What are you talking about? I've kept bags of rice for years without any issues.

What he said is generally true [1], so you must have either stored your rice in an environment that prevented them from hatching, or got lucky.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_weevil

I've never seen anything like that and I've kept rice around for years as well. Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies? If things like that hatched in food people bought from stores that would make the news, I've seen it in the news before so it can't happen that often.

> Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies?

USA.

So, I mean, kinda.

But, unless they're irradiating or freezing your rice before it gets to the store, there are rice weevil eggs in it. They're inside the rice grains. If you've eaten much rice, you've eaten rice weevil eggs.

Probably comes from grain storage locations in warmer climates then. I can't find anyone talking about these online in my local language which is to the north, we have no native pests like these so they all only live inside houses. There are other weevils, but they are very rare and mostly comes from other sources and starts eating your bread etc, they don't come from packages you get in the store. Nobody said there is a problem storing these things long term, instead you get rid of them by getting rid of all their eggs in your kitchen.

Can confirm both: I've gotten lucky with some batches and unlucky with others.

Unlucky is quite nasty, but maybe extra protein? /s

This reminds me of something I read in Discover magazine around 20 years ago.

The gist of it was that immigrants in western Europe from various countries in Africa had developed nutritional deficiencies after immigrating. It appeared their diets were the same, perhaps better on paper, so it wasn't clear why their health was deteriorating.

It turned out that these people had diets rich in unwashed greens and vegetables, and they were likely consuming far more beneficial bacteria, insects, and minerals in their diets. They continued their mostly-vegetarian diets in Europe, but were no longer benefitting from what tended to accompany their foods before.

Not sure why I remember that. Regardless, we should all be eating dirt and weevils.

The eggs don't hatch right away, can take months or years, but most people buy rice to eat right now, not to stockpile, so it's mostly consumed before the weevils hatch. And when they do, it's just a known nuisance, not worth reporting.

I cannot find anyone talking about rice weevils in my language online, so I really doubt finding them is a common thing everywhere. If it is that impossible to get rid of them then it is probably a climate thing, they are common in your climate but not in my climate.

So the advice would be to look at local pests and how to avoid having those in your storage. We still have other kinds of weevils but they are not everywhere like you say rice weevils are, you are unlikely to have them in packages meant for humans so storing things long term is fine.

What’s your climate? If it’s a colder one then that would make sense.

He's quoting the best way to store it. You want it in mouse and moisture proof containers too.

"diatomaceous earth"

This is also a suspected carcinogen. I'd be careful about putting it on food, even if you do wash it.

Yes, though if you're eating your emergency store of food rations because the world has ended, you probably won't live long enough to die of cancer.

There are alternatives.

Small (1kg) vacuum-sealed bags should be fine though.

Correct—it's doable, it just takes more material and planning than "buy bag of rice, stick bag in dry place in basement". Do that, you'll be sad when you try to use it in a year or three.

The alternative is maintaining a stock but constantly drawing it down & replenishing it, but it gets difficult to maintain a substantial reserve that way, unless you already eat your "apocalypse" diet most of the time, so go through a lot of the same things you've got in storage even during normal times—say, if you already eat rice & beans 5+ dinners a week. You're capped by the rate at which you go through those things in non-emergency times. Plus it takes some planning and ongoing monitoring/inventorying, which is a non-zero amount of work.

Maybe I'm ignorant of this, but it was my impression that vacuum-sealed white rice should pretty much last indefinitely?

I'd expect a couple years at least. A quick Google gives common wisdom that you still want anti-weevil measures (bay leaves in the bag, the aforementioned diatomaceous earth) with that method.

My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material than simply buying sealed (but not vacuum sealed) bags at the store and putting them on a shelf. Getting grains ready for long-term storage means more than just keeping mice and bugs and water out—you've gotta worry about oxygen, and about insect eggs already present in the grain, too. Just stuff one might not think of if one were to make the wrong assumptions.

[EDIT] Incidentally, trying to store all one's calories, at least more than enough for a week or two, might not be the right idea anyway, short of a truly horrible catastrophe like nuclear war—my great-grandparents and grandparents, who lived through the depression and World War II, respectively, didn't seem to be all that in to storing lots of grain. What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables. I'd guess that's the result of some hard lessons about how to make it through hard times—plus, just, times before modern shipping and refrigeration when food availability dropped a whole bunch in Winter.

Maybe the misunderstanding stems from a geographic difference. The rice I buy seems to come in an under a co2-atmosphere vacuum sealed bag that costs around $2 (or less on sale) per kg.

