Now that we know the basics of what is out there that we can store, lets look at actually acquiring and storing them!
Acquiring
For someone without the means, it seems like a daunting task to acquire even a month's worth of food. Trust me...once you start down the road, it becomes easier than you think.
With an extra $10 a week, and a mind for bargain shopping and sales, you could put up quite a bit of food over time. Many of you probably haven't even been to a grocery store. As I mentioned before, I got a 10 lb. bag of flour for $3.49. That will make between 5 and 10 loaves of bread, depending on the size of the loaf. Take advantage of sales, shop around, and do not be afraid to purchase generic if you have to. Many of today's store brands are not as horrible as they use to be.
There are plenty of bad habits out there that can be scaled back or stopped all together. Eating at home, making your own coffee, bringing lunch to work, having only one beer after work, cut your smoking in half, purchase a 2-liter of coke from the grocery store rather than a cup from the convenience store ...a penny saved is a penny earned. Thank you Ben Franklin.
Stan Deyo of the Millennium Ark has an excellent Excel program available through the Millennium Ark website for free that will aide you in figuring out what you need, how much you need for how long, and making an inventory once you have it. It might even point you in the direction of items you didn't think about.
As time goes on, you will be able to pick stuff up on sale, and purchase as much as you need. In fact, just today (Sunday August 30th is when I’m writing this), I picked up a whole bunch of brand-name cereal for less than the price of the store-brand knock-offs. Since only the two youngest actually eat cereal (and the youngest of the two barely eating anything), what I purchased will probably last a couple of months.
Storing You will see and hear a lot of information about how to store your own food. One example is plastic buckets with tight-fitting lids and either a cube of nitrogen or a packet of oxygen absorbers.
But we have a problem here...we aren't storing our food for an extremely long time. We are simply building a basic store of food that will last us maybe two weeks (if we go by the DHS report), three months (a suggestion I often hear), or one year (if we go so far as what the Latter Day Saints ask), and we will be eating from that store of food day by day.
Look at the picture above. I obtained it from “Prepare Today Newsletter. It is a picture of Donna and Aaron Bradshaw’s food pantry. Do you notice anything that seems wrong? Or, well, it would seem wrong if you have read all of the ways you are suppose to store your food. The boxes on the top shelf are out in the open! They aren’t specially wrapped! They aren’t stuffed in specialized buckets with nitrogen or oxygen absorber packets! They aren’t shrink wrapped! Why not????
Because the Bradshaws expect to consume it within the year, replacing it as they go along (preferably with items purchased on sale). Unlike the hardcore survivalists out there, they don’t expect to be keeping that food around for the next 50 years. They are actually going to eat it! Of course, if you plan on storing more than a year’s worth, it might bode well for you to follow those more stringent guidelines. However, I have found very little wrong with simply putting something on the shelf. In fact, I have encountered only three minor problems.
The first is moisture. Our larger pantry (location, not telling you) is seasonally damp. With a simple chemical humidity absorber, just about everything is fine...except the salt and sugar. The sugar turned into a rock (easily handled with a butter knife and a food mill), and the salt...well, it REALLY attracted the dampness. I had found that I have to put these into an air-tight ice chest (aka a cooler) with a few moisture absorbing packets, and they work just fine.
The second problem is meal moths. Most often, the meal moths will be imported from the store itself. Yes, that is how we got them. We use a combination of methods...we use moth traps to catch the suckers, and we diligently check any of our dry food (yes, this includes even raisins) for signs of being infected and get rid of anything infected. These signs include tiny holes in the packaging (they can chew through plastic to lay their eggs), webbing, and the weevils themselves. But before we do any of this, we stick stuff in the freezer, minimally for 48 hours. This will kill off most, if not all, of any little beasties that might be hitching a ride to your kitchen. Meal moth traps contain no poisons. There is a little strip of paper imbeded with a female moth hormone. You open the little plastic package, take the hormone strip out, and stick it inside the glue trap. Males, smelling female perfume, go inside looking for a girlfriend...and get stuck in the glue.
The third problem is mice. No matter how spotlessly clean our house, with the carpets vacuumed daily and shampooed several times a year, we still have an invasion nearly every fall (I’m sure most are coming from the condemned rental property next door). But in our house, the invasion doesn’t last long. Between Ms. Kitty patrolling every inch of the house, and Mr. Old Fashioned Mouse Trap smeared with peanut butter and hidden in places where kitty can’t go (like the garage), the invaders don’t last longer than a few days. However, they did manage once to find their way to our pantry...once! It looks like they had just chewed a hole into a case of Ramen noodles before Ms. Kitty found them. And because Ms. Kitty is so capable, she is given the softer giblets of any bird we cook as her bonus.
You can avoid mice getting into your food by making it more difficult for the mice to get to it. You could go crazy and use the long-term storage methods...or you could use simple precautions. One true homesteader I follow, Jackie Clay of Backwoods Home Magazine, keeps a lot of things inside popcorn tins. We have a couple of these, plus we use totes with tight-fitting lids and plastic containers made for holding things such as flour, sugar, and cereal. The bottom shelf should probably be left for things like cooking oil, or plastic sandwich bags.
You can keep things, such as flour and rice, or even muffin mixes, in a refrigerator or freezer. Just make sure they are not placed where other things can not drip on them.
Now...if you keep a longer supply than three or six months, then you might think about repackaging them.
Canned goods do not need to be stored in any way special, unless your environment is very damp...then you might want to protect the metal from moisture by using moisture absorbers or by dipping the cans in melted wax. I think it may have been Cordi Howell, host of “Cordite Country”, that suggested this tip, but don’t quote me.
Well, its getting kinda late as I’m writing this, and my mind is already shutting down and getting ready for bed. Until next time, I’ll see you later.
People mentioned in this blog are:
Cordi Howell, Cordite Country http://corditecountry.com/Stan Deyo of the Millennium Ark http://www.standeyo.com/index1.htmlJackie Clay, Backwoods Home Magazine http://www.backwoodshome.com/ (scroll down the page...she has a blog that also works as an advice column, and has a lot of canning recipes!).Prepare Today Newsletter http://preparetodaynewsletter.blogspot.com/
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