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That best-by date on a bag of sugar? Except for baby formula, no federal law makes anyone print it. Companies print it anyway because a date makes the old bag look like trash and puts a new one in your cart. On the things smart
A prepper guide to 17 long-lasting bulk pantry items like charcoal, cornstarch, strike-anywhere matches, washing soda, and honey, with uses for outages and emergencies.
Key Takeaways
- Many pantry staples have indefinite shelf life when kept dry and sealed; 'best-by' dates are often marketing
- Moisture control is the single most important factor in long-term storage
- Bulk emergency supplies should cover fire starting, food, hygiene, and cleaning needs
- Safety warnings, especially around carbon monoxide and infant honey consumption, are essential
What the video covers
- Argues that 'best-by' dates on many staples like sugar are not legally required and mostly drive consumer purchases
- Lists 17 bulk items that keep almost indefinitely, with moisture identified as the main enemy
- Charcoal briquettes can bake bread in a Dutch oven during a power outage, but must be used strictly outdoors due to carbon monoxide risk
- Cornstarch works as a foot powder to prevent blisters and diaper rash and can thicken canned food
- Strike-anywhere matches are recommended as a backup to lighters, which fail in cold weather
- Washing soda can be made by baking baking soda, and works well as a cleaner and degreaser
- Honey stores indefinitely, can be used for coughs in children over one year old, and crystallization is harmless
- Petroleum jelly prevents cracked skin and rust and can be used to make fire-starting cotton balls
- Other items discussed include borax for mold, alcohol as fuel, wool blankets, salt for food preservation, and jars for canning
- The video mixes practical preparedness tips with some health and safety claims that should be verified independently
Chapters
- 00:00Best-By Dates and Why Bulk Staples Last
- 01:36Charcoal and Dutch Oven Baking Safety
- 03:03Cornstarch, Matches, and Lighter Failure
- 04:36Washing Soda, Honey, and Petroleum Jelly
- 07:00Mold Control, Alcohol Fuel, and Flavoring
- 10:00Cleaning, Jars, Wool, and Salt Preservation
- 16:40First Aid and Storage Wrap-Up
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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preppers buy by the bucket and the 50-lb bag, that date means almost nothing. An old box of baking soda will still smother a grease fire, and a dry bag of charcoal forgotten in the shed will still bake bread with the power out. 17
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of them. And if you only buy one, make it number one, which costs about a dollar, and some of it was already older than the dinosaurs before it ever reached the store. Number 17 is a bag of charcoal briquettes, and with a Dutch
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oven, it bakes bread with no power at all. Charcoal is mostly carbon, so there's nothing in it to rot. The only thing that ruins it is water. Damp charcoal won't light, so keep the bags inside a sealed plastic bin or a trash
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can with a tight lid. And buy plain briquettes rather than the kind already soaked with lighter fluid. Once that bag is opened, the fluid slowly evaporates, and in a few years, you have expensive regular charcoal that you paid extra
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for. Put a cast-iron Dutch oven on a bed of coals, then pile more coals on the lid. Bakers who cook this way often use about twice as many coals on top as underneath, so the heat comes down on
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the food like a real oven. Bread, biscuits, cobbler, and casseroles all come out of that pot in the backyard with the power out for weeks. Fresh bread in a blackout does something to people that canned food never will. And
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on an ordinary grill, or over a pit dug in the backyard, charcoal burns steady and hot for a long time, so one bag cooks a lot of meals. Now, the rule that never bends. Charcoal is for outdoors only. Never burn it in the house, the
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garage, a tent, or a camper. It gives off carbon monoxide long after the flames are gone, and a grill of gray, quiet coals that looks finished can still fill a room with gas you can't see or smell. Every winter outage, somebody
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brings the grill inside to warm up, and some of them never wake up. The next one costs pennies, and it keeps your feet from cracking open when your boots never dry out.
