Can You Freeze Baked Beans? Discover the Best Ways to Preserve and Extend the Shelf Life

If a person wanted to live in an underground bunker for 10 years, what goods and supplies, in what quantities, would they need to ensure they would not have to return to the surface for that period of time?

Let’s think about this in stages. First, the basic necessities of survival. Second, the necessities to keep your mind healthy.
I cannot speak to the electricity needs and wiring etc, because a true in-depth engineering and electrical analysis is beyond my abilities and would frankly be absurd. I’ll assume you can have a large refrigerated area, heat, air vents to the surface, and maybe planted some big trees years ago to put solar panels atop them and run wiring down to your bunker or something.
This is for one person, not two or more, and not for pets. I do think that there’s a valid argument to be made for bringing a dog with you, and bringing the added food and water to feed and clean the dog, but I’ll let someone else answer about that in more detail.
So, let’s get started…
Most obvious of all, you need food, water, and sanitation. Ten years is a long time, and without knowing how big the bunker is I will have to assume a few things — (a) it’s big enough to store all the stuff you might need to live for ten years, but (b) it’s not so big that I can just say “keep twenty million gallons of water in a really big metal container.”
For food, then, I’ll assume you want to at least somewhat conserve space, and so will be on a more limited diet. Let’s peg that at 1,500 calories a day, which is below the absolute minimum but hey, either there was an apocalypse or you’re crazy enough to willingly lock yourself underground for a decade, so a reduced diet is one of the things you’ll just have to deal with.
I usually recommend MRE’s, because they are relatively cheap and provide nutrition and calories in a meal that’s actually not bad eating at all. But for a prolonged period, you have to be careful because of the high sodium content (to make them last longer and give them more flavor). So let’s consider eating one every other day, one meal per each of those days, for four years (the longest they’ll last stored in your bunker). That’s 456 MRE’s, so buy lots and lots of variety packs. They are tightly packed and don’t take up too terribly much space, either. But be sure they are kept at a temperature below 40 degrees, to get the longest shelf life out of them.
You’ll also want plenty of canned foods. Get items that are the least perishable, but once again keep in mind the sodium means you have to avoid over-consumption of these products in too short of a period. Try one a day, or a couple every other day, for a total of about 1,500 cans to consume in the roughly 4 years you can use them. This sounds like a lot, but think about a can for a moment and imagine ten of them side-by-side against a wall. That’s a line of cans about four to five feet long, and just six to eight inches high. Now stack them to the ceiling, about ten feet high (you better have a tall bunker, you need the storage space) — that’s up to 20 cans tall, multiplied by 10 across, for 200 cans stacked floor to ceiling and only sticking out from the wall the width of a single can. Do this five times, and you’ve a mountain of cans that’s four feet long, two feet deep, and ten feet high. That’s relatively a small amount of room for food that’s going to feed you every other day for a few years.
Avoid canned foods with higher acidity, because they don’t last as long, and store these in a cool/cold place, away from any potential sources of moisture (if your bunker floor is concrete or wood, keep the cans off the floor). If at all possible, keep them in a separate part of your bunker that’s sealed off to avoid moisture and too much oxygen getting to the cans (and to your MRE’s as well). This food will last you for several years if you pick mostly vegetables, fruits, and certain potted meats. But make 100% certain none of the cans have any dents or breaks at all.
Some of the items you get in cans will in fact last even longer if they are jarred (meaning you obtain pre-jarred versions, or you do jarring yourself at home, NOT just opening canned veggies and then putting them into jars).
(Always be certain to avoid eating any of these foods if you suspect they might be bad, if they smell off, if they taste bad, etc — food poisoning can kill you, so instead of taking such risks just be sure to pack plenty of food in order to be able to toss out suspect foodstuff.)
Stock up on a great deal of sealed jerky — sealed jerked meat-stuffs can last for half a year to a full year if kept cold/frozen and sealed. If you figure that you’ll be using this a lot first, to keep your longer-lasting foods until you need them, that means you should get enough jerky (of many different types) to use it for an entire lunch every two or three days, which should mean about 150 individual servings about the equivalent of the amount of meat in a couple of hot dogs.
