Food storage again

Our food storage was never as organized as I would have liked, but by taking advantage of sales and coupons I was buying extra food weekly and our supply was growing. Now the number of good sales and coupons available has decreased, and I could see the amount of food we had on hand was decreasing as well.

In deciding to do something about that, I ran into a few concerns. Some have been resolved, and some haven't yet, but I wanted to go over the thought process for where I am now because it allows for individualization, and that part could be helpful. (And because writing about things helps me understand them better.)

One complicating factor is that our eating habits change. A few years ago we were eating a lot more risotto, so stocking up on rice and broth made sense. I haven't made risotto for a while, because of the time it takes. We have been eating a lot more salad, but storage for that becomes complicated. We also have been eating a lot more pasta, however, and that stores pretty well. It is also cheap.

I wanted to get a 90-day supply underway. One advantage of 90 days is that you can rotate it fairly easily over the course of a year. With a full year supply, you would practically only be eating food storage to keep it moving. Also, I do not know where we would put a year's supply, but a three-month's supply will fit. It probably won't be our ending point, but 90 days is where we start.

My first thought was that we should have 30 boxes of pasta and 60 cans of soup and then a month's worth of something else. The soup cans would be the 18 ounce Progresso or Chunky cans, not the 10 ounce Campbell's condensed cans. They generally have two servings, so two would feed the four of us, and the pasta boxes have eight servings, so if there was one other thing we would have some variety. I just couldn't think of what, plus, that still basically only accounts for one meal a day, and not a super hearty meal at that.

I thought of a third category, but it was less organized, so I decided to change to 45 boxes of pasta and 90 cans of soup. After that, everything else is extra.

That extra consists of canned fruits and vegetables, and peanut butter, and boxed mixes, plus the third category, which will be grains. That includes rice, quinoa, barley, couscous, cornmeal, and even flour. That would be a very disorganized thing to have just one month of - the right bag of rice alone will give you a month's worth of meals - but that brings us into eating more than one meal a day, and having lots of variety.

Rotation then becomes fairly easy. When we eat any of the soup or pasta during the week, that gets replaced with the next week's shopping, along with whatever else is on sale, or we just feel like eating. Care still needs to be given to making sure the older items are used first, but that is doable. I am currently about halfway through buying the pasta, and then will start on the soup.

The feels better. It feels like it can be managed financially and is not exhausting to think about. There are two concerns left.

One is water storage. We do have some, and while we could have more, generally no one recommends more than 3-7 days worth of water storage. It is heavy, takes up a lot of space, and there is always the assumption that you can get more water by collecting dew or rainwater or something.

Worsening drought conditions and increased water pollution make me worry about that. Even water purification systems and boiling are designed for if maybe an animal died upstream, not fracking chemicals. That worries me.

One thing that helps is knowing that the canned fruits and vegetables and the soups have liquid in them, which can augment the water supply. People will tell you that frozen vegetables are more nutritious than canned, because of the way they are preserved. That's true, but freezing is one of the most expensive storage methods to maintain, and the cans give us more liquid. That is a reason to keep them as part of the plan.

The other concern came when Julie asked how we will cook it. That is a common question coming from the idea that food storage will be used under post-apocalyptic conditions where you won't have electricity. Food storage gets used during times of unemployment and strikes by delivery workers and maybe times of drought that complicate food growing enough that it raises prices. It is not always an apocalypse.

However, there can also be extended power outages, including during times of apocalypse, and so we do need to look into some alternative cooking methods. Right now, we don't even have a grill.

My hope is that as we get further along in our accumulation process I will get idea for water and for cooking that will sound better to me, and that will seem really helpful as opposed to mildly helpful. For now, I do have something to work on.