Leftover Dehydrated Meals

I think you mean dehydrated or perhaps freeze-dried meals.

In either case, the taste will be off long before there’s anything unhealthy about them.  While you’ve done a decent job with the ziplock bags and keeping them dark, some oxygen and atmospheric moisture still got in.  That can oxidize some components of the meal (hopefully not, being so dry and dark).  You can buy oxygen- and moisture-scavenging packets on Amazon for 3 to 9 cents each (in bulk).

Before your next trip, but with time to go procure more new meals if needed, I’d take a spoonful out of each type, rehydrate it and taste it.  If it tasted “off”, the dog would be having Chicken Tetrazzini for dinner that night.  If it tasted fine, I’d use it on my upcoming trip.

Our palate has involved over millions of years to warn us of hazards.  While we can’t detect bacteria directly, we can taste what they’ve done to the food as well as, in this case, flavor components that oxidized non-biologically.

In future, if you’re bringing, say, 6 days of food for a 5-day trip, maybe leave one or two days worth in its original packaging so you’re confident about its 10-year shelf life back home if you don’t use it.

There’s one FD meal – my least favorite variety, that’s been on a lot of trips.

That reminds me of a tip for bush pilots that I loved.  For emergency food, the author recommended MilkBone dog biscuits.  Unlike a bag of Snickers bars, they won’t get depleted each time you skipped lunch and are hungry because you won’t use them until you really need them.  And they’re made out of mostly food grade stuff.

I actually used dog biscuits that way last month when my diabetic (human) hiking companion’s blood sugar got into the 50s and was feeling lightheaded while far up the beach walking the dogs.  I kind of had to insist, using my fully-fueled brain, that a medical/first aid situation trumps the grittiness of peanut-butter-flavored dog biscuit (which I recommend over the liver-flavored ones).  As they sat (so as not to exercise away more blood sugar), starting to digest the MilkBone, I run to get the SUV onto the beach.  The husky impressed me by running a long way back to check on the diabetic – I wouldn’t have pegged her for a Lassie-type, “Come quick, Timmy fell down the well again!”

Thanks for the correction, David. Yes, dehyrated meals. You give good advice and I will try some for taste before I leave.

You’ll know when you open the bags. Smell and look. If they pulled in moisture, it’ll be limp and smell off. I use both dehydrated and FD ingredients that sometimes sit in their cans/bags – opened – for 1-2 years.