Oats

Oats are the breakfast of a food store: cheap, filling, a pound is about 1,700 calories, and they cook in five minutes or soak overnight with no heat at all. They keep less long than rice because the oat kernel holds oil that slowly goes rancid; the fix is the same as for everything with oil in it, which is to keep the oxygen away. Two to three years in a sealed container, many years in Mylar with an absorber.

Old-fashioned rolled oats are the all-round choice: they cook fast, soak raw, bake, and keep as long as any oat. Quick oats are rolled thinner and cook in a minute. Steel-cut oats are the whole groat chopped, chewier, longer to cook, and keep about the same. Instant oatmeal packets are convenient, sugared, and keep a year; they are for the bag, not the bucket. Buy rolled oats in the 25 or 50 pound bag from a bulk supplier and repack them. Oat groats, the whole kernel, keep longest of all.

Cool, dark and dry, in something airtight. The original bag or box is fine for the months you will use it in; for the years, the answer is the same as for rice: a Mylar bag with an oxygen absorber inside a food-grade bucket, which keeps out oxygen, moisture, light and every insect egg that came home from the mill. The Mylar ranking says which foods take an absorber and which do not.

A 5 gallon bucket holds about 20 pounds of rolled oats. Oats are dry enough for an absorber; granola and anything with added fat or fruit is not.

Smell them: fresh oats smell faintly sweet and of nothing much; rancid oats smell bitter, sharp or like old paint, and taste the same. Rancid oats will not make you sick in a bowl but they are done. Moisture shows as clumping and a musty smell, and mold follows. Pests show as webbing, moths or small beetles. Pale, dusty oats at the bottom of an old bag are just the fines.

Half a cup of dry oats is a serving of about 150 calories; a pound per person per week is a sensible planning number for breakfast alone. Overnight oats need no fuel: equal parts oats and water or milk in a jar, left to stand, eaten cold or warmed. Oats thicken soup and stretch ground meat. Oat flour, from a blender or a grain mill, bakes. Oatmeal with a honey packet and a spoon of peanut butter is a 400 calorie breakfast from three shelf items; the oatmeal packet recipe is how I pack it ahead.

Oats are the no-power breakfast. Soaked overnight they need no heat at all; on a camp stove they take three minutes. Keep the opened canister closed between meals in a warm house, because the clock runs faster above 70°F.

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.