Date: September 20, 1997 05:08 PM
Author: Michelle Rezentes (Mr rez@aol.com)
Subject: White flour storage

I would like to have white flour on hand in a crisis. I use it now in baking and if I bought a large supply, about 1 1/2 years, would it keep if I consistently rotated my stock? If not how long can I expect for it to keep?

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Date: September 21, 1997 12:09 PM
Author: ken Seger (kenseger@hotmail.com)
Subject: Food storage, palatabilty vs. nutrition


Michelle, one item that I have never seen discussed a great deal is the quality of food storage. Ie. yes you might not have rot and visable or odiferous decay, but is the nutrition still there? To my knowledge, ANY form of food preservation causes undesirable changes to the food whether it be salting, canning, pickling, drying, irradiation, freeze drying, freezing, smoking (have I left ANYTHING out??), etc. The nutrition in wheat seed can go nowhere but down as soon as you mill it into flour, the longer it stays as flour, the longer it goes downhill. I doubt that anybody can detect this subtle degradation with their palate.

If you don't like freshly ground whole wheat, perhaps it is your mill? The quality of flour that I get from my hand cranked mill is nowhere near what I can get from my The Kitchen Mill by Kitchenetics which is a highspeed toothed impact style mill. Yes I know, more technology to go wrong/require electricity. A good sized inverter or small generator will run it though. If you live near St. Louis I'll grind you some wheat seed and you can try it. No I'm NOT selling em', I just LOVE this mill.

Back to nutrition, it is MUCH easier to store 4 years of food than it is to grow food for four years. Cheaper AIN'T better. The vitamin depletion in stored foods can be compensated by stored vitamins, but enzymes and phytochemicals?!? You need fresh foods for that, and here is where Geri's advice is so important. Even if you had just 10 square feet of garden for parsley, tomatoes, cabbage, lettuce, radishes, etc. to supplement your food storage, your nutrition would be WAY better than just eating stored food. Even if you just did a lot of sprouting, you'ld have better nutrition than eating solely stored food. In Cresson Kearney's _Nuclear War Survival Skills_ he describes how you can get adequate vitamin C from just a small amount of sprouted wheat.

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Date: September 23, 1997 12:15 AM
Author: Michelle Rezentes (Mr rez@aol.com)


I understand the value of nutrition in food storage and plan to use mostly whole wheat for bread and most baking, but as Geri from the Ark institute points out, there is a need and a time for convenience foods and comfort foods, so the reason I want white flour is for things like birthday cakes and special occasions when whole wheat will not serve the purpose. So does anyone know how long it keeps?

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Date: September 23, 1997 12:37 AM
Author: Al Durtschi (rcox@mail.lcc.whecn.edu)
Subject: Storage life of white flour


Michelle,

You are probably pushing it if you try to store your white flour for more than a year in my opinion. Your storage conditions have a great deal to do with this, however. You can do the following things to extend it's life.

1. Store it in the coolest part of the house. If you have a basement this would be ideal. Then only bring it up when you are ready to use it.
2. Put it in an airtight container so the air doesn't have free circulatory access to it. This will at least limit the amount of free oxygen that has access to your flour to degrade it.
3. If you want to really go high tech, get rid of all the oxygen in the container. This will also go a long way to slow your flour's oxidizing. You can do this by...
    a. Putting oxygen absorbers in your air tight bucket. I would recommend this first for flour as trying to shoot nitrogen into it or using dry ice to fumigate it with carbon dioxide would be a bit of a challenge.
    b. Nitrogen pack it.
    c. Dry Ice - This works great for seeds like wheat or beans, but flour? It just doesn't seem practical.

We at Walton Feed believe if you remove all the oxygen from the air in your flour that you can get up to five years on it if you store it in a cool place, like a basement. For instructions on how to do this for your self, see Alan T. Hagan's misc.survival food storage FAQs for this and a ton of other good information at http://waltonfeed.com/grain/faqs/.

Al

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