Cool and humid, I’m guessing. [90F in the shade, 100F in the driveway at noon.]
It did get hot yesterday, but locally spotty rain and high winds kept temps down. It was relatively cool at my secondary location, which gave me a chance to work on restacking stuff that needed restacking.
I found a package of Kirkland AAA batteries, labeled “good til 2023” that all burst and grew big mounds of gunk by their ends. That will be going back to Costco. I’m keeping rough track of my spoilage as I go through the stuff I put up in 2014 during Ebola 1. So far, it’s the batteries and two cases of UHT milk. The milk is a fairly short lived product, not suited to long term storage. $36 gone so far. I put it up for fairly immediate use, and because of the kids, but I haven’t put any milk in long or even medium term storage in a couple years. I do still have some liter boxes, but they are really only backup for cereal if I miss a trip to the grocery store. I’ve got Nido powder on the shelf for long term.
I’ve shifted away from the Nestle’ canned “medium table cream” too. It will turn to a block of cheese-like substance in the can if it sits too long. I have been stocking powdered cream instead.
I suppose I should count the case of instant mashed potatoes too, since they died in the garage storage.
Maybe I’ll try a carton of hash browns this morning… they are from the same period and are probably high in fat. High fat items seem to fare the worst.
The prepper bible says ‘store what you eat, eat from your stores’ and that will help you rotate your food. I’ve known from the beginning that there were items I stored that we do not normally eat, or that we eat in much too small a quantity to ever keep up with the rotation. Most of those items are shelf stable meals (which are generally horrible tasting) in my ‘medium term’ stores, or bulk items like rice and flour, salt and sugar. The shelf stable meals aren’t cheap, but they do go on sale. The flour and rice are so cheap I don’t mind replacing them (although the totals will add up.) Salt and sugar don’t go bad if vermin are kept out.
My storage conditions are far from ideal, but having food and getting some spoilage is much preferred to not having food that doesn’t spoil. So I deal with it and accept that there will be losses.
What isn’t good form is losing track of it. I’ve got a lot of improperly stored panic buys at my secondary location. Ebola spooked the heck out of me last time around so I was just throwing food into storage. I’ll be going through it as I dig it out over the next few weeks.
I’ll be sharing the results so all y’all can benefit too.
And now, I better go cook some breakfast.
n