Next, go for a large quantity of dry foods. Store tons of rice — literally tons. Store tons of oatmeal and cereals, too. Store tons of honey (when it settles — with that sugary clump at the top — just heat some water in a pan while the honey container sits in the water, and it’ll return to normal, just be careful if the container is plastic or it might melt!). Store tons of flour. Store tons of dry beans. A ton or two of sugar and of baking powder. Several tons of cooking oils and lard.
Again, when I say tons, I mean TONS. Because toward the end of your ten years, you’re gonna be eating a lot of rice. I can’t say precisely how many tons of each you’ll need, because there are many ways to make use and combine them etc. for meals, but in nations where rice is a major staple food a person might eat 400-500 pounds of rice in a single year. Eventually, as the years go along, you’ll start to match and exceed those numbers, so figure you might need 500 or more pounds of rice per year for the final 5 years. The actual amount will be higher some years, lower others, so let’s use 500 as the average, which means those years you’ll use a total of 1.4 tons of rice. Now consider you will probably need to use it sometimes in the first five years as well, to stretch your other food resources, so tack on another half a ton, and round it up to 2 tons.
Now figure that there’s a chance something bad might happen to some of your other foods, and you do not want to risk starving to death just because you got stingy with bringing rice to the bunker. Add another ton for good measure. That’s three tons of rice, and should be a safe number. But hey, rice is relatively cheap and easy to store, so if you want to really be safe, you can add another ton or two, it’s up to you. But one thing is very important — keep it dry, always.
For your beans, you basically want to match your tonnage of rice, so bring three tons of beans or more. Oatmeal and cereals? The same. Hey, if you bring too much, you know what happens? You live for sure and have leftovers for the next few years, food to give away or donate to charity, or whatever else you want to do because you’re still alive and didn’t starve to death from not bringing enough food to your bunker. Got it? Good!
You should probably also get meat, salt it and cool it well-done, and then freeze it. Use this and the jerky first, and then go to the canned meats later. If you do this right, you’ll be able to eat meat for several years in the early stages of your days underground.
What you’ll have, then, is early years of meat, vegetables, MREs fruit, and simple flour-based products. Be sure to bring vitamins, for males get the supplements that have all of your daily vitamins but low in iron, enough bottles to last you for the first four or five years (how many bottles you get depends on the size you get, just figure one pill per day for five years = 1,825 pills) and then another several years worth that DO contain iron (the meat in the early years will give you iron, and men often get a bit too much iron in their diets, so avoid it in early years but be sure to compensate in later years).
Later years will be increasingly filled with rice and beans; the remaining longest-lived canned foods; oatmeal and cereals, with honey and sugar; and foods you can make with flour, water, sugar, and baking powder (tortillas, scones, and other simple recipes).
You’ll begin at 1,500 calories per day, but probably in the last couple of years you’ll drop this down to 1,000 and eventually toward the end something below even that number as you get close to coming back out of the bunker.
Oh, and since it relates to eating, don’t forget to brush your teeth in the morning and at night (some people brush after every meal, but actually since a lot of foods can temporarily soften enamel, brushing too soon after a meal might actually harm your teeth).
If you’re buried in a bunker, you do not want to get an abscessed tooth or gums, or cavities that cause jaw damage, etc. So bring plenty of toothpaste. I personally cover the whole top of my toothbrush, and then I brush for five minutes and hold the foam in my mouth the whole time instead of spitting it out (don’t swallow it, just hold it in your mouth as you brush, giving your teeth a toothpaste “bath” the whole time) — you might think that’s obsessive, but growing up poor I rarely saw a dentist and once went 13 years straight without a single dental visit; yet when I finally visited a dentist again, I had exactly zero cavities and have the healthiest teeth my dentist has ever seen, last time I went in for a cleaning they barely had to even do anything! My point is, brush and brush GOOD, and you’ll keep all of your teeth for a very long time. Which means a tube of toothpaste for every two weeks, and that’s a total of 260 tubes for your 10 years in the bunker.
Now comes the biggie — water. While the claim “drink 8 glasses of water a day” is kind of an unsubstantiated claim, it’s not that far off from the general recommended needs of your body for fluids. You need about 100 ounces (or 3 liters) of fluids every day, which should include water, fruit juices, and maybe some teas and coffee for variety as well. If you drink a liter of water, a liter of fruit juice, and a liter of teas and coffees per day, for example, you’d be fine. Really, though, you should lean toward water the most, but let’s use the above 1-1-1 ratio for our guide.
