Table of Contents

Part 1: The Oar System
Organize, Acquire, Rotate
Chapter 1: Organize
Chapter 2: Acquire and Rotate

Part 2: Preparedness
Getting Your Home and Family Ready to Handle Crisis
Chapter 3: Personal Preparedness
Chapter 4: Home Systems
Chapter 5: Communications
Chapter 6: Preparedness with Children
Chapter 7: Pets
Chapter 8: Preparing Your Car
Chapter 9: Evacuation

Part 3: Dealing with Disaster
What to do in an Emergency
Chapter 10: Loss of Power
Chapter 11: Fire in the Home
Chapter 12: Natural Disasters
Chapter 13: Toxic Hazards
Chapter 14: Pandemic
Chapter 15: Terrorism

Part 4: Doing it Yourself
The Arts of Self-Sufficiency
Chapter 16: Skills for Independence
Chapter 17: Food from Scratch
Chapter 18: The Stored Food Cookbook

Epilogue: Could We Really Do It?

Excerpt from page 23

Oxygen
The presence of oxygen causes food to spoil. Spoilage due to oxygen is most often thought of as a canning problem. Home-canned food that has been canned properly (see Chapter 17) will be as free of oxygen as commercially canned food, and it'll last as long, too.

However, some oxygen exposure can be a problem for some dry foods. Oxygen causes rancidity in fats and allows insects, fungi, and aerobic bacteria to persist. This is a problem in dehydrated foods with a relatively high fat content, such as powdered milk and eggs. It's even a problem for grains with a relatively high fat content (such as brown rice or rolled oats), split peas, and most nuts if they will be stored for more than a year. (It's not a problem for refined products such as white flour, white rice, and degerminated cornmeal, or for whole wheat, corn berries, or dried beans.)

Food purchased for long-term storage will arrive properly sealed so as to exclude as much oxygen from the containers as possible. But food purchased simply in bulk, such as from a natural foods store, will likely come in a plastic bag sealed with a twist tie. Obviously, this will not protect the food from the deleterious effects of oxygen. This is not a problem if you plan to rotate your supplies on a regular basis, but if you do plan to store oxygen-sensitive food such as dried milk for more than a few months, repackaging your supplies with oxygen absorber packets will greatly increase the storage life.