Recently I have gotten interested in food preservation. The higher costs of food and transportation have to be fought, somehow. This is especially true for somebody who has to drive over miles of bumpy dirt roads to a not-so-great, high-priced, small town grocery store. Perhaps it was the better containers available at Walmart that made me get interested in this topic. They are rectangular boxes with O-rings in the lid, and snaps to hold the lid down tight.
You Tube has a lot of videos on this topic. Have you seen those vacuum sealers for storing food in Mason jars? But the videos don't explain the principles of food preservation very well. After all, it is all about water vapor, oxygen, and ethylene.
You can't look into this topic very long before you get pulled off into the world of off-grid homes, preppers, Greenies, etc. I used to have a negative stereotype of these people. But they are a customer base for useful products.
I sometimes wonder if, during my 'next life', I will be an off-grid home guy instead of an RVer. Perhaps I would, except for one fundamental fact: the 23.4 degree tilt in the earth's axis. There are other reasons like land use restrictions, neighbors, and high real estate prices.
Still, I have this fantasy of a rural property where I breed miniature poodles.
Comments
Living the gypsy lifestyle, off the grid is the way to go.
Be Safe and Enjoy!
It's about time.
For storing my beans, corn and other grains I have been using Gamma2 Vittles Vault containers. They are sold as pet food storage container by Tractor Supply and many others but do a great job of storing dry foods. https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/gamma2-vittle-vaults-stackable-60-lb-4360
For shorter storage I have gone with screw on lid containers that hold about a pound of grain or other dry food items. These I have bought at Fry's or Safeway. The dry fruit that I buy comes in a resealable bag that works well since I use the contents rather quickly.
Many of the other Rubbermaid products are low-quality, it has always seemed?
I never heard of Tightvac. Need to do some homework.
Many of the storage products are aimed at long-term storage for dry goods, which is not my point of emphasis. It is vegetables that cause me to take expensive trips to expensive small-town grocery stores.
Storing vegetables, other than root crops, is a much more difficult problem. I think you would be better off looking at canned or dehydrated.
The fresh vegetables that I get at those expensive small-town grocery stores are generally NOT first class and will only remain 'fresh' for a week or less. I do have the advantage of "shore power" so I can get frozen vegetables sometimes.
Realistically I am just trying to get 7-10 days of useful life out of fresh veggies such as kale and collard greens. Am shifting emphasis to the baby carrots that are available most places now.
I wish I could store lots of frozen peas, but I have accepted no frozen foods as a fact of life for a boondocker.
The fulltimer/boondocker is independent and vulnerable at the same time. We cope by boondocking on our own property for six months a year and venturing out into the wild for the other six months. The home base isn't a house, but it has everything else required to live well. If things ever get dicey, we hope it's during the six months were on our own land. As an example, we were boondocking in the CA desert in March of 2020. We pulled up stakes and headed out the day before CA locked down for Covid. We were on our own land two days later. That was a minor example. At some point, traveling to get to a "safe" spot could be a dangerous activity.