You thus need 3,650 liters of each of those fluids, which means you’ll need close to 1,000 gallons of each fluid for drinking.
But now remember you’ll be using water to cook with, too. Probably at least a cup of water to cook with per day at first, and in the last several years about four or five cups a day. That’s about 11,000 cups of water for cooking, or 685 more gallons.
Now remember that you’ll need to clean your plates and dishes and cooking area, too. I have no idea how to calculate that, aside from saying it seems logical that you would keep one tub of water for rinsing plates that are not actually dirty but merely have crumbs etc, and this tub of water can be used multiple times before being discarded for “toilet sanitation.” Then another tub would be needed to clean food, and this should be clean water at all times — but you’ll rarely need to clean food, since so much is prepackaged etc. So this would be perhaps a liter every other day, or 500 total liters, or about 150 gallons of water.
So, we’re up to almost 1,850 gallons of water (plus the other fluids). And we’ve not even talked about bathing and bathroom needs. To put it simply, you better have one helluva chemical toilet, or a rope-and-pulley system to haul up your waste to the surface (like a miniature dumbwaiter built into a wall, where you can load waste into a hole, seal it, then work a rope inside the bunker that raises the waste up to the surface outside where animals and nature will dispose of it etc. But I’m thinking you’ll at least need water for cleaning yourself up and regularly cleaning your bathroom and living space, so let’s say mop once per week, using two buckets equal to a gallon each to clean the mandatory areas (the size of this bunker is obviously big, considering how much you’re storing in it). That’s 1050 gallons total, and a total so far of 2,900 gallons of water.
And yes, you need a bath. But nothing so luxurious as a true bath into which you submerge your whole body. This will be a case of regularly washing yourself with a wet cloth and soap. Plus you’ll use a bit for brushing your teeth each day. Let’s try to conserve here, since I’ve rounded up so far. You’ll mostly focus on face, armpits, crotch, butt, feet, and hands when you bathe with soap, and rely on spreading the lather and water to the rest of your body in a much lower quantity. Make it last, and bathe every other day to conserve water. This should mean a total of two gallons per week for bathing, teeth-brushing and bathroom duties. That’s 1040 gallons of more water.
Which now gives us a total of 3,940 gallons of water. We’ll round that up one final time to an even 4,000 gallons, and use that for our grand total of water. Look at that number again, and then add the 1,000 gallons of fruit juices and 1,000 gallons of tea and coffee… the latter of which is in fact water with tea and coffee added to it. You’re gonna have a LOT of water, in other words, and it has to be stored in the safest, most durable, airtight containers and kept at about 40 degrees. You can even freeze a lot of it and store it in your freezer with the frozen foods, to help keep everything cold and make your freezer run the most efficiently.
Let’s talk about toilet tissue a moment. you can either bring more water and rely on a more “European” solution to cleaning yourself, or add tissue to your list of items to bring and then to have to dispose of. But if you forgo tissue and opt to simply wash your butt off, you better wash extremely well, and not risk being unclean and contaminating your enclosed underground bunker. One thing that will surely ruin your stay in the bunker is a case of hepatitis.
An alternative is to build your bunker where there’s an underground river or spring, for a relatively open-ended supply of water. If you did the research and planned your bunker accordingly, you could conceivably remove water as an issue, aside from emergency reserves in case of fire, earthquake, etc. This option would also make a huge difference in terms of bringing a dog with you — if you’ve got endless water and (with major planning and design work) even a sort of indoor underground pool in your bunker (where some water rises up) then you’d save so much room due to not having to bring thousands of gallons of water, that you could instead bring tons of dog food.
With food, water, and cleanliness, you need to just remember to do some basic exercise every day. Jog around your bunker, do leg squats, some push-ups and chin-ups, and a stationary bicycle. Keeping active and in good physical shape is important to your survival.
