Canned Goods

A can is cooked food in a sterile steel package, and as long as the seal holds and the metal is sound the food inside is safe long past the date. The date is a quality date. What changes with the years is texture, color and some vitamins, and the rate it changes at is set by the temperature of the room. The canned pantry is the part of a food store that needs no water, no fuel and no skill, and this page is how to keep it. The full reference, with every kind of can in one table, the heat arithmetic and the keep-or-toss rules, is how long canned food really lasts.

Store what you eat. The pantry that rotates itself is made of cans you open every week anyway: beans, tomatoes, tuna, soup, vegetables, fruit, meat. Buy by the case when the price drops. Prefer cans over pouches for the long shelf, and check every can at the store for dents and bulges. Pop-top lids are convenient and fail sooner than a plain seam; a can opener, two of them, is part of the store. The individual pages cover meat and fish, beans, vegetables, fruit, soups and tomatoes.

Cool, dry, dark and off the floor, between 50 and 70°F if you can manage it; twenty degrees cooler, 70 down to 50°F, roughly doubles how long the contents stay at full quality. Never let cans freeze (the seams can fail) and never store them over a furnace, in a garage or in a vehicle. Rotate first in, first out, with the buy date written on the lid. A dented can is fine if the dent is small and not on a seam; a deep dent, a dent on a seam, rust that pits the metal, or any bulge means the can goes unopened.

Keep a running count by category, not by can, and replace what you use the same week. Twelve cans of each of the ten things you cook with is a deeper store than a hundred cans of one thing nobody wants.

Look before you open: bulging ends, a leak, rust that has eaten into the metal, or a seam dent. Listen and look as you open: spurting liquid, a hiss outward, cloudy liquid where it should be clear, foam, or a foul smell. Any of those and the whole can goes, unopened if possible, into the trash where nothing can get at it, because the thing you are guarding against is botulism, which has no taste and no cure outside a hospital. A can past its date with a sound seal and a clean smell on opening is food.

Home-canned jars follow the same rules with one more: a lid that has lost its seal, or liquid that leaked out during storage, means the jar is suspect.

Canned food is ready to eat cold from the can, which matters in an outage, and most of it is better heated. The liquid in canned beans and vegetables is cooked food too; drain it only for the salt. A can of beans, a can of tomatoes and a can of meat is a pot of chili with no water, no fridge and ten minutes of heat, which is the point of the canned shelf. Empty cans are the next thing: a cup, a candle holder, a stove.

This shelf is the one that does not care. Cans need no cold and no cooking, and the room temperature of a house in an outage is well inside their range. Open what you will eat; an opened can goes into a covered container and follows the fridge rules, or gets finished at the next meal.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.