So much for being prepared. I was intending to finish this chapter this morning, but woke up with a blinding migraine, so I'll publish now just to make sure this part gets out as promised, and update it in a couple of hours. If folks send me an email address, I'll email them when I put the updates in.
A hearty welcome to both those who dropped in for Chapter 0 on April Fool's Day and those popping in on the spur of the moment. Chapter 0 (I'm in computers, we start counting at 0, sue me.) was the general teaser and index of the series to be, and, as promised, Chapter 1 is a collection of ramblings on food and food storage issues that relate to emergency preparedness.
While lack of water can kill you far faster, water is generally relatively cheap compared to food, and generally more available, except in limited circumstances which we'll address later in the series. We all eat, though, and with weather getting more and more unpredictable, it's a nice feeling to know that if a blizzard is about to hit, you don't have to frantically run to the store and fight the mobs of unprepared folks. In addition, food preparedness usually equates to money saved, which is a bonus in these tight economic times.
So what are the parts of 'Food Preparedness'?
I would suggest the following.
Menu Planning
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One major rule of thumb in food storage is 'Store what you eat. Eat what you store.' This is key to the difference between a successful food storage program and having a money pit into which you're pitching dollars like confetti.
'Store what you eat,' means just that. If you won't eat something, why do you want to store it for emergencies? Now admittedly, most of us would, if starving, eat ANYTHING to stay alive. But given that you would in that case likely be fairly miserable already, why add to the angst by eating things you wouldn't eat normally? Why not eat foods you like when you're in an emergency situation?
'Eat what you store.' is the second half of the equation. Even the best planned out food cache won't last forever. Food degrades in quality and nutrition over time, and with exposure to oxygen, light, critters. If you simply create an 'emergency' food cache and never use it, eventually you'll end up at worst simply pitching expired items, or at best donating them to charity shortly before they expire for a tax write-off. You need to continually be eating out of your food cache to make it cost effective, and restocking as you can cost-effectively do so.
So how can you do this? Menu planning and recipe experimentation. Make a list of the foods you like to eat, and eat often. Start with your favorites, and work your way down to things you like to try every so often as a change of pace. Once you have a list, take a look at the ingredients used for those sorts of meals. If you're lucky, most of the ingredients you'll need will be things that can be stored dry, like pasta or dried beans, come in cans, like tomato sauce, green beans, or sliced peaches, jars like peanut butter, jams and jellies, or can be frozen like beef and fish.
Make sure you can throw together a few menus that don't require electricity to make, or much water. This could be as simple as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or even just grillables if the weather is nice outside. (Never use charcoal inside even if you're freezing, carbon monoxide will kill you quickly, as it preferentially binds to the hemoglobin in your blood, blocking oxygen.)
Make sure you've got some balance in your menus. While humans are omnivores and can eat imbalanced diets for fairly long times, dietary imbalance causes all sorts of health problems. Back in history, sailors often had bad breath, lost teeth, and had old wounds reopen as side effects from 'scurvy', a condition caused by lack of vitamins found in fruits and vegetables that weren't available on months' long sea voyages. You'll want protein, fats, carbohydrates and fiber. Fad diets that exclude one or more are just not that great for you. The real deal is in getting a good balance and not overeating. The good news is that canned fruits and vegetables hold up very well in keeping their nutritional values over time.
Selection Criteria
So how do we know what to store? Well, first stop is that menu plan you just completed. Obviously you're going to want the ingredients to make the items on your list. Some of the other factors that will play into your decisions are availability, cost, use by dates, and such concerns as mercury levels in fish that will play into how often you can eat things like tuna from cans or frozen tilapia. You're building a cache for long term use, so you might not get all of your planned menu ingredients all at once - some might not be on sale, but you know they will given time. At the same time, you don't want to put off purchases so long that some of your ingredients expire before you get the rest.
Purchasing or Growing
Purchasing
Most of us don't own farms, so most of our food will have to be bought from other people. Even those who do will want variety, and will at some point purchase condiments and other foodstuffs they themselves don't produce. Here's where we veer off into standard Frugal Fridays territory.
You'll want to buy at the best prices you can, which typically means shopping at a bulk store if you can. Costco is a good bet around here, or possibly Gordon Food Service, which supplies restaurants but also will sell retail. Sam's Club is an option if you're not one of the 'Boycott Walmart' club, but I suspect a lot of readers will be avoiding them. If you don't have access to bulk food stores, you can still do ok at general grocery stores by using coupons, and watching sales carefully. One caveat, in either place, is watch your use-by dates. A lot of times things are on sale because they haven't been selling and expire soon. You want to try for items with at least a 2 year in future sell-by/use-by.
