How Did Ancient People Keep Their Food From Rotting?:
For quarantine cuisine, many of us are reaching deep into the kitchen pantry and freezer — recovering canned soups and frozen veggies, purchased who knows when. Though we may wonder, "Are these the same peas I used to ice my sprained ankle?" we're confident the contents are edible. Perishables last for years thanks to modern methods of preservation, such as freezing, canning, vacuum-sealing and chemical additives.
But how did ancient people preserve their foods?
It's a problem that every society, from the dawn of humanity, has faced: How to save food for figurative rainy days — away from microbes, insects and other critters eager to spoil it. Over the years, archaeologists have found evidence for a variety of techniques. Some, like drying and fermenting, remain common today. Others are bygone practices, such as burying butter in peat bogs. Though low-tech, the ancient ways were effective — clearly, as some of the products have survived millennia.
To get a sense of what preservation techniques ancient folks might have used, archaeologists surveyed the practices of living and recent people in non-industrialized societies (here, here, here and here) They found many low-tech methods, which certainly could have been accomplished by people thousands of years ago. The most common and familiar include drying, salting, smoking, pickling, fermenting and chilling in natural refrigerators, like streams and underground pits. For example, the Sami, indigenous people of Scandinavia, have traditionally killed reindeer in the fall and winter; the meat is dried or smoked, and the milk fermented into cheese — "a hard, compact cake which may last for years," according to a mid-20th-century ethnographic source.
The various methods all work because they slow microbial growth. And drying does this best: Microorganisms need a certain amount of moisture to transport nutrients and wastes into and out of their cells. Without water, microbes shrivel and die (or at least go dormant). Drying also inhibits oxidation and enzyme activity — natural reactions of air and food molecules, which cause flavor and color changes.
Requiring minimal technology, methods like fermenting and drying could hypothetically have been used in the distant past. They are a good starting point for archaeologists seeking ancient evidence for food preservation. Plus, by observing the practices in action today, researchers were able to note the tools required and debris produced — material more likely to survive and surface at an archaeological dig than the actual food.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Sunday May 10 2020, @12:25PM (6 children)
Native Americans used what later pioneers would call a root cellar. They put dried meat, fruit, and vegetables into clay jars and buried them in pits under their dwellings, or at caches known only to them (inter-tribal warfare was a reality and you wanted to have food left after a raid).
Cultures in hot, dry climates also used pot-in-pot [wikipedia.org] refrigeration, which took advantage of evaporative cooling to draw heat from the inner pot where vegetables are stored.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @12:48PM (4 children)
Why didn't they just put stuff in the refrigerator?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:19PM
You were aiming for funny, but sorry, you missed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @02:27PM
Why did you put a joke in your comment?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @05:04PM (1 child)
Duh, they're Indians. The refrigerators were full of beer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2020, @06:32AM
I call racism. This is an offensive insult to modern Indians.
The refrigerator would have been fully stocked with leftover curry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2020, @04:39PM
That pot-in-pot idea is genius!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:17PM (5 children)
The PDF seems to offer a pretty obvious solution for grain storage.
https://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/wurpubs/fulltext/185551 [library.wur.nl]
Pits are great, but they leak. Warehouses are good, but infestations spread rapidly inside of them.
So, why not take the best of both? Put warehouses underground? Cracking clays, noncracking clays, or porous (sandy) soils, it hardly matters if you have good, solid concrete walls lining the pits. Forget about lining the walls with chaff or (uggh) animal dung. Temperature control, moisture content control, and insect control being the primary goals, concrete seems the perfect solution.
The depth of the pits is a factor in this research, but it isn't especially clear why the depth is important. It seems that the deeper the pit, the lower the temperature is, and the more likely water is to seep in. (higher temperatures ensure insects don't survive)
I wonder if it's possible that putting a warehouse even deeper into the ground would make it easier to control the temperature, at the same time controlling moisture. A solar powered unit to control both sounds feasible, to be honest.
Of course, all of my ideas are costly, and the research areas are rather money-poor. None of that may work at the village level, without government grants. Regionally, however, underground warehouses may well be a good solution.
My ideas would at least make for some interesting research, engineering, and construction projects! Such projects would have to overcome the villager's skepticism regarding concrete though.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @04:07PM
Soil temperatures will only get you so cold. I forget what the cap is, but I seem to recall that it's in the '50s. Point being, it's not really refrigeration temperatures (around 40) or freezing unless you have peculiar local circumstances such as an ice cave.
