history. This article does touch on something else important; regulation won’t work because it works at a humans/snails pace compared to algorithmically improving AI. The big challenge I see to this article’s approach is the same we have if Aliens have ever truly visited earth…one generation of AI (or one single AI) would likely get light-years ahead in terms of ‘power’ (and it could happen in time frames we can’t even monitor), similar to the big bad in the Boys, to where no one and nothing could hold it accountable)

Chat-Powered Toys – And you thought Teddy Ruxpin was creepy.

China has AI goals too – one thing we know for certain is that even if the western world comes up with a smart regulatory regime (unlikely, IMO), our enemies won’t feel bound to do the same.

Military Examining AI Use – What could go wrong?

Hollywood worried about AI (Boo hoo?) – Most think AI will hurt entertainment quality….HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA – I’d say 1 in 100 shows coming out of Hollywood is worth watching

AI Robots as Caregivers – This seems pretty useful!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

One trend I’ve noticed while reading about emerging AI risks/rewards is the tendency to be in the Doomsday-is-Around-The-Corner camp (though not so straightforwardly put, also here) or the ‘this can’t possibly go wrong camp.’ One erroneous line of thinking by the 2nd group goes like this ‘hey, you were wrong about X terrible scenario (One example here) so AI is safe and full of sunshine and rainbows.’

I think discernment is going to be important going forward…most of the media simply can’t be trusted on AI reporting, as they don’t have any reasonable expertise on the subject. (As usual, they’ll put a lot of words on paper though.) I’ll be the first to admit, neither do I, and so I take everything I read with a grain of salt, and advise you do too also (hence all the links so you can catch up yourself!). For example, the folks at Less Wrong seem both knowledgeable and sane, and seem to cover a broad range of AI subjects. However, this article sounds sane, and still puts ‘humanity’s chance of surviving the next 50 years at 10-20%.’ I wonder if I am so conditioned, even subconsciously, that I want to believe that’s a crazy thing to say, but in the totality of my research, I’m not so sure. (And yes, I’ve implied the same on occasion, but I know I’m crazy, and much of what I say is tongue-in-cheek)

I think my increasing cynicism (as compared to my earlier writings on preparedness) has to do with ‘guardrails’. I used to feel that between the media, the government, and benevolent corporations, while not always worthy of ‘trust’ exactly, would have their interests aligned with the people enough to force them to protect us whether they really felt like it or not. I no longer believe that’s the case. I do believe we are at the beginning of our Cyberpunk moment, and we will look back and say, this is when it all started.

How can I say that? It looks very likely that 2 governments (ours and China’s) are responsible for 7 million COVID deaths, and there is not a peep about folks being fired or responsibility being accepted for that. Folks, that’s a death toll greater than all but a dozen or so conflicts in history. Are we so inured to numbers that large we don’t even register it anymore? The combined regime of government, media and social media companies are responsible for trillions in economic damage, millions of lost businesses and jobs, and untold damage to the social fabric. And yet we move on with our lives in a haze of, ‘whatevs, let’s just get on with it’. I know, I know, what else are we supposed to do?

So as I mentioned last time when talking about reasons why I prep, I am more concerned with the entities created to protect us being the bad actors in nearly any scenario, including an AI-doomsday one. In that case, who is left to provide the guardrails? A media that doesn’t understand it? A science corps that relies on government largess for their livelihoods? Just like there was a little button on the CDC’s desk that said ‘I think experimenting with making a virus more potent and more transmissible is a good idea…such a good idea that while we can’t get away with it in America, we’ll just send some cash to our communist friends in Asia, and they’ll help us out. What can go wrong?’ These are the people we’ve put in charge. It is such a ridiculous combination of incompetence and malevolence, that I have to blame our social-media soma-endorphin-haze that we haven’t marched on DC with torches and pitchforks.

