The Food Storage Blog

$10 off on Swiss Army Knives and Multitools.

As we had a number of water-related posts during the flooding in Nashville, this week we will be doing a full run of food-storage related posts.  As we’ve stated on this blog before, all supply storage is simply a bridge to help us to get from the beginning of an emergency to the end.  It doesn’t replace developing a mindset (fortitude) that allows us to be a rock for our family when they need us most, nor the skills that might be able to provide for us long term (gardening, cooking, splitting firewood, fishing, hunting, etc).

Let’s talk food storage

Whether you have relatively little room in your home to store extra food and toiletries or enough space to put away several years worth of vittles and toothpaste, there are a number of reasons to store food.  In today’s economic climate, the potential for losing one’s job would be at the top of my list of reasons to start a program.  Imagine knowing that if you lost your job, you wouldn’t have to buy, or would only have to buy a limited amount of, food for a month, 6 months or a year.  A good food storage program provides peace of mind.

However, it’s not going to happen by magic, and there are quite a few potential pitfalls.  My families ‘road to food storage’ included more than a few mistakes that I will share in the hope that yours will be more fruitful, and quicker than ours was.  Before I move on to the Advice and Beans Food Storage Plan in Wednesday’s post, I’ll list some of the things we did wrong.

My biggest Oopses

Error 1)  I first stored one thing, rice, in large quantities.  Don’t!  While I was at least doing something, I hadn’t really developed a plan.  Rice requires a lot of water to cook, and in an emergency situation, water might be hard to come by.  By extension, boiling water requires a lot of energy…and fuel might be just as challenging to come by if the power is out, as I don’t have a generator or wood stove.  Finally, while I like rice, I don’t like just rice…appetite fatigue would strike on a diet of just one item within a matter of a week or two.  Plus, while rice would provide the calories my family needs to survive, it wouldn’t contain many of the essential vitamins and minerals as well.

Error 2)  I can be a bit thick-headed at times, so I doubled up on the rice-buying error by then buying 100 pounds of white wheat (But it was a steal at around $10 for high-quality wheat!).  When I bought it, I had no idea what to actually do with it.  I didn’t have a way to grind it into flour to make bread or cookies with it.  I didn’t know how I was going to store it.  Heck, I didn’t even know if I liked it.  Since then I have come to appreciate our supplies of wheat. However when first starting out, do not buy things you are not sure you will, or can, use!

3rd error)  Not eating from our food storage.  I eventually thought I had things squared away…I stored more water for our rice.  I had a fuel plan.  I had stored a larger variety of food…red wheat, white wheat, oats, flour, beans, sugar, salt.  Notice a pattern yet?  I didn’t have anything to actually eat without effort.  Everything would need to be prepared, but because I didn’t eat from my food storage I didn’t realize it.  One of the main components of any good food storage plan is:  Make sure you have something you can eat right now!

So now you know our dirty little secrets, and they were some big ones!  No one just wakes up one day knowing how to store food in the perfect manner for their family.  However, what is one of the tenets here at Advice and Beans?  Persistence.  I had a goal, and I was going to move toward that goal until I got there.

Through a number of resources, such as an LDS friend at work who also stores food, as well as reading some James Wesley, Rawles, I eventually came to the obvious solution, and one that I had read about a long time prior, but had not internalized:  Store what you eat, eat what you store.

Yes, I had a ‘well, duh’ moment. 

At that point, for the first time, I actually developed a plan.  So don’t do what I did and follow this advice:  Plan first, buy later.  Know what you are trying to accomplish, and only purchase items that meet those objectives.  If your house’s power goes out every time a gentle breeze blows, buy more food that you can eat without cooking it.  If water is going to be a potential challenge, pasta and rice should not make up a huge portion of your food storage.  No one’s food storage plan is going to be exactly the same as everyone else’s.  Your plan needs to be adaptable, flexible, and maintainable.

Wednesday I will lay out a simple, comprehensive framework for a food storage program that you can then adapt to your needs, whether you decide to keep a 2-week or 2-year supply on hand.

Sale on camping equipment.

Once a week, I will do a ‘What Can I Do Today’, where we try to build up our preparedness supplies in increments.  For example, today we will discuss buying a backpack to use as a Car Bag, to hold essentials that would be able to tide you over for 72-hours.  Next week at this time, we will discuss one of the component areas that should go into your bag, such as food, water, medical or shelter.  Over the course of a month or 5 weeks we will build out your bag in increments so it is not too much expense all at once, and we can take a good look at individual components of a Car Bag, instead of just throwing a huge list at you.  By the end of this process, you will have a fully stocked 72-hour kit!

You may have heard the term BOB or Bug-out Bag, or 72-hour kit, either on this site or many other preparedness sites.  I personally call it a Car Bag, because that’s where it lives and because it makes me sound less like some crazy fringe survivalist-type than having a Zombies are Coming Bug-Out-Bag!  I would call it one of the cornerstone’s of preparedness, partially due to its simplicity, but mostly due to the level of peace it provides.  Having one is recommended by Ready.gov as well as other governmental and private organizations.

As putting one together would take more than the time allotted for a ‘WCIDT?’, today we’re just going to do Phase 1:  Picking out a bag.

What Type of Bag Should I Get?

This is the big question, and it really depends on what you are comfortable with.  If you drive only a few miles to and from work today, and you never leave your town, odds are you could get away with a school-style backpack carrying just the essentials.  If you regularly drive cross-country, live in a very rural area, or live in an area prone to disasters, I’d recommend a larger hiking-style backpack, as well as maybe a small tote to hold some additional supplies.

