In 1976 two young lads drove into East Helena MT with an old farm truck with Idaho plates,I was a LEO and on duty so they asked me where they could set up to sell their load, all beans! all kinds of beans, now I love a pot of Ham and pintos and being married to an LDS gal I took an interest, and showed them a good spot, then I gave them my order and paid for it saying I'd be back when I got off duty, when I got there they only had my stuff left!!! man them farm boys done good!!
I took my 300 pounds of beans home and we poured them into 5 gal. buckets lined with plastic white garbage bags, before we closed the bags I tossed in a bunch of plain old crackers, then twisted the bag shut and tied it off then put more crackers in on top of the bag.
Now ya gotta know I was winging it...well time past ,we used beans with no sign of problems, we split up and laughingly divided the buckets remaining, in 02 I used the last of the pintos, leaving one bucket of great northern whites, which I never really cared for, I gave them to some friends, when she opened the bucket for the first time in 25 years she said the outer crackers were stale..hahahah...the inner ones were still pretty crisp and not too bad!
I was truly amazed with that, I will say the last of the pintos seemed to take a bit longer to cook but tasted fine..
God does watch over fools eh?.. he's had a full time job with me!