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Number 16 is cornstarch. It keeps for one simple reason. It's dried starch with almost no water and almost no fat in it. So, there's nothing inside to go sour or rancid. A box from years ago, kept dry, works the same as one you
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bought this morning. When you're hauling water or walking places you used to drive, your feet stay wet inside your boots for hours. Wet feet blister and crack, and a foot that won't heal turns into a serious problem fast. A dusting
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of cornstarch on clean, dry feet and inside your socks soaks up the sweat and keeps the skin in one piece. The same powder soothes chafing on a long, sweaty day, and parents have used it on plain diaper rash for generations, which
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matters a lot when the diaper cream runs out. Back in the kitchen, emergency meals made from cans and water tend to come out thin and watery. Stir a spoonful of cornstarch into a little cold water first so it doesn't lump.
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Pour it in, and a can of vegetables and a can of meat turn into something that feels like a stew. The one weak spot is bugs. Pantry moths and little beetles love an open box of cornstarch. Pour it
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into a jar or a bucket with a tight lid the day you bring it home.
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Cornstarch keeps your feet dry. The next one lights off a rock, and a lot of stores have stopped carrying it.
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Number 15 is the strike-anywhere match, which lights off a rock or a zipper. Regular safety matches only light on the strip on their own box. Lose the box or let it get wet, and you're holding a pile of little sticks. Strike-anywhere
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matches carry everything they need in the head, so any rough, dry surface works. A lot of stores quit carrying them, and shipping rules make them a hassle to mail. So, when you see them, buy several boxes. Stored dry in a
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sealed jar, they keep for decades. And they cover the two moments when a lighter lets you down. A lighter runs out of fuel without warning, and the common butane lighter struggles in real cold because the gas inside won't turn
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to vapor much below freezing. So, it just clicks and clicks while you stand there. A match doesn't care about the weather. It lights the stove, and it lights the fire. Keep them sealed and away from heat. A jar of strike-anywhere
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matches rattling against keys in a hot glove box is not where you want them.
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Matches are getting hard to find. The next one you can make yourself when the store runs out. Number 14 is washing soda, and you can bake it out of something already in your pantry.
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Washing soda is the bigger, tougher cousin of baking soda. It comes in a plain box in the laundry aisle, and it costs a few dollars. When the detergent is gone, a scoop of washing soda in a bucket of water softens hard water and
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loosens dirt. And with a little grated bar soap added, you have a laundry wash that people used for generations before detergent was ever sold in jugs. It's even better on grease. Greasy work clothes or a grill grate caked with old
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fat come clean faster with washing soda than with almost anything else in the house. And here's the trick worth remembering. If the stores are empty and you can't find a box, spread plain baking soda on a baking sheet and put it
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in a hot oven for about an hour. The heat drives off water and gas, and what comes out is washing soda. You can feel the change, too. Baking soda feels silky between your fingers, and washing soda feels grainy, like fine sand. That means
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every cheap box of baking soda you stack is secretly two products. The catch is that it's harsh on skin. Wear gloves when you use it, keep it out of your eyes, and label the jar clearly so nobody ever bakes with it by mistake.
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I'll be honest. Never goes bad has the same asterisk on almost every item here, and it's moisture. But still, a tight lid and a dry corner make most of them a lifetime supply. Moisture is also the only thing that can ruin the next one,
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and bees already did most of the work on it. Number 13 is honey. Honey is mostly sugar with very little water, and it's acidic. So, germs that land in it dry out and die. A sealed jar keeps for
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years, and the old saying that honey never spoils is close enough to true. Buy it by the gallon jug from a local beekeeper, and it's often cheaper per pound than the little plastic bears at the store. The thing that makes people
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think old honey has gone bad is when it turns grainy and solid. That's just crystals, and the honey is fine. Set the jar in a pot of warm water, and it goes back to liquid. It's best job in a hard
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winter is the cough. A spoonful of honey at bedtime is an old remedy for a child's cough, and pediatrician still suggest it for kids over a year old.