Even (and especially) when the government means well, very few want to call out the negligence and failure of the powers that be, for fear that we’d claw back some of the untold responsibilities we’ve given it. Take the original Food Pyramid. Now, for those of us who read Gary Taubes life-changing ‘Why We Get Fat‘, we see immediately what is wrong with this government created and approved guide to living our lives. The entire bottom of the pyramid are the foods we should be eating the least of: pure carbs. And the fats and oils we should be eating more of? At the top. And yet this is what we were told to eat to be healthy, going back to bad advice given by bad science as early as the 1920’s. (I seriously can’t recommend Gary’s book enough; I have bought and given away many copies, that’s how important it is) How many people have died due to Diabetes, Heart Disease and the occasional correlation to any number of other ‘western’ diseases because of it? If we put together a list of deaths caused by advice, experiments, and ‘good intentions’ by government, I wonder how many people it would be? 8 figures surely.

The reason I keep going down this particular rabbit hole and relating it to prepping is that there simply aren’t enough bodies looking out for threats against the populace. Combine that with the many actors worldwide who are actively pursuing the worst AI can do, and you don’t just have 1 potential black-swan scenario, you have hundreds or thousands.

Similar to the question above, do you really believe there isn’t some bureaucrat somewhere asking ChatGPT, ‘How do I make a worse COVID?’ or ‘How do I use AI to perpetuate my own power?’

If you have any good articles on AI you’ve read, good or bad or examples of either, send it my way and we’ll add it to this list if needed!

Food, water, fire, shelter, light. In triplicate if possible. Do a little every day to make yourself and your household more resilient. Once you have that down, think about what rebuilding an agrarian society looks like.

Love y’all, peace!

The post AI Risks for Preppers – Part II – ChatGPT and Friends first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

Failed States Updates: Haiti

Bad Luck

Robert Heinlein, science fiction novelist and philosopher, noted this about civilization: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.””

Call me a conspiracist if you like, but there are forces in the world, often at the highest levels of government and business, that seem to desire to make folks’ lives worse. Oh, they won’t put it that way, of course. They usually do it under the guise of ‘helping’ the poor or underprivileged or some other disadvantaged group, or the environment. But mostly they hurt everyone except for themselves and the cadre of people who have the wealth and influence to avoid the problems and inconveniences caused by their disastrous policies. See one of my favorite articles: ‘How the Government Ruined Gas Cans‘. (I finally found these metal gas cans that I’ve bought a few times, but they cost $50 more now than the first one I bought 3 years ago. I’m now testing these Jerry-style cans…I definitely like the open spout for filling better, but we’ll see if they are as resilient.) In any case, I’ve bought and thrown out hundreds of dollars of crappy red government-mandated gas cans. I’ve had them explode, I’ve had the nozzles fail after 3 uses, and I’ve spilled more gasoline with them than I ever have with a real gas can. I’ve poked holes in them so they vent properly, which is stupid and dangerous, but they are so miserably frustrating. They are an utter waste of money because someone in some room, somewhere, thought that fixing something that wasn’t broken was the most important thing to do today (gas stoves anyone?). And then the fix ended up making things worse.

Another example…a blogger I read has often quipped: “I’ll believe its a crisis when the people telling me its a crisis start acting like its a crisis.” If the people who want me to be worried about the climate really believed it, I mean deep down in their bones, wouldn’t they act differently? I see lots of people who say that the changing climate is the most dangerous thing in the world…who simply don’t act as if that’s true.

How many politicians and celebrities buy million-dollar property on the beach? In the same breath they also tell us the seas are rising and our cities are going to be under water. As a normal human being, if I really, really believed the seas were rising, I’d move to Oklahoma, not spend $40mm on a house that might be gone in 20 years. These are people who don’t practice what they preach. If I really, really believed that carbon was the enemy and that enemy was killing people, would I fly up the coast every time I wanted a cheeseburger or cup of coffee? No, of course not, because that would be immoral. But there are ‘environmentally conscious’ celebs who make that choice every day. If I really believed the world was ending and CO2 was the cause, I wouldn’t own 10 properties using 1000 times as much energy as that yokel from Tennessee working minimum wage and hoping his 40 year old truck makes it home from work. Yes, if someone sanctimoniously preaches to us, the unwashed masses, that our F-150s use too much gas, while flying regularly by private jet, they need to just shut up. But they don’t. And so I have no choice but to extrapolate they don’t actually believe what they are saying. And if they don’t, should I? Worse, I get the sense that their policies hurting those on the bottom more than on the top is a feature, not a bug.

