The Guru Speaks On The Storage Life Of Food And Water

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This is to answer your questions from personal experience as well as from books I have read, as well as from current Internet sites for verification:

If packed in a nitrogen atmosphere, dried potato slices, dried beans, white rice (lasts almost forever), etc, will keep for at least 20 years; freeze dried and sealed in a cool, dry nitrogen atmosphere would also keep for 25+ years ...but they must be stored in that nitrogen atmosphere to keep that long and retain flavor.

Just sitting on the shelf, if kept in a cool DRY place (like my sealed but turned off vermin-proof freezer) and in manufacturers' original packaging, dried (but not freeze dried) items keep for about 4 years before I notice the flavor changing (rice and beans, as well as flour). Potato flakes in sealed cardboard packages (original package, placed in a large Ziploc or plastic bag) have tended to last only a year or two before taste is noticeably changed. If the item is low moisture (like raisins, dried dates or dried apricots which retain a stickiness and some moisture), I suspect in a sealed package they would keep on the shelf for a year or two, but not much longer — there is enough moisture for any biological impurities to eventually start multiplying and I have even found worms in both raisins and dates after 18 months so I avoid doing it any more. Of course, in nitrogen nothing grows, nor in foods that have been irradiated, as some now are. If you’re not worried about flavor, white rice kept dry and sealed from moisture and bugs should last a hundred or more years.

This is what both personal experience and research over the years has turned up, with the assumption foods are being stored in a cool (70° or less), dark area and with no chance of bugs or vermin getting in — like a large, sealed plastic camping cooler, unused but sealed chest freezer in the basement (like mine), sealed mud- or paint-buckets (5 gallon or more) in a basement (There are so many variables in storage conditions, containers, and product preparation that exact times cannot be guaranteed.

• Soft grains --- around 8 years

• Hard grains --- 10+ years

• White rice --- 8+ years

• Beans --- 8+ years

• Honey/White Sugar/Salt, well sealed from bugs --- decades

Self sealed and stored as above, preferably vacuumed, then dry nitrogen from a high pressure nitrogen cylinder is introduced so there is as close to zero oxygen in the containers as possible doing it yourself — I have introduced dry nitrogen slowly from the bottom of a bucket using a buried hose that is pulled out.

• Peanut butter, vacuum sealed with all O2 removed --- 5 years (but most peanut butter is not vacuum sealed and it is a mess to try)

• Dehydrated vegetables, nitrogen sealed from O2 -- 10-25+ years

• Dehydrated Dairy products, nitrogen sealed from O2 --- about 5-15 years

BTW, butter, stored in wood kegs in brine --- well, I've eaten some that was more than 14 years old (and did not like the STRONG) taste — but it was edible; I would recommend only 4-5 years though and personally would do without or make it fresh from the appropriate mammal!

• Flours, nitrogen sealed from O2 --- 5-25+ years

• Pastas, nitrogen sealed from O2 --- 10-25 years

• Dehydrated fruit, nitrogen sealed from O2 --- 5+ years

• White rice, nitrogen sealed from O2 to retain flavor --- potentially decades

• Brown rice, nitrogen sealed from O2 --- perhaps 2 years MAX

• Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) from soy beans, dried and nitrogen sealed from O2 --- easily 20 years

• Yeast, left in sealed packets, perhaps 5 years ... no longer; yeast is alive and it will eventually die.

HOWEVER, if you get food from a quality packager who does all the packing in a dry nitrogen environment, perhaps including in the cans an oxygen-absorber packet where necessary (similar to the small white packets in many bags of beef jerky), with quality control, and who uses freeze drying to virtually eliminate moisture, I would say the average keeping time is about 25 years for most all the foods, including pastas with freeze-dried meats. This would include canned in tin (actually steel) cans products from Sam Andy or Mountain House who do claim 25 year shelf lives. I am sure there are others.

AS FOR WATER: distilled water, while it might not taste that great, has nothing in it and off-the-shelf sealed gallon containers of it keep for many, many years before anything grows in it. In fact, I have never had unopened jugs of distilled water go bad; in one case I had put a gallon on a shelf to use later (2-for-1 sale, and I was topping off a couple of batteries with the other gallon) and forgot it — over ten years later it was still perfect and I recently partially used it in my deep-discharge RV "house" battery. The remaining water still had that distilled no-taste! It is my understanding that distilled and in pre-sterilized glass or thick plastic bottles, water can be stored for decades. Filtered or bottled water in the 1 gallon & 2.5 gallon jugs or water fountain carboys does not seem to keep as long. I would assume filtered bottled water in the wasteful throwaways, would keep about the same but truly do not know the life.
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