Author Topic: Warning: don't use garbage bags as a liner in food buckets  (Read 919 times)

opsec

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Warning: don't use garbage bags as a liner in food buckets
« on: October 25, 2008, 02:45:43 AM »
In my early days of food storage I put up about 10 buckets of rice. I used a garbage bag as a liner and no oxygen absorber. I wasn't concerned at the time. It would have only been for a couple of years anyways since I was prepping for Y2K. I wasn't until several months later that I found out that garbage bag manufacturers mix insecticide into the plastic that they use to make the bags. Suffice it to say, a lot of rice went to waste.
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Lady Lilya

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Re: Warning: don't use garbage bags as a liner in food buckets
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2008, 12:53:23 PM »
Yeah, i can smell it on the garbage bags.  Especially the high-end ones, which happen to usually be the thicker bags.  But I found some cheap dollar-store bags that were just plastic, and I generally use those to store stuff.  (But NEVER food.)
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AndrewG

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Re: Warning: don't use garbage bags as a liner in food buckets
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2008, 06:34:43 PM »
Home Depot sells some really good, really strong (6 mil I think) contractor bags that I can only attest to their functionality at storing gear in, but I have never smelled anything on them. I have a surplus of them for general emergency purposes. They are a bit pricey at 20 beans for 32 of them, but in my estimation well worth it if they save resources from water/ mold.

opsec

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Re: Warning: don't use garbage bags as a liner in food buckets
« Reply #3 on: October 26, 2008, 07:40:26 PM »
Those are also really good for use as a water tranpiration bag. Basically, it you are out in the boonies and there is no other source of water, you put a transparent (it's gotta be transparent) bag over a live tree or bush branch getting the bag to encompass as many leaves as you can. Then you tie off the bag around the branch and orient the bag so that one of the corners is lower than the rest of the bag. Wait a few hours. There will be a pool of water in the lower corner of the bag. It helps if you run a piece of surgical tubing down into that corner of the bag so you can drink the water without undoing the bag. Be careful to not tear the bag, and be damned good and sure that you don't do this with a poisonous plant.
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oscar615

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Re: Warning: don't use garbage bags as a liner in food buckets
« Reply #4 on: November 21, 2008, 11:03:14 AM »
OPsec:  How did you know the food was unsafe to eat?  I have a few buckets of pre Y2K rice, wheat etc.  that I unknowingly packed in trash bags w/ oxy absorbers. How will I know not to use them?

And would you be able to wash of the pestisides like you do with fruit?  Or what about boiling the grains or something.  Would it evaporate off?
« Last Edit: November 21, 2008, 11:56:58 AM by oscar615 »
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opsec

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Re: Warning: don't use garbage bags as a liner in food buckets
« Reply #5 on: November 21, 2008, 01:41:57 PM »
To be honest, I have no way to quantify the danger involved with eating food out of a pesticide laced plastic bag. I had some rice that was packed in a garbage bag once, and just as an experiment I ate some rice from the middle of the bucket which had not been in direct contact with the garbage bag and nothing bad happened. I didn't get sick (that I could tell anyways), a second head didn't grow out of my shoulders, and it tasted just fine. If I was in a survival situation and had to eat the rice, the possibility of poisoning myself slowly from cumulative exposure to pesticide would rank much lower on my list of survival priorities than dealing with the immediate threat of starvation, so I would eat it. Remember too, pesticides are designed to work on insects. It takes a lot more pesticide to effect an animal or a human than it does to kill bugs. All the horror stories you hear of people being harmed by pesticides are from people who have an occupational exposue to pesticides and have been exposed to high concentrations of it over the course of years.
   The only reason I did toss the rice and replace it, was because I had the resources and the money to afford doing that. If I didn't have the money for it, I would still have the rice today and I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
   The point of all this is that you should avoid making this error to begin with just for the sake of knowing that your food supply is pristine, but I don't think that it's necessarily a fatal error.
   As far as washing the rice off before cooking and eating it, that sounds like a good idea to me even though I couldn't say definitively that it's necessary.
    I don't know if pesticides would boil off in cooking.
"The difference between a pessimist and an optimist is that the pessimist usually has more information"

"Where law ends tyranny begins. Where law begins, tyranny becomes legal"

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