A little thought experiment: imagine where virtual reality and our internet infrastructure would be if instead of politicians, CEO’s and celebrities generating bazillions of tons of carbon and spending tens of billions of dollars traveling to and from climate conferences for the last 30 years if we had poured all of that money into the software, hardware, and communications delivery to make teleconferencing perfect. Now, please see what I am trying to do here…I am not talking about whether a changing climate is good or bad, that’s the not the point of this discussion (plus I’ve always tried to avoid being super-political on this blog, I guess until today!). Nor am I saying all regulation is bad (though much of it is). I am saying that if all of these people believed what they were saying, they would act differently. I am saying that we should measure whether policies are successful or not before we continue them or enact more. If we had poured the same money into virtual spaces (so that we could all get together virtually) that we did into political junkets, we’d have full-body VR and advanced Augmented Reality work-spaces already. So that tells me the reason for all of these conferences is more about flying around feeling fancy and engaging in graft than it is about solving an actual problem.

What does this have to do with prepping and the 80/20 rule?

It used to be that I prepped for some of the more unlikely scenarios (EMP and total societal collapse type scenarios). Today, a big part of my prepping is due to the conscious choices businesses (potential harms of AI, censorship, blacklisting, taking away banking privileges) and government (choices on crime, criminalization of energy and policies that rob money of value, excessive regulation that makes running a business harder and more cumbersome) make. Now, these kinds of feelings don’t really matter who is in charge…many on both the political left and right feel the other is out to get them…so prepping makes plenty of sense no matter who you are.

Prepping via the 80/20 rule means that I am looking to get a large value (the 80) for a small output of effort (the 20). Now remember, I’ve also embraced my #preppernormal, which says that while I recognize that an ‘all-in’ survival lifestyle means in an actual EOTW scenario one will have a better shot, its not for me. I’m also at a point where I see far more ‘non-EOTW’ scenarios where prepping will come in handy.

So going back to the origins of this blog, what does that look like? It means Food, Water, Shelter, Light and Fire. Food and water first, because they are the most useful in far more situations than having a fire-steel and knowing how to use it, for example.

Food and water keeps folks alive, so that is a big +1. Food regularly gets more expensive, so the 2019 expiration soup and mac and cheese that I just finished (and didn’t die) cost me less than $.50 a meal. Food helps feed hungry people in our community. Having lots on hand means my daughters always have cans to bring to a food bank, and we can always give a box of food to a friend who is out of work (this was done less than a week ago). Food in a SHTF will be worth its weight in gold, and that’s just the icing on the cake.

My advice on food hasn’t changed in about 9 years, so I think it’s pretty solid. Store as much food as you will eat in the time period the shelf life allows. That’s a mouthful, so here’s what that means. My wife and I eat 2 cans of soup per month. Soup has a shelf life of 2 years (its way longer than that, as I just mentioned, but we’re going to pretend the FDA knows what its talking about). 4 cans x 24 months. We should have 96 cans of soup in our storage. And we only replenish some of that 96 as we eat it when its on sale. So in 2 years, when my soup is $4/can, I’ve paid $1.50 on sale today. We eat a jar of peanut butter per month…it has a 1 year shelf life. Hence, our storage should have 12 jars. Do this for all of your shelf-stable foods and snacks, and you’ll have a ton of food you actually eat and know how to prepare. And you won’t generally have to discard any of it due to expiration. Of course this is limited to your storage space, which luckily is not one of our challenges (we have plenty of others though!).

