Somewhere in the back of your pantry sits a can or jar that’s been there longer than you’d care to admit. And from the outside, it probably looks just fine. Stored food changes slowly, though, and much of that change happens where you can’t see it or smell it. For decades, we’ve had the luxury of shrugging off a bad meal, because a doctor and a pharmacy were never far away.
After SHTF, that comfort disappears in a hurry. A bout of vomiting and diarrhea can leave a grown man too weak to stand within a day or two. And without enough clean water to replace what he loses, dehydration sets in fast. For an older body, especially one already dealing with heart or kidney trouble, things turn dangerous even sooner.
So stored food deserves a closer look before it goes on the plate, whether you’re rotating your stockpile or eating from it in a crisis. Some of the old rules of thumb hold up well, but a few of them could get you hurt.
Which Dented and Rusty Cans Are Still Safe to Eat
Store-bought canned food is about as safe as long-term food storage gets, but only while the can stays sealed tight. The canning process kills the germs inside, so the real risk comes later, from damage that lets air and bacteria back in. And where that damage sits on the can matters more than how big it looks, so these are the spots to check before you trust what’s inside:
- Dents on the smooth side: A shallow dent here is usually harmless. The exception is a dent with a sharp point or crease you can feel under your thumb.
- Dents on the top or bottom seam: That rim is where the lid is crimped onto the body, so even a small kink can break the seal without leaving a gap you’d ever spot. That’s why the USDA advises throwing out any can with a deep dent or a dent on the seam.
- Light surface rust: A thin orange film that wipes off with a dry cloth won’t hurt the food.
- Flaking or pitted rust: Rust that flakes away and leaves pits along the seam means the metal has thinned. Once it gets that thin, pinholes can open and let bacteria in, often without a leak you’d notice.
- Cans that froze: Cans kept in an unheated garage or shed can freeze during a hard winter, and the expanding food can stretch the seams and push the ends outward. If the seams look sound once the can thaws, the food is generally fine to use, but a can with a burst or rusted seam belongs in the trash.
Dents and rust aren’t the whole picture either, so make sure you check these 10 ways to tell if a store-bought can is still good to eat, and you’ll want to run through them before you sort out a whole pantry shelf.
What’s inside matters too, since tomatoes, fruit, sauerkraut and juices are high in acid and that acid eats at the metal over time. So those cans go stale faster than corn or green beans and are the first to pick up a metallic taste or develop pinholes, which puts them at the front of the rotation. And if liquid spurts out or the food smells off when you open one, trash it without tasting. Botulism from commercial cans is rare, but it paralyzes the muscles you breathe with, and after SHTF the ventilator that would keep you alive is out of reach.
The Perfect Home-Canned Jar That Can Make You Sick
Picture a jar of home-canned green beans pulled off a basement shelf by flashlight on a cold evening. The lid sits flat and the beans look as green as the day they went in, so opening it feels perfectly safe. Yet according to the C
DC, home-canned vegetables are the most common cause of botulism outbreaks in this country. The hardest part is that the toxin often leaves no sign at all. A jar can look and smell completely normal while holding enough toxin to paralyze whoever eats from it, which is why the CDC warns against tasting food from a suspect jar, even a small bite.
So here’s what to run through before anything from that shelf hits a plate:
- The seal, before the lid ever comes off: With the metal band removed, lift the jar slightly by the edges of the flat lid and keep your other hand underneath. A good seal holds the jar’s weight without any trouble. But if the lid lets go or shifts, air may have gotten inside, and that jar shouldn’t be eaten.
- The liquid, held up to a light: Streams of tiny bubbles rising on their own mean something inside is fermenting. Cloudy liquid and a sticky residue on the rim point to spoilage too, and so does a lid that spurts when it comes off.
- Food above the liquid line: Those top pieces often darken in the jar. Usually that color change comes from air in the headspace and doesn’t mean the jar has spoiled, though it’s still a good reason to recheck the seal before opening.
- How the jar was processed: Green beans, corn, meat, and other low-acid foods put up in a boiling water bath never got hot enough to kill botulism spores. Those spores survive ordinary boiling, so low-acid food has to go through a pressure canner. Jars done the other way shouldn’t be trusted, whether they came from an old family recipe or a hand-me-down cookbook.
Have you ever wondered how the Amish keep their homemade cans good for years? They do it without a pressure gauge or a freezer, just methods passed down through generations. That’s why you must try their secret methods on your own shelf this season.