Finally, in terms of basic survival, you’re going to need not only a first aid kit, but a lot of emergency kits — for fire, for poisoning, for injury, etc. What would you do if you tripped and broke your ankle? Or if you got an injury that became infected? You’ll want medical kits of the sort military medics have in the field, plus emergency pills and shots of all sorts, too. Keep painkillers, antihistamines, decongestants, antibiotics, and so on. And you’ll want them not by the bottle, but by the case. I’d bring several cases of each kind of medication that you can think of, in fact. Then, on top of all of that, bring splints and braces and crutches and slings and stuff for casts and neck braces, too. Be prepared, just in case.
Also important to staying alive is avoiding going out of your mind. So let’s look at how to keep your mind healthy.
Be sure to bring a lot of reading material. If you have a Kindle, that’s awesome and will save lots of room in the bunker, but remember you have to be able to charge it and replace the batteries etc., (which I don’t know anything about, so look that up and take care of it, is all I can tell you there), plus you’ll have a few generators and fuel for them as well. Read a lot, to keep your mind sharp and active. Bring some books in foreign languages and teach yourself those languages, with study guides and so on. You’ll need a few books per week, the longer the better, from all different genres and periods and categories etc. Let’s say 150 books per year, for 1,500 books total.
To this, add music. Here I think iPods are a necessity, so be sure to do the research into how to maintain them for a decade. Bring a lot of iPods, to store thousands of songs. And of course, you need an iPad and boxes filled with batteries for it — actually, you’d of course bring lots of iPads. This is to watch movies in a simple, carry-around format that (if broken or worn out etc) can be replaced more easily than having to store multiple TVs in the bunker. But then, also DO store some TVs and Blu-ray players and DVDs. I strongly recommend bringing hundreds and hundreds of movies, even thousands if you can, because these and books take up relatively little space and can be stacked for easy storage etc. You will needs lots of entertainment, so don’t skimp here.
Bring some art equipment, too — mostly paper and pencils, pens, and paints. If you play guitar or another instrument, bring it as well. Keep the creative parts of your mind active and challenged. Set a goal for yourself (learning to play the drums to every song on your iTunes before the 10 years are up, for example) and stick to it.
If you’re alone, that means you’ll get lonely not just for companionship and conversation, but for sex. So you want to prepare for that, and bring whatever magazines or power tools fit your fancy, too. You’ll be alone for 10 years, so it’s not the time to be shy about it, you need to keep your mind and attitude as positive and healthy as possible, and sexual release happens to go far in those areas, so actually do some seriously planning in this regard — think about all of your likes and fantasies etc, and make sure whatever you might need is close at hand. (Sorry.)
Bring diaries, enough to write in every day for ten years. And yes, handwritten diaries are better. It’s more directly interactive and has a different impact on your emotional association with what you’re writing about your thoughts & life, if you’ve written every letter and every word with your own hands. It will look like your thoughts and ideas, and will draw you into the process more.
Also write letters to people you left behind, and to those you’ll see again when you emerge. Tell them how it felt to leave them, how it feels to no longer be with them, how you’ll feel to see them again, and so on. Take your time, do this when the mood hits, but be sure that you think about it and know that you need to do this even if you never give them the letters. But plan to, go into it assuming you will give them the letters, and only refrain if they are dead or no longer in contact with you or if after it’s all over you realize that it’s best for them not to see what you wrote.
If you can bring a long-term task with you into the bunker, some major goal that will take you many years to conquer, in order to immerse yourself in some mission that you accomplish not just for yourself but for other people as well, that would be a great way to help make the process more worthwhile and easier to tolerate.
Bear in mind that you will grow lonely, sad, scared, and detached from time to time. This is why a pet might be very important, if you are otherwise going to be in the bunker alone. A dog for a companion would be very helpful in alleviating the loneliness, make you more tolerant of the situation and able to deal with the daily stress much better. So that’s something to consider for piece of mind and emotional/mental stability through this process.
Lastly, I’ll say you need to really be sure the bunker is big enough to hold all of the supplies you’ll need, as well as big enough to give you plenty of room to maneuver and walk around, to not feel boxed in, for keeping your bed area separate from the kitchen, which is separate from the recreational area, and so on. Each place has its purpose, and this will help you maintain an orderly life and not slip into uncleanliness or depression, or into mental instabilities. You need every factor in your favor as much as possible, so take every step seriously and remember that it’s better to have something and not need it, than to need it and not have it — when trapped underground for 10 years of your life, that philosophy had better be a driving force behind your planning.
