Cereal and Granola

Cereal is breakfast with no cooking and no fridge, which is a real thing in the first days of an outage, and granola is the dense version with the calories to be a meal. Neither is a long-term food: a box of cereal is a year sealed and a few months opened, and granola, with its nuts and oil, is the first thing in the pantry to go rancid. The oats page is the long-term answer to the same breakfast.

Plain cereals without nuts or dried fruit keep longest; the sugared ones keep as well but bring less. Granola is best bought in small bags and often, or made in batches from the stored oats. For the bag: a sealed pouch of granola or cereal bars, replaced every spring. For the store: a few boxes of what the children eat, rotated through the kitchen, and the oats bucket behind them.

Cool and dry, the inner bag folded tight or the cereal decanted into an airtight jar, because moisture is what makes cereal soft and stale. Granola goes into a jar in the fridge or the freezer once opened; the fat in it turns at room temperature in weeks in summer. Neither takes an oxygen absorber for the long term: the Mylar ranking puts granola on the list of foods too oily or too moist for one, and cereal would only go stale anyway.

Stale is soft, chewy and flat-tasting, and it's safe; a few minutes on a sheet pan in a low oven crisps it back. Rancid is a smell, sharp, bitter, like old paint or crayons, in anything with nuts, seeds or oil, and it's done. Moisture inside the bag, clumping, or webbing and small moths mean the box goes and the shelf gets wiped.

A cup of cereal with powdered milk made up from the can is a 200 calorie breakfast that needs no heat. Granola is 500 calories a cup and travels; a bag in the truck and the bug-out bag is lunch. To make granola that keeps: rolled oats, a little oil and honey, baked low until dry, with the nuts and dried fruit added when it is served rather than baked in, and the batch stored in the freezer; it's cheaper than the box and the oats came from the bucket.

No-cook breakfast for the first days: cereal and granola with powdered milk or canned milk, or eaten dry from the bag. Opened granola in a warm house should be eaten within the week.

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.