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Never give honey to a baby under one, because it can carry spores that make infants seriously sick. Keep the lid tight. Leave a jar open in a damp kitchen, and it can pull in enough water from the air to start fermenting. The
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next jar heals cracked knuckles, and a single spark lights it. Number 12 is petroleum jelly. There's no water in it, so nothing can grow, and a jar keeps for years. Chopping wood and washing in cold water will split the skin on your
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knuckles and fingertips, and cracked skin is an open door for infection. A thin coat at night lets it heal. Lips get the same treatment. And before you head out into the wind, a light layer on your cheeks and nose stops the raw red
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windburn that makes your face sting for days. Out in the tool shed, a thin layer wiped on an ax head or a saw blade before you put it away keeps rust from getting a grip on the steel. And then,
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the job people never guess. Take a plain cotton ball, work a little petroleum jelly into it, and stuff a dozen of them in an old pill bottle. When you need a fire, pull one apart so the fluffy fibers stick out and a single spark will
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catch it. It burns for a couple of minutes, which is long enough to light kindling that's a bit damp. A whole jar of them costs about as much as a cup of coffee. The catch is what you put it on.
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Keep it off fresh burns and deep wounds. It seals things in and with a burn or a deep cut, sealing things in is the opposite of what you want. The next box on the laundry shelf fights the mold
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that climbs the walls after a leak. Number 11 is borax. Borax is a mineral scraped out of dry desert lake beds.
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Back in the 1880s, teams of 20 mules hauled it in giant wagons out of Death Valley and that's where the mules on the old box came from. It's rock, basically, and it doesn't care how long it sits.
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After a leak or a flood, mold climbs walls fast it day after day in a closed-up house makes people sick. Borax dissolved in hot water and scrubbed onto the spot cleans it off and the thin film it leaves behind slows the mold from
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creeping right back. A spoonful in the wash with your washing soda and grated soap makes it work harder, too. It handles ants as well. Mix a little borax into sugar and water, set it out on a jar lid near the trail and the ants
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carry it home to the nest and share it. That's the same idea as the little bait trap sold in stores at a fraction of the price and you'll be glad of it the summer ants find your stored food.
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Now the serious part. Borax is not food and it's not safe for kids or pets to get into. Keep it up high and labeled and never let it anywhere near the kitchen bins.
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The next one becomes medicine or money, depending on the bottle. Number 10 is a bottle of plain vodka or high-proof grain alcohol and a sealed bottle keeps for decades. Alcohol is too strong for anything to grow in and as long as the
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cap stays sealed, the bottle you buy this year is the bottle you'll open 20 years from now. For generations, people steeped garden herbs in alcohol for a few weeks to pull out what's in them and keep it through the winter. And those
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little bottles are called tinctures. It also cleans. Tweezers, a needle for a splinter, or a kitchen counter can all be wiped down with it. Now, something worth knowing. Ordinary 80-proof vodka is too weak to rely on for sterilizing
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anything. High-proof grain alcohol works far better. And it's also flammable, so keep it well away from the stove you're cooking on. That same fire makes it a fuel. High-proof alcohol runs a small alcohol stove, the kind hikers use, and
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it burns clean with a pale blue flame. That flame can be almost invisible in daylight, so treat the stove as lit until you're sure it isn't. Regular vodka won't do this job. So, if you want a fuel, buy the strongest grain alcohol
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your state allows. And it trades. A sealed bottle is something almost everyone recognizes and plenty of people want, and it doesn't lose value sitting in a closet. One more thing. Drinking it in the cold is a bad idea because it
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makes you feel warm while it pulls heat out of your body faster. Vodka keeps because it's alcohol. So does a bottle in your baking aisle, and by law, about a third of it is alcohol. Number nine is real vanilla extract, and it lasts for
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the same reason whiskey does. Anything sold in this country as pure vanilla extract has to be about a third alcohol, and nothing grows in that. A bottle can sit in the back of the cupboard for years and come out smelling exactly the
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way it went in. And if anything, the flavor gets a little deeper with time.
