Canned Meat and Fish

The canned protein shelf is the part of the food store that makes the rest of it a diet: cooked meat and fish, ready cold, good for 5 to 10 years stored cool, with no water and no fuel needed to eat it. Each can on this page has its own entry: tuna, sardines, beef. This page is the whole shelf and how much of it to keep.

By usefulness: tuna and sardines (cheap, complete, small cans), chicken breast in water (the most neutral, goes into anything), chunk beef and corned beef, canned salmon (bones in, for calcium), canned ham (shelf-stable, 2 years on the label and good past it), and the potted and luncheon meats for calories and fat. Spread it across kinds so no one gets tired of the one thing. Case lots, dated lids, and a hand can opener that does not need the pop top.

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.

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.

The planning number is one can of protein per person per day, in the 5 to 12 ounce range, beside the rice, beans and pasta from the buckets. That is about 365 cans a year per person, which sounds like a lot until it's counted in cases: about 15 cases of 24. Rotate it through normal cooking: tuna salad, chicken and rice, chili, hash, pasta with sardines. The broth and oil are food, not waste.

This is the shelf an outage is built around. Open what you will eat at the meal, heat it if you can, and leave the fridge out of it.

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.