Three Reasons To Store Oatmeal In Mylar Bags
Kevin Felts 03.01.18
While beans and rice are the favorite among preppers to store in mylar bags, oatmeal should be added to the top of the list. If anything, oatmeal should be at the top of the list, then beans and rice.
Why should oatmeal be at the top of the list? What do most people do when they wake up in the morning? Most of us eat some kind of breakfast. Guess what, oatmeal is a good breakfast cereal.
In the grand scheme of things, oats are relatively new. Humans have been cultivating various grains for thousands of years. The amount of work required to process oats made them counter productive until more modern times.
Oatmeal Nutrition
Oats are packed full of nutrients. From Wikipedia:
- Calcium
- Iron
- Magnesium
- Manganese
- Phosphorus
- Potassium
- Sodium
- Zinc
During a survival situation nutrition be a concern, or at least getting nutrients should be a concern. Oatmeal provides several nutrients.
Eat a bowl of oatmeal and a couple of scrambled eggs from your chickens, and you should be ready to start the day.
Easy To Store
Oatmeal has to be one of the easiest food products to store in mylar bags. For one, there are no sharp edges that may poke a hole in the mylar. Second, oatmeal is somewhat cheap.
Then there are the varieties of oatmeal on the market. Do you want steel cut, quick, or classic? However, avoid any oatmeal that has artificial food flavoring.
When storing food products in mylar bags, all you want is straight dried food items and no added byproducts. How will those artificial flavorings taste after a decade stored in mylar bags? Since we do not know, avoid artificial flavorings.
When stored in a mylar bag with a good size oxygen absorber, and stored in a climate controlled place, oatmeal can last 20+ years. Some estimates put it at 30+ years.
Easy To Find
Go to just about any grocery store and there should be a selection of oatmeal. Not just a couple of containers, there should be a variety on display,
While writing this article I got on Amazon.com and looked for oatmeal. There were five pound bags for around $13. For around $30 someone could have 10 pounds of oatmeal delivered to their home.
Individual serving packets of oatmeal vary around 1.2-2 ounces. Let’s just say 2 ounces to keep the math easy.
10 pounds multiplied by 16 ounces in a pound = 160 ounces.
160 ounces divided by 2 ounces per serving = 80 servings.
How many people do you expect o be in your group?
Cut that down to one ounce per person per serving, add a couple of eggs from the chicken flock, and there would be 160 servings with that 10 pounds of oatmeal.
If someone wanted to go the easy route, just buy a superpail that has around 20 pounds of oatmeal in it.
Final Thoughts
If the reader has never heard of storing food in mylar bags, here is a video that talks about it.
Since that video was made I learned several lessons. Never store anything with animal products byproducts, such as butter or fat. Read the ingredients and stick with dried items, such as rice, beans, and oatmeal.
I even give oatmeal to my chickens from time to time. Using it as a treat can be a little expensive, but they seem to love it.
Question to the readers, how many are storing food in mylar bags, and how many are stockpiling oatmeal?