Dung actually makes for a stable surface, when blended with clay and various other things. Not knocking concrete, but they weren't doing dung out of insanity. It was a practical solution.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday May 10 2020, @04:39PM
Well, among the ancient Greeks and Babylonians (and probably others in that area) the solution was clay (ceramic) jars that were buried. I don't know how they were buried, but I'd guess a sort of "artificial cave", IOW, my guess is that the clay jars were on an elevated platform and not touching any wall.
This is reflected in the stories of Demeter and Persephone, of Ceres and Proserpina, and of Ishtar and Tammuz. I.e. the dying and resurrected god of the grain. (Or goddess, in the case of Persephone or Proserpine. But despite my examples I believe that the deity of the grain was usually male.)
The Greeks also did this with olive oil, though that was often stored in a basement...which made fires quite interesting.
Given the commonality of this approach, I expect it was not limited to grain and oil.
I've run across statements that an extremely old approach to storing meat was to find a cold, still, lake that was deep enough, and to place raw butchered meat at the bottom, below the thermocline. Supposedly it worked fairly well, though I don't know for how long. Perhaps small fish would dart down into the low oxygen water to steal bites off of any piece that started to decay, and thus become soft. But wouldn't hang around because of the low oxygen level. (But that's just my guess.)
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by lentilla on Sunday May 10 2020, @05:30PM (1 child)
Below about ten feet the temperature of the ground is constant year-round. That temperature is the average temperature of the area and is more-or-less consistent with latitude.
I'm sorry I can't find a good global resource to look up but you will be able to find this information given a specific locality.
This is the basis for geothermal heat pumps [wikipedia.org]. At least in temperate climates (middle latitudes) one digs a ten foot deep trench, lays some pipe and then back-fills the trench. Cycle fluid through the system and into the house and you get free heating in winter and free cooling in summer. Even in less-temperate climes it is still more efficient to use a heat pump to exchange with the ground rather than with the outside air because the temperature differential is less.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2020, @09:16AM
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchal [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday May 11 2020, @02:49AM
Methinks this pit storage happens because they haven't invented silos, not because it's anything all that superior.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:41PM (8 children)
Lot of these food preservation techniques were in wide use as little as just one century ago.
My grandparents used "canning", as they called it, though on the farm it was more glass jars than cans. Metal cans were more industrial. Heat the food to boiling, to sterilize, then seal it away. No refrigeration needed. The treatment killed more than microbes, also killing a lot of the flavor. Also had to watch for botulism. If the lid is bulging, throw it out. This was used for fruits and veggies. Soon as they got a freezer (their home having been electrified a decade before), almost overnight they cut way back on the canning. Frozen food tastes better.
Another factor that put an end to much of the canning was the arrival of everbearing strawberry varieties shortly after WWII. The older varieties would produce all the fruit in early summer (June), so the only way to have strawberry at other times of the year was to preserve it somehow. With everbearing strawberry plants. you had a steady supply of fresh strawberries over a much greater span of the year.
My great grandparents never used electricity though they could have had it in their later years. They used a root cellar, which is an underground or below ground chamber with a dirt floor. Rebury freshly harvested carrots, potatoes, onions, and other underground growing foods, AKA "roots", in there. The lack of light and the more steady cool temperature of the dirt (about 55F) would keep them fresh and prevent them from germinating.
Another method was the ice house. That only works in colder climates that have real winters. In the winter, pour water in a shallow pond, let it freeze, then cut it into large cubes of ice. Insulate the ice with sawdust as it is stored in the ice house, a building with enough insulation to keep most of the ice from melting all through the upcoming summer.
Then there are the techniques used for, among other things, food on sailing ships. Cure meat with lots and lots of salt, and heat and smoke from fires. Make jerky. Fruit can be preserved by just drying, as with raisins, by adding lots of sugar, as with jam and dried apricots, or by pickling, which uses lots of salt. Yeah, cheese keeps longer than milk. But it's not the super soft stuff we're used to keeping in our fridges today. The cheese they had on board ship was rock hard.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 10 2020, @02:00PM (7 children)
You have flipped a bit in the old computer, here. Canning? As we know it, canning is a relatively recent development. Tempered glass, and good seals were necessary for the type of canning you refer to. And, of course, a couple hundred years ago, only the very richest of people could afford anything like that, in any quantity. 1000 years ago, forget it.
But, what about clay jars? We know that civilizations were using clay as far back as history goes. Was there any "canning" going on? How exactly were those old clay jars sealed?