Why Pemmican Made With Berries Spoils Faster
Pemmican made the traditional way, from dried lean meat pounded fine and mixed with rendered tallow, has very little water in it. That low moisture is a big part of why it keeps so long. Adding dried berries changes the balance, because the fruit holds more moisture and sugar than the meat does. As a result, pockets of fruit inside a bar can grow mold while the outside looks perfectly clean. Breaking a berry bar open and checking the center takes only a few seconds, and fuzzy spots, a sour smell or a damp feel near the fruit mean that bar goes in the trash.
Plain pemmican runs into a different problem, and that problem is rancid tallow. Good tallow smells mild and almost clean, while rancid tallow gives off a sharp, stale odor and tastes soapy or bitter. Eating a bar like that can bring on nausea and loose stools. And pemmican is prized for packing a lot of calories into a small space, so a bar you can’t keep down wastes exactly the food you were counting on.
Both problems come down to how the bars were made in the first place, so a better option is to make this pemmican recipe that keeps for 20+ years, and rumor has it the bars still taste good after two decades if you apply the #1 trick that comes with it.
How to Tell If Water-Glassed Eggs Have Gone Bad
Water-glassing only works with unwashed eggs, because washing strips off the bloom that seals the shell. And US producers wash theirs before they ever hit the store, so those eggs never had the protection to begin with.
A good jar holds milky or clear liquid with lime settled on the bottom. But a foul smell when you lift the lid tells you it’s gone, and so does a cracked egg or liquid that dropped low enough to leave eggs sitting in the air.
So rinse the lime off before you crack one, since it’s caustic stuff. Then crack each egg into its own bowl, because a bad one announces itself the second it hits the dish. Thin whites are normal, though, so don’t let that worry you.
Still, the shells turn brittle after months in lime and tend to split when boiled. So prick the large end with a pin, or skip the trouble and scramble them. Either way, cook them through, since a bad egg brings salmonella and that kind of diarrhea costs you water you can’t spare.
Even though lime eggs are a good option, a way better option is to make powdered eggs at home. I tried this recipe myself last month, and the eggs came out perfect:
Moisture is the only thing that can ruin it. So once you open the can, scoop with a dry spoon and seal it back up tight. Powder that turned into hard lumps or smells stale and glue-like has already gone off.
The best part is that the powder keeps for years in a sealed can, and you only add water to bring it back. From there, you can scramble it for breakfast, work it into cakes, or use it for homemade pasta.
The Hidden Danger in Old Rice and Dried Beans
Red kidney beans contain a natural toxin called phytohaemagglutinin, and according to the FDA even a few raw beans can make you sick. The illness hits within a few hours, bringing severe vomiting and diarrhea. Beans warmed but never boiled can be worse than raw ones, so skip the slow cooker. Soak them first, then boil them hard in fresh water.
Old beans make that harder, because years in storage can cost them their ability to soften. When fuel runs low, it’s tempting to pull a stubborn pot off the fire early, and with kidney beans that shortcut is how people get sick. A pressure cooker handles them best, while a pinch of baking soda in the soaking water helps too.
White rice is one of the longest keepers you can store, but brown rice keeps its bran layer and the oil in it turns rancid years sooner. It rarely makes anyone sick, though it tastes bad enough that hungry people throw it out. Moisture causes the other common problem, and your nose usually catches it first. Here’s what to look for before any of it goes into the pot:
- A musty or sour smell: water got in at some point, and clumped grains or discolored patches say the same.
- Mold: the toxins survive cooking, so picking out bad grains and eating the rest is a poor gamble.
- Insect damage: small holes in beans, webbing in the rice, or fine powder at the bottom of the bucket.
A better option? The dry canning method. You heat the jars with the rice or beans inside, then seal them hot with an oxygen absorber, which locks out the moisture and air behind almost every problem above. This way, you can store white rice and dried beans for 25 to 30 years. Find the step-by-step method here.
What Can Go Wrong With Flour and Cornmeal
Flour looks like clean dry powder, so it’s easy to forget it’s a raw farm product. Nobody treats wheat to kill germs before milling, and the CDC has tied several E.coli and Salmonella outbreaks to raw flour. That’s why licking the spoon can make you sick, even when the flour smells perfect.
Beyond that, here’s what to watch for in storage:
- Whole wheat, rye, oat, and almond flour: the oily germ turns rancid long before white flour does. Bitter, sharp smell instead of mildly nutty means it’s gone.