> What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables,

My grandmother did this too, after living her childhood through WW2 (in Germany), she used to have a repository of canned vegetables in the cellar. I sometimes talked to her about her rural live in the war-torn country, and she told me about soldiers, and all kinds of people, who would come by in war-time, where food was very sparse. And I think she maintained that sort of hoarding behavior throughout her life, based on the experiences she made as a child.

Interesting. Our (my part of the US) rice is mostly sold in small plastic bags (perhaps 1-2kg), or for some brands hard plastic containers; larger amounts come in either a much heavier opaque plastic bag (like pet/livestock feed, when it's not in a lined paper bag of some kind), or a thin clear plastic bag inside a rough cloth bag. If there are already-vacuum-sealed options here, I've not noticed them.

Reading some other comments, it is also possible that these bags aren't actually vacuum sealed. It is hard for me to tell how much of a barrier you need to get a good sealing, in particular to protect from rice weevils (bugs), which appear to be the biggest issue.

you would know if your rice was vacuum sealed because the grain jamming would make the bag inflexible

"What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables."

Ditto

I became aware of the world just as seasonal food availability was becoming a thing of the past—I remember significantly more seasonal variation, but only when I was pretty young—so this really stuck with me growing up. All those colorful jars lined up on shelves, all the gardening, all the boiling-of-jars, et c. All that work, and a can of the same thing was $0.29 at the store.

So I assume they all developed these super-similar habits for really great reasons. And since the ~1960s and earlier were just normally pretty similar to what a significant food shortage would probably look like now (at least in countries that will almost certainly be able to maintain adequate supplies of staples, like the US) it seems to me that might be a good first place to look. Stock up on canned veggies, worry less about the rest of it. Maybe get some chickens and plant some berry bushes (they also all loved keeping a line or two of berry bushes, and it seems like in their generations you just alway kept chickens, if you weren't smack in the middle of town)

I'm going to ramble a bit... I grew up on a farm in the actual middle of nowhere. It was a then-defunct, mid-size dairy. In it's heyday it had 300 head of Holstein being milked.

My mother, whose parents ran the dairy, and to a large extent my father, instilled this way of life on me at a young age. Growing up, we had a huge vegetable garden (they still maintain a 1/8 acre vegetable lot in their 70s, it's quite impressive, really -- and that's in addition to a 400 sq. ft. greenhouse I helped my father build and the rest of their lot that has fruit trees, berry bushes, etc.) but I was always in awe of the canning and the preserving. You grow all of this food but you only eat 20% of it fresh, canning and preserving the other 80%. But then, being so young I didn't realize that our meals consisted of vegetables/fruits that were canned or preserved years previously, of course. There was a strong communal aspect to it, too. We'd get oversupply from neighbors and/or give oversupply to neighbors.

Chickens, too. The farm had a coup. My parents had a coup (they gave it up in their late 60s -- my father grew tired of dealing with the foxes and skunks they attracted). It's something I want to do but where I live it's impossible. We're planning on a move where we can have a chicken coup and more space for growing food in general. I'd really like to preserve the heritage, as it were, and it's become more important as we start a family.

Also, I've dealt with corn and wheat weevils before. I actually did not realize that they also laid eggs on rice. I guess I assumed that it was "different" or whatever but thank you for highlighting that in other comments. I've got 50 lbs. of rice that I'm going to break down to smaller vacuum sealed bags this weekend. I've dealt with weevils at least a half of a dozen times in my past and it is not pleasant. I do not want a repeat of that mess, but especially where I live today.

If you vacuum seal it with mylar lined bags and some oxygen absorbers, it can last up to 5 years, which is a long time.

Oxygen will get through normal plastic vacuum sealing bags and ruin the taste and eventually nutritional content otherwise after a year or two. Mylar lining stops most of that and the oxygen absorber gets the rest.

The thick bags will also stop rice moths from getting through (they are able to get through most cardboard and thin plastic bags), and the lack of oxygen will stop their eggs from hatching.

I keep rice and grains permanently in a chest freezer. It is fairly low power and you can cook directly from frozen, 1 cup at a time.

Does it not affect texture? E.g. I'd imagine they might be more inclined to crumble/turn to mush on boiling?

Nope, you can use the rice as normal in a recipe, no change. And the grains go straight into the grain mill and turn into flour the same as normal.

I have seen rice stay without any problems for more than a year. It was dried under hot sun for hours before storing. Most likely, the extreme heat took care of the weevils and the lack of moisture had a protective effect on the rice.

They take the rice out and soak it (as in soaking, not washing) like beans before cooking. Probably for re-hydrating it.

Eek. Ideally, you don't have a bag of rice for months and months at a time, though, you have a bag of rice and once you've used up most of it, you buy a new bag of rice, etc. There is kind of an inherent assumption that the person doing this is fond of eating rice.