A search for "canning" leads to a history of canning, that starts just a little over 200 years ago. But, did no one, in all of history and pre-history, ever discover that heating foods in a sealed container would cause those foods to last for months, or even years?
https://www.thekitchn.com/breakthroughs-in-food-science-canning-218083 [thekitchn.com]
As with TFA, I can only complain that archeologists probably don't even bother to look for evidence of such things.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @02:30PM
> I can only complain that archeologists probably don't even bother to look for evidence of such things.
They've been waiting for someone, like yourself, to sit on their couch smoking bongs for long enough to come up with all the good ideas.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday May 10 2020, @02:45PM (4 children)
You can't heat food in a sealed container, it will explode as the gas pressure climbs. For canning you heat food (and lids) to sterilize them, and then seal them before they cool off. That could have still been done with ceramic (not clay) pots, but you have to be able to create a vacuum tight seal to keep contaminated air from entering as it cools.
It's a rather strange procedure that I was going to say you're not likely to just stumble upon before the existence of germ theory. Except that it was in fact stumbled upon, roughly 50 years before Louis Pasteur's work in the late 1850s helped germ theory catch on, and nobody new why it worked until decades later. But I suspect that it was enabled by the existence of jars with airtight lids as a commodity item. You're not likely to stumble upon canning unless you have cheap and convenient cooking vessels with airtight lids.
Of course ancient people already had a really effective way of storing food - dry grains sealed in clay jugs will keep almost forever, and have been used for many thousands of years. Seeds are already incredibly microbe-resistant so long as they stay dry, and sealed jugs kept out animals that might eat them. Meat and fruit could also be dried and stored for long periods in a similar fashion (not nearly as long, but mostly you just want to store it through the scarce seasons, so it worked fine). You don't even need to dry many fruits for medium-term storage - for example apples will keep for many months in a root cellar, plenty long enough to last through the scarcity of winter.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday May 10 2020, @04:39PM (2 children)
You don't need any fancy containers. Pour in your hot food, then a bit of molten wax, which will float on top and form an airtight seal as it cools.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday May 10 2020, @05:46PM (1 child)
Same idea but using fat instead of wax: Confit [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Monday May 11 2020, @06:55PM
Duck confit ... oooh. Food of the Gods.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @06:26PM
No, you don't heat the lids and jars separately. When the lid is screwed on to the jar, the rubber seal acts as a one-way valve so the jar doesn't explode while it's being heated. I don't think ancients could have pulled this off. AFAIK, the type of canning that was popular in 19th century America was a product of the industrial age--a kind of intermediate step between ancient techniques and the modern era of refrigeration. Ancient people probably couldn't manufacture a lid precisely enough to get the one-way valve effect.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 10 2020, @04:51PM
Ceramics aren't really good for canning things in. Some modern ones might work, but the older ones were full of cracks large enough for microbes to work their way through. You could fix that by glazing, but that has to be done at too high a temperature for food to survive. If you have paraffin, or something similar, you could sterilize and seal, but those seals aren't very good. They're good enough for jam, but not for many other things. (Jam isn't very favorable to microbes anyway.) And canning with poor seals is dangerous.
FWIW, canning was invented under Napoleon Bonaparte to preserve food for his army. Earlier (i.e. before Pasteur) there wasn't even a germ theory to explain why it might be a good idea, so it could only have been invented by happenstance. The Greeks used a simplified version of canning to preserve their wine, by covering the surface with pine tar or olive oil, but that was basically it. Well, the Romans liked dormouse preserved in honey...but that's a rather different approach.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Sunday May 10 2020, @01:48PM (21 children)
After living on my own for a few years, I have found that I tended to over-buy and then not quite get around to eating everything in time.
Some things, eggs for example, I literally never get to using while they were still fresh as there were other, more expensive things that would go off first.
I found out the other day that eggs don't need to be chilled, they just need to be isolated from the open air. This is a common trait - there's half an onion in my fridge that would have gone off in days if it wasn't in a little tupperware box. Just keep the air away from things. That's why they put nitrogen into crisp packets, and air-tight seal everything they can. Little ziplock bags or even a vacuum-sealer are extremely good for your own purposes. A vacuum-sealed cut of fish or meat can last so long in the freezer.
But how do you keep the air away from eggs before plastic? The best way is to bury them in salt. You're not salting the egg (the shell prevents that), but the air doesn't get to them. I have literally used a 5-month-old egg that was just kept inside a large mound of salt... I buried an entire pack and used them over the course of those months. it passed the "does it float because of the bad gases inside?" test still. And salt is cheap, useful and re-usable.