- Stone-ground cornmeal: same problem, while the degerminated kind from the supermarket lasts much longer. Musty smell, hard clumps, or dark specks point to mold that makes aflatoxin, so trash the batch.
- Weevils and pantry moths: small dark beetles moving through the flour, or silky webbing in the corners of the bag. A few won’t hurt you, but a heavy infestation means the flour took on moisture.
- Self-rising flour: the baking powder fades over time. Bake one test biscuit before you mix a full batch, or you waste the flour and the fuel.
Good Mold and Bad Mold on Cured Meats
Dry meats, such as “the forever sausage,” often carry a dusty white mold as well, and many of them are made that way on purpose.
Harmless surface mold tends to look dry and powdery, in white or pale gray. By contrast, fuzzy green or black patches that reach down into the meat mean the whole piece should go.
Cured meat comes with its own set of checks, so run through these before anything goes in the pan:
- Slime: A wet, sticky film on salt pork, sausage or jerky comes from bacteria rather than mold, and no amount of scrubbing makes that meat safe. A sour smell or a sharp whiff of ammonia points to the same thing.
- Yellowed fat: Fresh fat on cured meat is white or cream colored, so fat that has yellowed and smells stale or painty has gone rancid. That rarely causes real food poisoning, but it upsets your stomach and ruins the taste of everything cooked with it.
- Underdried jerky: Bend a strip. Well-dried jerky cracks without snapping in two, while a strip that bends easily and feels damp in the middle lets mold grow inside the bag.
- Heavy salt: Country ham and salt pork can leave you badly thirsty, and with rationed water that’s a cost you can’t spare. Soaking them in fresh water before cooking pulls out a good share of it, though the soaking water comes out of your budget since you can’t drink it after.
Wiping mold off a cured sausage or a ham sends spores into the air, and breathing them in can leave you wheezing for days. That’s worse news if you already deal with asthma.
What’s happening is your body dumping histamine. But luckily, there’s a plant that fights that, now or when SHTF. If you already have The Forgotten Home Apothecary, look for the Histamine Balance Tea on page 118. Stinging nettle is the plant doing the work there, and it’s long been used to calm allergic reactions, itchy skin, and the kind of airway irritation those spores kick off.
But if you don’t want the hassle of making it, get the famous stinging nettle spagyric extract from Nicole Apelian’s official website. I carry it in my bag year-round, mostly through allergy season in spring, but also for hives and the stuffed-up head that comes with dusty work. And what’s special about it is that spagyric pulls more out of the plant than a regular tincture, which is why users rated it five stars. I’m telling you, this nettle extract is something you’ll want on hand at all times.
But if you have severe allergies, keep antihistamines in the stockpile too, like Allegra or Claritin. Wipe the meat down outside when you can, since what’s underneath is usually fine to cook.
If a Stored Meal Makes Someone Sick…
Even careful checks miss things, so it helps to know which symptoms pass on their own and which ones don’t.
Botulism rarely looks like a stomach bug. According to the CDC, it starts in the face, with double vision, drooping eyelids and slurred speech, then spreads down to the chest and the muscles you breathe with. There’s usually no fever, so someone clear-headed who suddenly can’t swallow needs help fast. Bag the jar or can instead of rinsing it, since doctors can test what’s left.
Salmonella and bean toxin are far more common, and healthy adults ride them out. For older folks, the water lost to vomiting and diarrhea is the real danger. Thirst fades with age, so watch for dark urine, dizziness and confusion instead.
To make sure you can take care of someone who got food poisoning from your stockpile, you need this first-aid manual on the shelf, written by a doctor for the days you can’t reach one. This way you will learn:
- The facial signs that separate botulism from a stomach bug, and the window where the antitoxin still works
- The homemade rehydration formula doctors use in the field, down to the exact salt and sugar measurements
- Why the anti-diarrhea pill in most medicine cabinets traps a salmonella infection inside you
- The three signs that tell you an older person is dangerously dehydrated before they ever feel thirsty
- How to keep someone breathing and stable through the night when there’s no ambulance coming
- What to do for a child or an elderly relative, since the doses and danger signs aren’t the same as for a grown adult
Keep it next to your food, and you’ll know what to do on the night something slips through.
You may also like:
Why You Shouldn’t Stockpile Beans and Rice
The Homemade Antibiotic That You Can Smoke (VIDEO)
Signs You’re (Probably) Not Taking Prepping Seriously
The Amish Never Store These Foods in The Root Cellar
How to Make Finger-Licking Brisket in a Jar
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