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Which might explain why grandma's baking always tasted so cheerful. The hardest part of living on stored food has very little to do with calories. It's the sameness. After a couple of weeks of the same plain meals, people start eating
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less of it. Kids are the first to push the bowl away. A few drops of vanilla in a pot of hot milk made from powder or in a pan of pancakes from a mix and the whole thing suddenly tastes like a
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normal Saturday morning at home. It trades well, too. Real vanilla comes from an orchid that farmers pollinate by hand, one flower at a time, and nobody on your street can make it. Around a birthday, when somebody wants to bake a
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cake that tastes like the old days, a small bottle is worth a lot more than the label says. Imitation vanilla keeps on a shelf, too, but nobody is going to trade you a thing for it. Buy the real
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stuff in the larger bottles, where it costs less per ounce, and keep it capped tight and in the dark. If this list has you eyeing your pantry, subscribe now because the next item can brush your teeth in the morning and put out a
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grease fire at dinner. Number eight is the orange box at the back of your fridge, and it can put out a grease fire that water would turn into a fireball.
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It's baking soda. If grease catches fire in a pan, slide a lid over it first, and if it's still burning, throw big handfuls of baking soda right on the flames. Never water, which makes burning grease explode across the kitchen, and
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never flour, which can catch fire itself. Keep a big box right next to the stove.
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When the toothpaste runs out, dip a wet toothbrush in baking soda and brush the way you normally would. It's gently gritty, it cleans well, and directions for heartburn are printed right there on the box about half a teaspoon in half a glass of
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water. Stored food, stress, and bad sleep are a recipe for an upset stomach, and when the pharmacy shelves are bare, that orange box still works. It's for now and then, not every day, because it's loaded with sodium.
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Over the years, baking soda loses some of its power to make bread rise. To check, drop a spoonful into a splash of vinegar. A big, hard fizz means it's still good for baking. A lazy fizz means that box goes to cleaning, and the box
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that's been pulling smells out of your fridge for 6 months, go straight to scrubbing burnt pots. Next is the cheapest defense you can buy against the stomach bugs that spread after every disaster. Number seven is plain bar soap, and unlike the liquid kind, it
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gets harder and longer-lasting as it sits. Soap made right has nothing in it for germs to feed on. A fresh bar still holds a little water, and as it sits on a shelf, that water slowly leaves. So, an old bar is harder and wears down
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slower in the dish. Old-time soap makers let their bars cure for weeks for exactly that reason. Here's why it matters. After floods and long outages, stomach bugs travel from hands to mouths, and they spread fast when water is short. Back in 2003, two researchers
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in London, Val Curtis and Sandy Cairncross, pulled together the studies on handwashing and found that washing hands with soap cut the risk of diarrhea by close to half. That bar by the sink may be the most important medicine in
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the house. It washes hands and dishes alike, and rubbed along a drawer that sticks or a zipper that jams, a dry bar makes it slide again.
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Store bars out of their wrappers in a dry place where air can move around them, like a closet shelf or a cardboard box with a few holes punched in it. Keep them out of a damp basement. The big
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multi-packs are the cheapest way to buy them. The only thing you lose with time is the scent, and nobody in a collapse is going to complain that their soap smells like soap. Soap keeps the germs off your hands. The next one keeps them
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out of your food. Number six is white vinegar, and 1 gallon jug can pickle a garden's worth of vegetables. Vinegar is acid, and germs can't live in it. The Vinegar Institute, the trade group for the people who make it, says its shelf
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life is almost indefinite. If you ever see cloudy strands floating in an old jug, that's called a mother, and it's harmless. Pickling is the big reason to stock it. Cucumbers, beets, peppers, and green beans from a summer garden can
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last into the winter in vinegar. But, you need store-bought vinegar because its strength is printed on the label, usually 5%. Homemade vinegar might be strong enough, or it might not. And with food safety, a guess isn't good enough.
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Poured straight on weeds in a crack in the driveway on a hot sunny day, it burns the leaves down. It won't kill deep roots, so expect to do it again.
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But, it's cheaper than anything in the garden aisle. And a splash in the rinse water works as a fabric softener.