I know it's not exactly ground-breaking news but almost everything can be either salted, frozen, cooled, pickled or - at worst - cooked to make it last longer. All of those except possibly frozen are available to ancient civilisations, and they demonstrated use of them - everything from food cellars and mines and caves used to store cheese, to salted fish.
I can still buy preserved-by-salting fish in my supermarket, they are a delicacy in Jamaica apparently, and they sell - on an ordinary shop shelf - salted fish that last months. You can freeze milk. It turns yellow, but it's still perfectly serviceable. So much stuff can be preserved.
Get it away from air.
Keep it as cold as you can (but not so much that it deteriorates from the cold or that you can't return it to something approaching its original state).
Put it in an environment hostile to bacteria (smoking, salting, cooking, pickling).
Unfortunately, we have such a throwaway society that it doesn't really ever get used - anything seen as substandard in the shop, approaching its date in the fridge, or which "could" be off is tossed, rather than checked.
Personally, I now do one "big" shop a month. It will fill a trolley. For one person, that will last me an entire month, with lots of treats and extras on top. It'll fill a fridge/freezer combination (not a huge one). The work involved in preservation is absolutely minimal - fill the freezer. Then the fridge, in expiry order (so I know what I have to get through this week and what can be left / frozen later). Then the cupboards. Then spend a small amount of time preserving things - bury the eggs in salt, occasionally vacuum-freeze some leftovers, bag up bread in packs of three-four slices and put in the freezer, etc.
It's also surprising just how long ordinary things can last - apples will last months, so long as they are untouched. Of course they will - people used to harvest them once and then use them all year round, pretty much. Hell, my little recycled-food-waste bin would take me over a month to fill up, and it's only the size of a small car battery.
But I don't think the ancients would have had much of a problem. To be honest, the worst thing I've ever seen was one of those reality shows where they put people on an isolated island and let them get on with things. This one I watched was supposed to be replicating the stone-age kind of human. They weren't allowed anything past that. I thought it would be fascinating so I stuck with it for a few episodes, but the food really pissed me off.
1) They were given HUGE bundles of seeds, nuts, etc. to start. They all went in the first couple of days because they never bothered to look for anything else and just gorged on them.
2) They were given a huge carcass of a deer. They left it outside for two days before they even looked at it, by which time it was basically rotting fly-food, and it literally never got touched.
3) They then spent days complaining about hunger, in the middle of a forest, with a natural river not far. They couldn't catch a single fish. They gathered about a handful of berries between about 10 of them.
Of course, they put in the odd annoying person who was pissed off that they didn't have a pillow, but the final straw for me was when it snowed and they all asked to be removed from the island because they were all getting hypothermia - with a pre-built hut, a massive fire available, and animal skins...
I know we have no "need" of this kind of knowledge any more, but damn if it isn't so wasteful and ignorant of us to understand it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @02:36PM
Yes those skills are mostly lost. But we have gained so much - 10 new management layers on top of the 1 person who can still do stuff.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday May 10 2020, @03:13PM (9 children)
Actually, modern practices make eggs spoil much faster - eggs are naturally covered in a thin microbe-resistant "skin" which gets washed off along with the chicken shit to provide the clean uniform look we're accustomed to. They'll keep *much* longer if you don't wash them before storing, though you'll probably have to know the farmer to get them that way. I suspect your salt storing works similarly - salt isn't going to stop airflow (unless you cast it into a solid block), but it will tend to kill any microbes long before they reach the eggs.
Everything else - absolutely. Canning and freezing didn't make food preservation any more effective, it just (arguably) preserved flavor and texture better. Grains especially are practically in the perfect form for long-term storage - naturally dried to inertness and defended against microbes, all you need to do is keep it dry and protected from vermin and they will last almost forever. They'll even remain "alive" - researchers have managed to germinate seeds cached by ancient people many thousands of years ago. If your food supply is unreliable you cache the grains first, and preserve enough other stuff to keep tree bark from looking like an appealing way to season the grain in the hard times.
As for those "stone age" shows - I've seen a couple episodes myself, and I can only assume they weed out anyone remotely competent as being too boring a contestant. Nobody is going to tune in to watch someone living comfortably with only ancient technology, they tune in to watch the spectacle of failure. Otherwise they could just live-stream any of the various primitive tribes that still thrive all over the world.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @03:23PM (1 child)
Hey Dog,
Dog!
Did you see the size of that chicken?
