Yeah, they do sometimes. One guy had a 3 year old bag of hard tack in a ziploc bag, had one worm in the bag, but it died, I guess it was too dry.

He basically soaked one of the biscuits in a bowl like all day to get some of the moisture back, then boiled it for an hour and a half, and then fried it in bacon grease, added some hot sauce to it, and it seemed okay.

Doesn't seem very true to the prepper code to believe you'll have bacon just lying around in those hard times, but hey, it was edible after 3 years of storage, so that's pretty dope I guess.

Most of the time, though, people die with their supplies. When I moved to Kentucky, I was looking up auctions and there was a huge one from some old prepper that passed away and the itemized list of stuff was basically a fucking armory. I'm talking over 200K rounds of ammo total, various kinds. Many many guns, just redundant guns, like he planned to arm half the county for whenever things were supposedly going to get bad. People like that tend to rack up a shitload of debt because they don't suspect there will be a system left to have to pay it back to.

They keep on believing, right up until the end, when a heart attack, cancer, or just being fucking old takes them out of the game like everyone else.

It's an excuse to hoard and sort of a security blanket. Most food, especially food low in moisture, keeps much longer beyond their stated expiration, it just becomes a question of diminished taste and maybe nutritional degradation.

I've noticed a lot of prepper types aren't the most physically fit specimens, if things get so bad you decide to hole up in your home and subsist on hard tack, you're just keeping yourself fresh for the inevitable mutant marauders' pantry.

Their kids end up filling a large dumpster with all the spoiled and expired food ( along with all the other hoardings ) after they die.

But yeah, if you're not an idiot, you rotate the food. Or more to the point, you just do what I do. Buy bulk staples and make food as you need it. Hardtack? How about buying 50 lb sacks of real flour ( crown best baking flour REPRESENT! ) and making real bread every week? I'm not surviving the apocalypse only to have to suffer a shitty meal for the trouble. Anyway, a sack lasts about 2-3 months, so everything stays fresh coz we're eating it (unfortunate side effect: my partner now refuses store bought bread when offered by others. You can't imagine how good a fresh baked load of semolina bread can be.)

That said, I am a little intrigued by whether you could make a half way decent hard tack. This guy's product is shit on a shingle. If you watched the related vid of Nazi Chocolate guy, he eats a piece of civil war hard tack that looked quite a bit different from this. Much thinner, and baked over a wood fire. The lack of any oil really limits how good this thing can be, but I could see a cracker like thing that would be edible.

He's right about one thing though, you need a _lot_ of salt.

Loaf, I mean, not load. Paging Dr. Freud!

Even though you can and people did, hardtack isn't really meant to be consumed as a standalone thing. Like pemmican and jerky, it's proper purpose is preservation, and you're supposed to mash it up and cook it into things.

I'm a little confused as to why a modern prepper would even want to make it for that purpose, seeing as how commercial dehydration, vacuum sealing, and other various methods of shelf stabilization are a thing now.

For him it's clearly a cost issue.

I imagine it's also a 'more money left to buy guns' issue for him specifically

I was about to mention that even cost considerations don't make sense because you can just vacuum seal your flour and use it for bread (as was previously suggested).

Then I remembered that the guy is a prepper and it's all just a big fantasy anyway.

Neeeeeerd