DIY Emergency Survival Food Buckets For Long Term Food Storage

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Quick & inexpensive food buckets provide all you need for when the SHTF. Here is a step by step guide to making your own.

It is pretty much self-explanatory that you need food to survive. If you want to have enough food to survive for long periods of time you’ll need to have a big food storage.

A survival food bucket could be really useful when it comes to that. They will be good for 10-30 years. This is because they have been hermetically sealed to keep the foods inside edible for long periods of time.

One of these food buckets can feed a single person for up to a month or a family of four for up to a week. These survival food buckets could really come in handy in all sorts of scenarios.

When natural disasters such as blizzards, hurricanes, earthquakes and food shortages hit, you probably wouldn’t be able to just stroll to your favorite supermarket and buy your groceries there.

But even if you’re not a prepper, things like job loss, power outages and epidemics could still occur. In all these cases a survival food bucket could mean the difference between life and death. If you don’t have enough food at home to last through these disasters, you will not make it.

In this article I’ll show you how to make survival food buckets that will be inexpensive, including a means of water purification.

Emergency Survival Food Buckets

Few notes beforehand

The items you will need for the buckets are available in local stores, except the Mylar bags. You can get them on this link at Amazon.

These already have the right size oxygen absorbers so there’s no need to buy them separately.

When deciding on what to put in the bucket, you should contemplate what you and your family need. You should go over this with your family to come to a conclusion as to what to put in.

Some other things you should be mindful is that dried beans and white rice have a shelf life of up to 30 years stored in a Mylar bag with oxygen removed. Brown rice, on the other hand, has a significantly shorter shelf life. It will only last up to 6 months.

Also, you should never put an oxygen absorber in with salt or sugar for it will cause it to become one solid clump.

What to put inside two food buckets

  • 50 pound bag of white rice: It would be wise to buy these in large quantities at once, for if you buy it in small packages at local grocery stores, you’ll end up paying much more.
  • 10 pounds of assorted beans: Again, if you buy it in large quantities, you will end up paying less per pound. You can choose to buy pintos beans in large quantities (say 25 pound bags) at Sams or Walmart and repackage them in smaller amounts. If you don’t like pintos, you can also choose from Northern beans, black beans, kidney beans, red beans, and black eyed. You can decide how much of what beans are going into the buckets .
  • Boxes of Orange Drink Mix: (for both): This is a great source of vitamin c and tastes delicious.
  • Container of salt: Salt will serve as a flavor additive to all the beans and rice you will be eating. Also, off the grid food lacks iodine. You will want to stay iodized.

How to assemble

You are going to need two five gallon buckets to store all the foods in. You can buy these here online or at your local Home Depot or Lowes.

Now we have everything we need, let’s start the assembly.

  1. Place one of the Mylar bags in each bucket.
  2. Fill the buckets about 3/4 with rice.
  3. Now add 5 pounds of the assorted beans in their original packaging in each bucket on top of the rice.
  4. Take the drink mix out of the original packaging (to save space) and add them to the bag. You can choose how many you add.
  5. Before you put your oxygen absorbers in the bucket, you should grab a large jar and fill it with rice halfway. You should then open two oxygen absorbers and put one in each bucket. Put the remaining oxygen absorbers in the jar and fill it completely with rice and close the lid tightly. This way they will be safe next time. (Please note that the strength of oxygen absorbers vary.)
  6. You should now quickly seal the bag since you opened the oxygen absorbers. Try to do it within 10 minutes.
  7. You’ll need a heat seal crimping tool, but if you don’t have one there’s no need to panic. You can also fold the top, place a metal level on top of the bucket, laying the top of the bag over it, and then ironing it on its highest setting.
  8. Hammer the lid back on tightly. Don’t be too gentle or it won’t close off completely.
  9. Finally, write the contents of your bucket on the bucket so you will know what’s in it.

Final Thoughts

That’s how you make a survival food bucket. If you, for example, don’t like orange juice, you could choose other flavors.Try to find one that has vitamin C in it for the added benefits.

You could also put oatmeal instead of beans, macaroni instead of rice. You can also do this to sugar, but you have to remember not to put the oxygen absorbers in. Be creative and resourceful with what you have.

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