(gunshot)
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Monday May 11 2020, @05:46AM
You need to quote Monty Python, not Young Guns, to get the upmods
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday May 10 2020, @04:48PM
Search "primitive technology" on YouTube.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 10 2020, @04:55PM (3 children)
My grandmother always washed the eggs before preserving them. She put them in a crock, covered them with water, and then added some "water glass" (sodium silicate). She said they'd keep around 6 months (IIRC). When she took them out they were still fresh eggs.
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(Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday May 10 2020, @06:12PM (2 children)
That's interesting. One question though: does one store the eggs in the solution, or merely dip the eggs and let them dry?
Wikipedia's [wikipedia.org] entry mentions "dip and dry" in the text but the associated World War I poster suggests storing in solution.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 10 2020, @11:00PM
store them in the crock in the solution.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday May 11 2020, @04:04AM
It sounds like there's considerable confusion.
For starters, there's a second process that's sometimes also (mistakenly) called water-glassing - storing the eggs in a lyme solution, where the alkaline water will preserve them for a similar length of tie. Presumably as a similarly alakaline solution waterglass (sodium silicate) would work similarly, but I'm seeing references to both immerision and dip-and-dry. It does sound like waterglass actually leaves a glasslike layer when it drys, so I suspect it could seal eggs quite effectively that way.
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Sunday May 10 2020, @06:42PM
One historical way of preserving _unwashed_ (the layer that is on an egg that gets washed off is called "bloom": https://www.fresheggsdaily.blog/2015/04/should-i-wash-my-chicken-eggs.html [fresheggsdaily.blog] ) eggs without refrigeration is to store them in a slaked lime and water solution. Lots of videos on this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=preserving+eggs+with+slaked+lime [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday May 11 2020, @02:57AM
You can replace eggs' natural coating with a thin layer of wax; that way you can wash the chicken shit off (and with it, much of the risk of salmonella) and the eggs will still keep, in fact rather better than natural eggs do. (Costco in SoCal gets their eggs from some outfit that does this... and I've seen 'em keep as long as 9 MONTHS.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @11:41PM (7 children)
> Personally, I now do one "big" shop a month.
I'd like to do that too, but I need fresh bananas every 5-7 days (one a day keeps away leg cramps). Any idea on how to keep bananas from rotting on the (cool) kitchen counter?
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Monday May 11 2020, @01:25AM (1 child)
No. Why not put them in the fridge?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday May 11 2020, @04:08AM
They brown much faster. Though that's (mostly) a cosmetic effect.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Monday May 11 2020, @02:51AM
My understanding is that it's the potassium in the bananas that is supposed to help with the cramps. So I suppose one option would be to dry the bananas, since you will still get the potassium.
Of course, this may not apply to you, but I've found when I get leg cramps it's because I haven't been drinking enough water. Bananas don't really help, other than being a source of water (bananas, like most fruit, are mostly water).
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday May 11 2020, @03:02AM
If a banana prevents leg cramps, you're shedding potassium (and are at risk for high blood pressure). Get a full thyroid workup for starters, and look at other metabolic factors that affect potassium levels. (Insufficient salt will also do it.) You might want to take an OTC potassium supplement (one a day should do it).
Bananas rot, rather than ripen, when they haven't been stored correctly. Some stores do it right, others don't (Costco doesn't bother and theirs rot). When they've been stored right, they'll just get riper and riper until they're black on the outside and sweet mush inside, but they don't rot til about a week after they're solid black. (And when they get to the black stage, you can freeze 'em, in the skin or squeezed into a plastic bag.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday May 11 2020, @04:27AM
Go ahead and refrigerate - the skins will turn brown almost immediately, but the fruit itself seems to keep better, though as with many fruits it seems to stop getting riper and just progresses toward spoilage, so it's perhaps best for buying an extra day or two for almost-ripe fruit.
For use in breads, smoothies or as frozen snacks you can also peel and freeze. They turn to mush when thawed though, so they're not good for much else. And you *really* want to remove the skins first - the skin becomes incredibly tough when frozen and is dramatically more difficult to remove . It also keeps you from conveniently breaking off just as much frozen banana as you want at the moment, which I find really nice for snacking. Of course they stop ripening, so ideally you'd skin and freeze a whole bunch just as they reach perfection. I just throw them in a plastic bag together and immediately freeze, going in to break them apart from each other before they freeze so hard so that it becomes impossible.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Monday May 11 2020, @05:39AM
Bananas will keep longer if you keep the cut end tightly wrapped in plastic film. Alternately, put the whole bunch in a plastic bag, remove as much air as you can, and seal the bag. This is usually good for doubling the useful life after purchase.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2020, @03:22PM
Put bread in the fridge in a bag with a stick of celery.