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Hand-washed clothes tend to dry stiff and scratchy because soap stays in them, and the vinegar rinses that soap out.
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Store it in plastic or glass, never in metal. Vinegar eats into metal and picks up the taste, and you don't want your pickles tasting like an old bucket.
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Vinegar saves your vegetables. The next one saves your fruit, and it's probably open in your kitchen right now. Number five is plain white sugar, which doesn't spoil because nothing can live in it.
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Sugar pulls water out of anything it touches so hard that germs dry up and die. That's the whole reason it keeps fruit for a year in a jar of jam. Sealed in a bucket, white sugar keeps indefinitely. Remember that best-by date
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from the start? This is the bag it's printed on, and now you know what it's worth. A pound of sugar is about 1,700 calories. And for somebody who's cold, shaky, and worn out, a hot sweet drink gets energy into the body faster than
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almost anything. Summer fruit cooked down with sugar into jam gives you something bright to eat in the middle of winter. And a pan of cookies on a kid's birthday in a year when everything else has gone wrong is worth more than you'd
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think. The only enemy is moisture. Sugar never goes bad. It just turns into a brick, which after a collapse is also useful. To keep it loose, store it in a bucket with a tight lid in a dry room,
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and skip the oxygen absorbers you'd use for other foods. They pull the last bit of moisture around and help turn the whole bucket into one solid block.
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Sugar keeps the kitchen going. The next one keeps the lights on, and it's been lighting farmhouses for 150 years.
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Number four is lamp oil and paraffin wax, and between them, you have light for years. Lamp oil, or plain kerosene, keeps for years in a sealed container out of the sun. Kerosene can yellow and smoke a little more as it ages, so the
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clean refined lamp oil is the better pick for indoor lamps. Paraffin wax comes in solid blocks, usually near the canning supplies, and it keeps basically forever. A simple oil lamp with a glass chimney gives steady light all evening
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and burns slowly. The paraffin blocks melt down in an old pot set in hot water, and poured into a jar around a cotton wick, they turn into candles that burn for hours. Rub a block of paraffin over canvas or a cotton jacket, warm it
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with a hair dryer or near the stove, and the wax soaks in and sheds rain.
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Remember the strike-anywhere matches? Melted paraffin makes them waterproof. Dip the heads in a little melted wax and lay them on wax paper to dry. When you need one, scrape the wax off the tip with your thumbnail and strike it.
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Here's the one rule for flame indoors. Put a battery-powered carbon monoxide alarm in any room where something is burning. The plug-in kind with no battery is dead in a blackout, which is exactly when you need it. And never
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leave a flame burning in an empty room or while everyone's asleep. The catch is the fuel itself. Store your lamp oil and kerosene away from the house, in a shed or a detached garage, in approved containers. Kerosene goes in a blue can,
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so nobody ever mistakes it for gasoline and pours the wrong thing into a lamp.
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Paraffin seals your matches. The next item seals everything else. Number three is the glass canning jar, and a good one can be used for longer than you'll live.
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Glass doesn't rot or rust, and it doesn't soak up smells. A jar's only real enemies are a hard knock and a sudden jump from hot to cold. People are still canning in jars their grandmothers bought. If you think jars are something
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you can always pick up later, look at what happened in 2020. Home canning came roaring back that year. Gardens were bigger than they'd been in decades and canning jars sold out across the country. People who'd grown a full
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summer of tomatoes and beans stood in front of empty shelves for weeks and some of that harvest rotted on the counter. Nobody sees a jar shortage coming until the one summer you need jars. Canning is the obvious use.
