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Food Storage Duration Charts

This book has covered a great deal about how to safely store all kinds of food for an emergency, but so far most has been very general. It's also vital to know the specifics for many different types of food you may want to store. In these charts, the "cans" column refers to commercially purchased canned food, and "jars" refers to anything that has been canned at home in glass jars.

Any commercially produced food should have an expiry date on it. Use that as a guide but not necessarily as a last-word on the matter. That means a date when it is better to eat before that point, not that it will immediately go "bad" the next day. Many foods are still edible and healthy to eat well after their official end date.

These are just guidelines and should not be considered to be "set in stone" limits. Many foods have been eaten well past their official shelf lives and been completely fine. There are stories of people eating 20 year old home-canned food and finding it still tastes fine and causes them no problems. Use your own judgement once you start passing these dates. Watch for foul smells, odd textures, mold or mildew growth or any bubbling in a liquid. Darkening is fairly normal and shouldn't be considered a sign that the food has gone bad.

Staples

These are the foundation goods that make up most long-term food storage, providing you have some basic cooking skills. If you wouldn't know what to do with flour or dry beans, then you should probably stick to commercial canned foods that are simpler to prepare and eat. Because these foods are mainly already in very dry form, you would usually store them in buckets or bags but vacuum packing is another option. Using a vacuum packing method can add a year or 2 to any of these dry product storage times. Some of these items are not dry goods, so their best storage option is listed as well. This is how long you can expect these foods to last when they are properly packed under good conditions.

Vegetables

Unlike the foods above, vegetables can be stored in a number of ways and each one will give you a different time frame for storage. Anything marked as n/a means that method for storage is not suitable for that food (or that it is not typically available as a commercially canned product)

Fruits

Fruits can also be stored in several different ways, but n/a means that method is not a good idea for any particular fruit (or that it is not typically available as a commercially canned product)

Meat and Fish

For the meat section, root cellaring is not applicable in any case and dried meat is a difficult and impractical approach (unless you are storing commercially-made jerky). Stick to these 3 methods for adding meat and protein to your stores. Different cuts of meat will not store differently for the most part, so they are not itemized out.

Extras and Condiments

This is really a mixed bag of items that you might want to have on hand to help add some additional flavor and variety to your basic stored foods. Several of these are purchased commercially in bottles rather than cans, but consider them the same for storage purposes. Just make sure you store them unopened.