EDIT: I’d originally considered discussing trying to grow a garden in the bunker, but I wrote this at 3am and kind of rushed through it as fast as I could, so I decided to forgo getting into that kind of detail.
However, User raises the idea of growing trees, veggies, and having artificial sunlight, so I thought I’d say that I definitely endorse the concept and expound on what you’ll need for it for a moment.
An ideal bunker would be large enough to include a rather vast area (bigger than the rest of the bunker) that is a wide open space with lots of fertile dirt piled up and where you have large and powerful grow-lights overhead, and that you have an extensive seed collection. You’ll be recycling your waste — both food waste and bathroom waste — plus your dog’s waste (another reason to bring a dog!) for fertilizer, but you should also be sure to keep an entire room filled with bags of topsoil, too. Rotate the crops to keep putting nutrients back into the soil, too.
This very large room would have ladders or stairs leading to higher levels as well, so it’s a multitiered garden. This would require having located a large underground river/well and built your bunker around that as a water source (I mentioned this option briefly in the answer before), but the benefits are enormous since it frees up room (no more storing thousands of gallons of water, for one thing) and the freed-up space can be part of the larger area used for this garden project.
It also creates a sort of mini-park in your bunker, so build the garden in a way that it has nice pathways around the rows of veggies and bushes and small fruit trees. Bring your iPod with you and listen to music, take your dog for a walk in the park, and get the full benefits from this space.
This supplements your food supply, so you have vegetables and fruit for the duration of your stay. And no more thousands of gallons of water! Easy bathing with an actual pressurized showerhead! Gardening irrigation!
For a smaller room, though, you could probably just use a bedroom-sized area filled with soil and rotate a small number of essential crops, water them (meaning bring a couple of thousand more gallons of water) and use waste to fertilize etc. You can grow potatoes vertically, using old tires — lay a tire down, fill it with dirt and wet leaves, and put a few chunks of a potato inside; place another tire on top of that tire, and again fill with dirt and wet leaves plus chunks of potato, etc. Stack them as high as you want, and soon you’ll be able to remove the top tire, and inside will be full potatoes sprouted from the potato chunks. Eat most of these, but save some chunks with eyes in order to keep repeating the process. Grow tomato plants, and any vine-grown food is easy to string up the wall and around horizontal bars/planks to get the maximum use of your space. Even a small room with a very basic garden can work and supply you with seeding fruits and vegetables for constant food. Don’t forget the grow-lights, too!
Lastly, if you are the sort of person who can do this (I’m not encouraging it, just saying that if the bunker is used for emergency in an apocalyptic scenario, this might be a necessity), in a large or small garden you could also bring a collection of rabbits. They breed fast, can eat from the garden, have a large litter, and if you plan well then you could have a constant supply of rabbits for additional meat. Again, I don’t advocate this personally — the only meat I eat is fish, I love animals, rabbits are sweet and friendly animals that I’d never harm, etc. But in a survival situation, it’s a realistic option if you have to try to stay alive in a more limited space, and it’s worth mentioning in the answer.
EDIT: I was asked about how to provide wi-fi in this bunker, so I responded to the comment and am also pasting my response here in the answer, just to help make it more thorough…
1. Sign up for AT&T for cell phone service.
2. Talk to them about getting a personal private cell-tower to help your reception on your property (don’t explicitly mention “I’m going to live underground for a decade”). They will actually do this if you really push for it and the situation warrants it etc — they offered to provide my wife and I with a cell tower to put on top of our apartment building in WeHo because reception can be problematic in parts of the complex!
3. Get the newest model iPhone.
4. Put the cell-tower on top of your bunker’s ground-level “roof.”
5. Have the top floor of your bunker include a desk with your laptop, connected to your generator etc.
6. Use the feature on your iPhone that allows it to create a mini wi-fi hotspot, and log your computer into that Internet access.
7. Alternately, you can of course just use the Quora iPhone app to read things on Quora, which will be more efficient I guess.
8. Make sure you made arrangements to have AT&T check the tower regularly to ensure it’s working etc, and that you have a set up auto-pay to AT&T each month from a bank account with enough money to last while you’re underground. Or, just go online and make the payments from your bank via automatic transfers etc.