Checking On 10 Year Old Rice, by Patriotman

A guest post by Jessie Blaine did a similar test in 2022.

When I first got into preparedness a decade ago, I used James Wesley Rawles’ How the Survive the End of the World as we Know It as my blueprint. I decided to start, aside from ill-thought out tactical gear that was all black and not camo (clearly I was quite new to the game), with food storage. I settled on white rice to be the first bulk storage food item. I went with white rice for three main reasons:

1. It would keep longer than brown rice and the oils in brown rice would make it go rancid faster
2. It was a large source of calories, something that would be in great demand given the higher labor inputs a collapse would necessitate
3. It was cheap and easy to store.

I grabbed 5 gallon food grade white buckets and lids from Home Depot to store the rice in, along with a few screw top gamma seal lids for when the bags were eventually opened. I later learned that the orange buckets with their logo are also food grade and are cheaper, so I have subsequently started to use them (look for the recycling triangle with the “2” inside it on the bottom to ensure it is High Density Polyethylene, or HDPE). I ordered oxygen absorbers and mylar bags from USA Emergency Supply and use their information center to determine approximately how much rice would fit in the bags in the buckets and how many absorbers to use.

What steps did I use to store the rice?

1. Put mylar bag inside buckets
2. Fill buckets with rice
3. Get an iron hot and ready along with a small piece of wood
4. Add required O2 absorbers
5. Begin to heat seal the mylar bags, leaving a tiny gap at one corner. I did this by “ironing” the mylar on the piece of wood.
6. Push excess air out of tiny hole
7. Seal tiny hole
8. Put regular lid on
9. Label and add to your records

I ended up storing approximately 350lbs of rice that first go around, which is almost ten years to the day that this article is going up, in ten buckets.

These buckets have been through three house moves and have also spent 12 months in a “climate controlled” storage unit. They were kept initially in a basement, then a garage, a storage unit, and now a bedroom. After ten years, we decided it was time to start tapping the rice to both check on them as well as begin to replace them.

I was nervous and excited to check it out because, after all, this was the first attempt at long term food storage I had ever done. I was praying that they were still stored correctly and that I didn’t have to worry about 300+ pounds of rice being bad.

Just as good as the day it was sealed!

We cooked the decade old rice alongside some rice we just got from the store and did a plain taste test to determine if there were any differences.

There were none. Thus, we made some banging rice and beans with mango salsa.

Now, I only paid approximately $20 for those 50lb bags of rice in 2013. Obviously, prices have gone up. However, you need to be sure you secure your long term food storage so that you don’t have to go crawling to government food lines when society breaks down.