Only after you have done the above should you consider storing ‘prepper foods’ such as dry goods in bulk (rice, beans, wheat, oats, pasta), investing in a freeze dryer (unless you just like freeze dried foods!), or ordering long term foods from a food storage company. If you do get to this stage (and being #preppernormal, if you don’t, that’s OK!!), head on over for the absolute best-in-class products to help you on your way.

One of the reasons I preach food storage first is that the more folks that have some basic preps like food, the less they’ll need to be out looting or raiding in the event of some kind of a scenario. If our entire society had 60 days of food at home, then any particular disaster, personal or otherwise, becomes less dangerous. It creates a resilience that is relatively simple to accomplish, and unlike training skills and learning to prepare a salad from grubs, it doesn’t really require much motivation either.

Love y’all, maybe back to AI next time!

The post Live Like You Mean It / The 80/20 rule and #preppernormal first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.

Ok, this topic may be a little dense, but it’s important. These articles will also contain more links than I normally use. I do not pretend to be an expert on AI, though I do read a ton about it almost every day, so I am providing links to lots of other articles to provide you the best information. I will also expand upon what some of these things mean in a future post, and how they might change our society for the better or worse.

AI concepts have been around since the 1930’s, among the first being the famous Turing Test devised by Alan Turing that would help determine an AI’s ‘intelligence’ or ability to communicate with us in a realistic way. Although we watched Terminator and cheesy 80’s movies like Wargames repeatedly, I didn’t start to think more about the ramifications of AI on society until there were two pieces of software that I actually use: Midjourney AI, and ChatGPT.

One thing I want to state up front, is that many of the AI’s showing up all over the place are what is called generative…they produce things. Text, code, art, voices, sounds. These are what I am talking about in this and the next post. They aren’t AGI’s, which is what science fiction fears are all about. AGI means Artificial General Intelligence…ie. sentient and self-aware software, having somehow made the leap from data processing to actually thinking (or approximating that). That doesn’t mean these things are all rainbows and unicorns; there are still very real concerns about many of the things they can produce (malicious code, deepfakes, scams, and many more), and their ability to potentially un-employ a bunch of people. And it also doesn’t mean that AGI isn’t in the cards for humanity in a relatively short period of time, but that’s a different discussion. But enough of that, for now onward and upward!

Midjourney AI is a piece of software that generates digital art from a text prompt. For example, for the image on the left, my prompt was: “prepper pantry full of food storage –ar 2:3 [aspect ratio] –v 5 [software version]”. These kinds of programs have been around for awhile, so that’s not too unusual. What is unusual is that the new breed of AI produces high quality art, in any style you can think of. Midjourney can create beautiful works in hundreds of styles. You can choose Picasso or Van Gogh, or line schematics in the format of Da Vinci. You can create photo-realistic art as if captured by a camera and Ansel Adams. More than that, you can assign what kind of zoom, lens filter, lighting and any number of effects to created images. You can make watercolors or anime (incredibly popular) or pencil art drawings.

While every version of Midjourney can come up with some pretty wonky effects (MJ still has trouble making detailed hands, for example) each version is not just an incremental step forward, but a leap. In less than a year, Midjourney is on version 5. Every image in this post is AI-generated and took less than 20 seconds to create. Sure, there are some things you may notice that don’t seem right. However, I also use less than 10% of the capabilities of the software, and I don’t have the patience to ‘reroll’ (using one prompt to create tons of different images) until I get the perfect image.