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Cornstarch, matches, sugar, and a dozen other things on this list go into jars, too. And mice and bugs can't chew through glass. A wide-mouth jar is tough and hard to tip. And it's what half the farmhouses in America drank from for a
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century. And a spoonful of sprouting seeds in a jar with a cloth over the top and a rinse twice a day gives you a handful of fresh green food in under a week. In the middle of winter with no
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garden at all. Store them in their cardboard boxes upside down so dust and bugs stay out. Before you can anything, run a fingertip around the rim and feel for chips. A chipped rim won't seal, so that jar goes to the dry shelf. Jars
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keep food. The next item is the cheapest way to stay warm in a house with no heat. And surplus stores sell it for the price of a pizza. Number two is a plain wool blanket. And it's the one bedding
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fabric that keeps you warm even when it's damp. Wool can soak up about a third of its own weight in water and still feel dry against your skin. And it keeps holding warmth while it's wet.
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Cotton does the opposite. A damp cotton blanket pulls the heat right out of you.
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Wool is also stubborn about fire. It tends to smolder and go out rather than flare up, which matters in a house lit by lamps and candles. On a bed, use some of them under you as well as on top.
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Because a cold floor or a thin mattress steals more heat than the air above you.
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Wrapped around your shoulders and pinned at the front, a wool blanket is how soldiers and shepherds stayed warm for centuries. Nail one over a doorway to close off the cold half of the house, and the room you're living in holds its
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heat. And with two long poles folded inside one, it will carry a hurt person when nobody is coming with an ambulance.
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Where to buy them? Army surplus. Old military blankets are heavy, scratchy, and built to last, and they cost far less than a new wool blanket from a fancy store. Check the tag, because a blend with a lot of synthetic fiber
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gives up most of what makes wool special. Moths love wool, especially wool that's dirty. Wash or air the blankets before you store them. Seal them in plastic bins and toss in some cedar. And they're heavy to ship, so
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buying in person at a surplus store saves you a lot. A good wool blanket outlasts its owner. Remember the Dollar Buy that was older than the dinosaurs?
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It's plain salt, the oldest food keeper on Earth, and one big sack of it can cure a whole hog with no fridge. Salt is a mineral, so it can't spoil. And some of the salt on store shelves was mined
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from seabeds that dried up before the first dinosaurs. The salt mines under Hutchinson, Kansas, for example, dig salt that's been lying underground for about 275 million years. Your canister has already waited out more than any of us ever
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will, and a few more years in your basement won't bother it. That's why salt was the fridge before there were fridges. It pulls the water out of meat, and the germs that rot food can't live without water. For most of history,
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families got through the winter on salt pork packed in a barrel and fish laid down in salt. If the power is out for good, and you've got more meat than you can eat in a few days, salt is how you
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keep it. Shredded cabbage and salt pressed into a crock turn into sauerkraut that keeps for months, and the same goes for cucumbers and other garden vegetables. And salt could save a life. After disasters, diarrhea spreads through dirty water, and what kills
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people is the dehydration that comes with it. The World Health Organization's home recipe for a rehydration drink is 1 L of clean water with six level teaspoons of sugar and half a level teaspoon of salt stirred in. Two things
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off this list plus water, and you've got the drink that has saved millions of lives around the world. Measure it exactly because too much salt makes things worse. Outside your door, a handful of salt melts the ice on the
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steps. And when the emergency room is closed or the roads are blocked, a broken hip from a fall on ice is the last thing your family needs. Now, which salt? For curing and fermenting, buy plain canning salt or kosher salt with
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no iodine and nothing added to keep it from caking because those extras cloud brine and can spoil the taste. Keep some iodized salt for the table, too. Your body needs that iodine, and it slowly fades out of the salt over the years.
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So, that's the one kind worth rotating. And for the ice, any cheap rock salt will do, but keep that bag far from the kitchen. Store the food salt in sealed buckets so damp air can't turn it into a
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lump. A sack big enough to cure a hog costs less than a family dinner out.
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It'll still be good long after the bag it came in has fallen apart. Buy the things that don't care how long you wait.
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What's one thing you already buy in bulk that isn't on this list? Subscribing is the one thing on this list you only need one of. So, tap it because next, we cut through the survival gear hype to the
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only seven tools that really matter. Keep it dry and forget the date on the
Topics:emergency preparednessbulk storageprepperpantry staplesshelf lifesurvival tipspower outagefood storagefire startingoff-grid living