Let me state that any gathering of supplies will be helpful in an emergency situation, so if you choose to have just a fannypack hidden under the seats of your vehicle with a small first aid kit, 16oz bottle of water, flashlight, and lighter, you are well ahead of half the population.  However, I am going to advocate that you, and every teen or older member of your family, have a full-size hiking/camping pack in the back of your vehicle.  To not feel left out, (and to teach them young!) I’d suggest that even the youngest member of your family should have their own pack according to their ability to carry it.

Why?

The reason I recommend a larger bag is simple:  it holds more stuff.  If a tornado or fire destroyed your home, a full 72-hour kit would at least let you set up in a hotel or friend’s house with a fresh change of clothing and needed toiletries while you try to figure out how to get your life back in order.  How about the peace of mind it would provide you to know your teen who is headed to college 300 miles away doesn’t have to worry about the basics if their car breaks down? 

I’ve also seen more than my fair share of stories in the northeast and northern plains states having snow and ice storms that literally trap people in their cars for 48 hours or more.  Having an extra sweatshirt and thermal emergency blankets on hand may actually save lives.

So all that said, what should you think about when buying a backpack?  First, get one with a frame, either internal or external.  An internal frame is probably better if you don’t plan on carrying it regularly.  It allows the weight to be carried close in to the body, which is helpful with your center of gravity and balance.  Both my hiking and 72-hour kit backpack are internal frame packs.

If you are an outdoor enthusiast who regularly backpacks, you could go with an external frame.  These are good if you really have a lot of weight in the pack, as the external frame helps distribute it.  Plus, the frame is useful for attaching a wide variety of items.

Next, make sure it has a hip belt, preferably with padding.  If you have to hike with it to the next exit because you broke down in the middle of nowhere, it should definitely be as comfortable as possible!  If you can find one with a chest strap, that is another good feature, though for the ladies make sure it is not uncomfortable.

Finally, make sure it can carry what you need it to carry!  Mine is about 4000cc and still has some more space left that I plan on filling up at some point.  Anything over 3500cc should make for a pretty solid 72-hour kit.

Some decent packs that won’t break the bank: 

This Teton Sport is around $70 and 3400cc.

A huge 6200cc pack for $53 delivered.

For a full list of packs, check here. Also, make sure you check the reviews for any important information.

(Please note this caveat; these are bags I would suggest for a 72-Hour Kit, as something that wouldn’t be carried around hiking day-in and day-out. There’s a whole extra set of criteria for picking a good hiking/camping pack that you will be using regularly. While my hiking pack and Car Bag are of similar size, my car bag cost 1/3 of my hiking pack, and I expect less of it, as its main job is to just sit in the back of the Jeep ready to help at a moment’s notice!)

While most of my family and friends are supportive of my preparedness lifestyle (and all the supplies and mindset that goes with it), I still get some quizzical looks now and again, and I fairly often hear the question, ‘why are you doing this again’?

My new standard answer is that being prepared is simply another form of insurance. It is insurance that protects my family and I from crises ranging from losing our jobs to a massive interruption of the electrical grid to many emergencies in between.

If you live in the mid-south, you know what it is like when the forecast calls for as little as a half-inch of snow (or in the north-east when a hurricane is approaching). Every store is emptied of milk and bread in a 50-mile radius. Having sufficient supplies on hand at all times means never being that person who has to rush anywhere because we’ve taken care of our needs long before the snowstorm or other weather event was even on the horizon. This allows us to actually plan what we would do if there really is a problem, instead of following the herd to the local Kroger.

For example, we make plans for what will happen if we can’t get to our place of work, such as having the phone numbers of our supervisors readily available. We know what we will do if our sidewalks become icy, or if the power goes out due to ice on the lines. We make sure we have sufficient food and water if we’re stranded, even for a length period of time, and the ability to cook with it.

Yes, all this really is important.

Put another way, I buy car insurance to protect my vehicle, home insurance to protect my house, and health insurance to protect myself. But even in those cases, insurance is like the police…they show up after the problem has already occurred. I want the skills and supplies to actually help me in my times of need until I actually get to the point I can call Farm Bureau or Geico to come cut me a check.

I call this ’emergency insurance’, and I assign resources to it (time and cash), just like I do for any of my other insurances. Take car insurance; I pay about $500, or 5% of the value of my vehicle annually in comprehensive insurance. That indicates that the insurance company thinks I have less than a 5% chance of being in an accident or filing a claim, which seems about right.

My homeowner’s policy costs me .2% of my home value annually (coincidentally, that also comes to $500 a year). The insurance company must think that I have less than a 1 in 500 chance of having my house burn down. Again, that’s probably right.

Somewhere between those two numbers I estimate is the chance to have a major emergency; perhaps 1-3% per year. Of course, there are lots of ‘minor’ emergencies that being prepared for assists in as well, such as the broken tooth that happened yesterday, car breakdowns, job losses or downgrades, electrical outages and the like.

Looking at it like insurance, spending between $500-$1000 a year on preparedness doesn’t seem so out of line, does it?  And the difference between ’emergency insurance’ and regular insurance is that even if nothing happens, I still have something to show for it.  I’ll likely have my emergency radio for 10 years (and I actually use that in my home business area to listen to music; it sounds good enough for me!) and our food storage we actually eat out of, so I more consider that ‘pre-buying’ food as opposed to a preparedness cost.  My water storage containers are solidly built and will likely provide the same usefulness 20 years from now.

If you’re still on the fence about this stuff, being prepared isn’t different than any of the other multitude of ways we provde for our families.