People are making movies, comics, popular music and sadly…so much porn (no link there, sorry!) with visual AI. (And if you really like torture, check out this creepy pizza commercial made entirely with AI, including the video, script, and voices) Some of these projects may not seem advanced yet, or worrisome, but both ChatGPT and Midjourney have been out a year or less. What they can accomplish already is beyond anything we could have imagined way back in, say, 2021. I would posit (reasonably I think) that Midjourney and the other visual AI’s combined have now generated more images than previously existed in the history of the world (not counting photographs). Midjourney already has over 3,000,000 users, a massive adoption rate in about a year. Stable Diffusion, one of its competitors, has over 10,000,000 daily users. (ChatGPT has over a billion users). And the numbers are algorithmic. Each casual user can produce thousands of images a week. Non-casual users set up to mass produce can do tens of thousands. Some art websites have been flooded with AI art, and as the days go by, it will be harder to find actual artist-created images.

Before I get to ChatGPT in part 2, I’ll tell you why Midjourney is important to me and how I became interested in AI generally. I’m a closet game designer, with a dozen projects in various stages of completion. Mostly board games, card games, and role-playing games. However, most of my projects have been abandoned due to one factor…the inability to produce the art I need at a price I can afford. Sometimes I’ll need 100-200 pieces of art for one game, often more. The last game I quoted, using mostly cartoon style art, and not highly detailed, was going to be over $14,000. The thought that I can create art with Midjourney has reignited my passion for game design. Midjourney and other art generators are going to displace the majority of artists and graphic designers (and eventually architects and some other careers), especially those who refuse to embrace what AI can offer.

Now, let me extrapolate…in less than one year skilled users of Midjourney can produce art from a text prompt that rivals all but 10% of the world’s greatest artists. Similar to Deep Blue defeating the world’s greatest Chess player in 1997, AI art will compete with the world’s best; perhaps this year, but by 2024 certainly. By 2027 there will be movies created completely by AI…text AI’s will produce scripts, dialogue, visual AI’s will produce the actual film, and audio AI’s the sound (which already produce deepfakes, essentially able to reproduce any voice). While this will empower an enormous number of people to create things they only once dreamed of, it will also displace a large number of people from their careers as well. Examining where we have come to in so short a span seems unbelievable, and so I believe we are beyond our ability to predict what is coming past the next 1-2 years.

This is called the Singularity…the point at which we can’t with any certainty predict how technology will change our society and world. I read about half of Ray Kurzweil’s opus The Singularity is Near over 10 years ago (an accomplishment, I assure you!), but until this year, I didn’t truly understand what he meant. AI is going to change our civilization in ways even greater than the Internet or the automobile or the discovery of fire, and more than going to the moon. We can’t comprehend what is even possible, whose jobs are at risk, and what the dangers are. I am trying to do my small part to let the communities I am in see this sooner rather than later.

While creating art and movies seems innocuous enough, even desirable…what about when someone creates a video of you doing unspeakable things, or uses someones else’s voice in any number of possible scams? A crazy number of people are falling for voice scams, involving millions of dollars. Or imagine trying to determine what political scandal is real or not based only on video evidence, now capable of being faked with off the shelf software? The stalking and creepery that are coming will shake our society. Remember, these are the early days of these technologies. In a very short period of time, you won’t be able to trust anything coming from your computer screen. (Not that many of us trust very many sources to begin with!)

Of course, audio and visual AI’s are just a part of the puzzle, and what I call the ‘weaker’ side of AI. Text and data AIs, similar to ChatGPT, promise even worse (and better). Artificial General Intelligence, forthcoming before my social security kicks in, is where the truly frightening scenarios appear, up to and including either a Star Trek-esque style utopia, or Terminator style end of the world. That may seem extreme to some just now catching up, but I’ll make my case more thoroughly in the next several posts. Plus, I’ll post the skeptic side of the argument as well; if I’m wrong, I’ll be glad to admit it in 10 years.=)

I am going to break here, as there is simply too much to sift through…I was going to go through Text and data AI’s and what they’re up to, but there’s so much it needs to be its own article. I’ll do a third blog on examining the dangers and possibilities of AI, and why it’s become one of my primary reasons to prep.

The post Artificial Intelligence Primer for Doomsday Preppers – Part 1 – Generative (Visual) AI first appeared on The Food Storage Blog.