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Stocking Up 101

Written by Kate Petersen on June 28, 2008 – 7:00 am -

With all the (ahem) cheerful news this spring about prices going up and stocks of available food going down, more and more people are paying attention to stocking up for lean times. I see this as a wise move. It could even be considered an investment: If you pay $2.00 for a loaf of bread today to put into your freezer, and a month from now when you take it out that same loaf costs $2.50, you’ve essentially saved 50 cents. Think how much more valuable that loaf of bread would be if a month or a year from now there was no bread to be had in the local stores. At all.

So what should you store? How much is “enough?”

Many of the food storage advice sites online seem to be based on the system encouraged by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Under this system, each family is supposed to store enough food for a year (but oddly, only water enough for two weeks). The storage calculators are heavily weighted toward whole wheat berries, cooking oils, honey, powdered milk, and beans and legumes. For my family of three adults, these calculators say to store 900 pounds of wheat berries and other grains, 225 pounds of dried and evaporated milk, 180 pounds of beans and legumes, 180 pounds of sugar, 75 pounds of various oils and fats, plus a few assorted items like yeast, baking soda, and vinegar.

No protein other than beans. No vegetables. No fruit. Lots and lots of wheat. Sounds like a fairly dull diet to me. And what about those who are allergic to wheat or lactose intolerant?

At the other extreme are the survivalist providers who stock complete freeze-dried meals, nitrogen-sealed cans of food, and MREs in many flavors and varieties. Up until a month or two ago, they’d happily sell you a year’s supply of storable food that turned out to be about the size of a small Subaru and cost just about as much. Lately, though, there seems to have been a panic run on these companies. Some have been so overwhelmed that they’ve temporarily stopped accepting orders altogether, while others are either out of stock on many items or so busy that their websites are constantly overloaded.

So what to do?

It takes some time and effort, but here is what I’m doing a little at a time.

1. Over a period of one month, make notes on what your family actually eats. I have a daybook that goes with me everywhere. Nothing fancy, just a blank journal-type book with lined pages. On Sunday I make up a general menu plan for the week and write that on the left hand page. (Although this doesn’t really pertain to the subject at hand, on the right hand page I make a list of unusual things that are scheduled for the week — meeting with client at 11:00 am Tuesday, husband has doctor’s appointment at 3:00 on Friday, that sort of thing.)

I use a separate double page for each day of the week. Again, the day’s schedule and to-do outline go on the right hand page, while I list actual meals for the day (after they are completed and eaten) on the left. I add in the small things, too — for example, Mr. P. had a banana when he got home before dinner. At the end of the week, I can then go through and add up all the ingredients that went into feeding the family during the previous seven days.

If you have dogs, cats, or other living things dependent on you, don’t forget to count how much you are feeding them, too. Do this for a month.

2. Figure out how much storage you would need if you had this month’s worth of food at one time. How much pantry space do you have? Is there a closet you could convert if you had to? Freezer and fridge space will most probably be at a premium, so could you store some of this food without it? (We’ll talk about ways to do that in a later diary.)

3. Now figure out how much you would be comfortable storing. One month’s worth? Two? More?

Grocery stores currently keep no more than three days’ stock on hand, depending on frequent deliveries to replenish the shelves. It doesn’t take a crop failure or a local blizzard or hurricane to result in empty stores. What if there is a truckers’ strike or a natural disaster elsewhere in the country that disrupts supply lines? We’ve seen the beginning of that with flooded railroad lines and washed-out bridges in the upper midwest that created major delays in shipping goods cross-country. Let’s not even begin to address (yet) the disruptions that will occur as the price of gasoline and diesel fuel continues to rise.

There are also personal disasters that make it difficult or impossible to make normal runs to the grocery store. Earlier this spring, for example, I got hit with a completely unexpected and unplanned-for $1500 plumbing bill followed immediately by a $450 water/sewer bill in the same month. This was the same month, by the way, that my husband was hit by a car and seriously injured. We didn’t lose our jobs and the weather was fine and the store shelves were still as full as ever, but there was a month that we’d have been in seriously bad shape if I hadn’t been able to “shop” from my pantry.

4. Make a list of what you need and slowly begin to build up your stores. Starting about a year ago, I gave myself $20 of the grocery budget each week to buy stuff just for storage. Some weeks I could set aside more, but at a minimum I allocated that much. I’d buy canned goods, an extra roast for the freezer when it was on sale, some rice or pasta or dried beans and lentils. Be sure to date everything when you put it on the shelf and rotate your stock. My husband noted just this evening that there were some pretty old cans of corned beef hash in the pantry that needed using, so I’ll pull those for dinner tomorrow and make a note to replace them. Now that summer’s here, that $20 a week is probably going to go to the farmer’s market to buy fresh beans and squash and tomatoes that I’ll can or dehydrate or freeze. (We’ll talk more about those storage methods in later diaries as well.)

Don’t forget to add extra laundry detergent, bathroom tissue, toothpaste, shampoo and deodorant and so forth as part of your stores.

5. Have a plan to keep creepy-crawlies out of your food while it’s in storage. White flour, cornmeal, and rice should go into the freezer for a minimum of three days to kill anything that may have hitchhiked home with it, after which I pull it out and seal in individual ziploc bags, in reasonable portion sizes of 2 to 5 pounds. The dated bags then go into a Rubbermaid storage box, the under-the-bed kind they sell for storing sweaters and blankets. The box isn’t safe for direct food contact, but since I’m using food storage bags inside it I don’t worry too much about leaching or offgassing. I then store the boxes off the floor (and not touching the walls) on shelves in the downstairs pantry — one more little obstacle to mousy-type critters’ free lunches.

NOTE: This storage system is not adequate for really long-term storage of flour, rice, and grains. To keep these items more than about 6 to 12 months, you’ll need a way to exclude oxygen and moisture. More on that later, if there is sufficient interest.

DO NOT STORE FOOD IN CONTACT WITH PLASTIC GARBAGE BAGS. Garbage bags are treated with pesticides; some are treated with deodorants. Neither is good for your food or for you.

If you are building a long-term supply, be sure to store white flour instead of whole wheat and white rice instead of brown. Whole wheat flour and brown rice, which retain more of the oils of the whole grain, will keep only for about three months at room temperature. Refined grains and flours last considerably longer — six to 12 months when sealed and kept in a cool, dry place away from sunlight.

6. Rotate your stored food and be sure to use it before it goes bad. I shook my head a month or so ago at all those panicked people buying 25 and 50 pound bags of whole-wheat flour and rice just because Costco and Sam’s told them they could only have one at a time. I knew they were going to take the big bags home and set them somewhere in a corner, just as is. And if the mice or bugs don’t get them, the grains and flour will go rancid and in a year or so there will be many, many 25 and 50 pound bags of spoiled foodstuff headed for the landfill.

I’ll have more information and specifics to add in later diaries, but here is the beginnings of a food storage plan that doesn’t require buying hundreds of five-gallon buckets and won’t have you eating wheatberry mush with honey and evaporated milk for the next year or two if — or when — something does happen to disrupt the economy and the food supply.

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