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Monday May 11 2020, @12:29AM
In tropical countries, they also use chilies to preserve meat. Example is rendang. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendang [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Monday May 11 2020, @05:43AM
Refrigerated onions will sometimes sprout rather than rot. I see this most often in onions that I've already cut about the top 1/4 off.
2 months ago I took one such sprouted red onion, put it in a pot with soil. I've been watering it daily, and it's growing just fine.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @03:51PM
Just brainstorming here, but if you made the human caterpillar long enough and attached the head to the tail you effectively have an infinite food supply.
That's basically what nature does anyway. We just replace the "middle-men" (microbes, plants, etc) with actual men.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @05:54PM
not sure if this is correct, but it might be possible to "adopt" some microbes as a tiny army that is edible but until that day helps you defend your food against the other army of microbes that spoil your food and make you sick?
i am not sure if "sauerkraut" and "kimchi" are such well-spoiled foods but if they are then the next question would be what the pre-germ theory would have been for people doing this?
on a side note: i am not 100% convienced that "germs" were unknown pre pasteur. doesn't need much reasoning in a stone age brain to start wondering if the yellow and blue etc color stuff that regularly starts growing on picked or dropped fruit was inside the fruit or deposited ... etc. i think everybody knew of "germs" and where just eating lots of rotten food hopeing it was invaded by the "good" sort, heyya?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2020, @12:04PM
Nearly everything on the farm ran on corn one way or another. We all grew corn. And always too much, as having too much was way better than not having enough.
So, we had a still for that. If we try to store the corn, mice would ruin it. But we could distill it and make a tradeable currency. Jars of 'shine. Of course, we kept the center cut, the purest ethanol, for family.
It would keep indefinitely.
During prohibition, Capone's boys would visit and we would have to give him some too, for protection. We would give him the stuff we would have used for veterinary use on farm animals. It had too much methanol, amyl alcohol, and fusel oils in it to think of drinking it. It would make you blind and leave you with a terrible hangover. You might as well drink kerosene.
Unless a possum or other rodents got into the barrel of mash. We would discover this after fermentation, when the dead rodents gassed up and floated to the top. We'd fish the dead rodents out and run it. The yeasts and sugar and various fruits we had put in were still converted to alcohols, albeit some rotten varmint body fluids were in there too.
Capone got the good stuff that time, center cut and all. It probably made a lot of people pretty sick. But one did not disappoint Capone's boys with excuses.
Then we would give the still a good cleaning. Start over with fresh everything, starter and all.
We were actually glad to see the law cracking down on 'shining. We knew what was going on. The Sheriff never bothered us. Hell, he knew what we were doing, an occasionally enjoyed some with us. And help keep the Feds off our ass. It's one thing to shine on the farm for farm use...it was quite another to make it for sale.
If you saw those signs saying moonshine is poison, well if I wasn't damm sure where it came from, I sure wouldn't drink it...especially if it was *sold* to me.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday May 11 2020, @09:43PM
There is one easily overlooked method for storing food: On the hoof.
There is a reason that small livestock (e.g. rabbits, chickens, goats) are popular. It is easier to manage 10s of pounds of food than hundreds.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2020, @11:16PM
As some have mentioned, root cellars. You can mostly bury a barrel and have the lid available to open.
Sometimes, in root cellars, carrots and onions were allowed to grow in sand to make them last longer.
Salting and drying. The temperature isn't as critical with that. Prosciutto is done that way. Salt cod was a prime part of a nation's war chest at one time.
When Sherman marched through the south, one of the goals was to destroy any source of salt he could find. By the end of the civil war, salt was worth its weight in gold.
Just drying for meats, fish. They still do fish the old way in northern scandinavia.
Fermentation for grape juice, apples, barley. Distill it and it lasts forever (cognac, applejack and whiskey)
Seal it off from air. They used to pack a barrel full of apples then put it in the pond, underwater. Nowadays they have special coolers where they remove all the oxygen.
My CSA had alot of carrots they wanted to preserve over the winter for spring distribution. They put down a tarp to keep water from seeping out, a layer of sand, the carrots, then bury it with more sand. They were good the next spring.
Similarly, canning has been mentioned. Napoleon had a contest that created it.
Freeze drying. In peru, they'd mash a potato flat and leave it out high on the mountain. Cold & dry. When the spanish came, they found stores that would last the population several years. In europe at the time 1 bad harvest would cause famine.