Start a log. You want to track when you bought each item and when its expiration date is, as well as cost at the time you bought it. Also take a marker to the outsides of cans or bags and mark the expiration date in big bold letters, so you can see at a glance when you have to have things used up. Part of not getting caught short and wasting food is knowing how quickly you need to go through it, so you want to also track the dates on which you use things up. Then when you go to buy more, you'll know the rough rate at which you go through various items.
Growing
For those with a bit more time and space, gardening can supplement or even replace a number of possible purchases. Canning and preserving have been a traditional method of preservation for ages, and are well-suited to food storage needs. I have a small raspberry patch of maybe five by eight feet and get about 4 quarts of raspberries each summer out of it. As raspberries tend to run about $6-8 per pint, I probably wouldn't be eating them if not for that patch. Although I've been told they don't freeze terribly well, and not to wash them, I give mine a light rinse in a colander, shake the water off gently, and freeze them up til I need them, and they work just fine. Recipes for jams are available online, and Ball makes a nice line of reusable glass canning jars.
UPDATE Ok, I'm back, the migraine is history, thanks to the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals. I'll take up where I left off, midgardening :)
I generally would suggest going with heritage veggies, as I'm deeply suspicious of monoculture, both in terms of having sudden wipeouts due to a particular blight, and in terms of having plants that I can only grow from purchased seed. You might start with local storebought seed for this season, but I'll put a few seed catalogue links down below that have some nice selections. Be sure and store seeds in the fridge or freezer even when not in use, so that you can use them more than one season.
I just got my lettuce and snow peas in yesterday, which brings me to the topic of composting. Just like you're working on a food store, you want to work on a 'nutrient store' if you're going to garden. Organic matter that would have gone down the garbage disposal or out to bulk up your trash can be layered in with dirt, lime, grass and leaves in a section of the back yard. Coffee grinds, banana peels, melon rinds, eggshells, and the like all wind up out back. The lime helps it decay faster, and by the time next season rolls around you'll find it crawling with big nightcrawlers (useful if you fish) and nutrient-packed and ready for working into last year's veggie beds.
A note for people with small yards: Try and get a lead-testing done on the soil in several places. If your house was built in the 70s-80s or before, chances are the original paint had lead in it, which probably flaked off some into the soil near the house, or was scraped off when it was repainted. Lead is nasty even in very low levels, and you do NOT want to eat anything planted where such paint wound up in the soil. Soil testing in general isn't a bad idea, as it can clue you in to acidity levels that might make your soil better or worse for certain crops.
Preservation and Packaging
We've already mentioned preserving and canning as two of the most common methods of preserving food. For the carnivores out there, there's also smoking, drying, salting and jerking, all methods commonly used on game. I'm happy to report that my frozen strip steaks came out very well. I was worried about freezer burn, but merely wrapping them in saran wrap and then wrapping those in aluminum foil seems to have worked better than expected.
Dehydrators are useful, and nothing beats chewing on some dehydrated fruit mix. My apple trees are looking good this year, and I'll be spraying them with a simple mix of water and dishwashing soap within the next week to help make sure I get to enjoy more of them this year and the bugs less.
Slightly more exotic are ways to keep oxygen away from your foods. Oxygen is one of the main culprits in making your food inedible, as oxidation causes chemical changes that degrade your food over time. There are two main ways to keep oxygen away. Vacuum sealing, or replacing the air around your food with something else.
The something else can be several different gases that are heavier than air. One way that commercial long term food storage preparers do so is to take a pail of food, drop in dry ice, wait for that to evaporate, filling in the bucket, toss in a couple of oxygen absorber packets which will bind chemically to oxygen around them, and hammer the lid on nice and tight. With the right packaging, and storage in a cool, dry, generally even-temperature environment, certain foods like hard wheats will still be good decades later.
Vacuum seals have now come to the home. Vacuum sealing can keep leftovers fresh, extend the life of the veggies in your fridge, your flour and sugar on the shelves, and prevent freezer burn with ease. The two most popular models that I've seen are the 'pump-n-seal', which is the cheapest at around $20 and works (and looks like) like a reverse bicycle pump, and with a bit of practice can be used to create a vacuum in everyday things like ziploc bags or canning jars, or the more expensive line of Tilia 'FoodSaver's, which can get fairly pricey, both as a tool and for the custom plastic bags/rolls they use. The Tilia sealers also then seal off the bag you've just vacuumed the air out of by melting the plastic shut. A middle line Tilia runs from $130-$160 when not on sale.
The downside of vacuum sealing? The possibility for botulism. Botulism is anaerobic, meaning it actually needs a lack of oxygen to grow. Be sure and put anything you'd normally put in a fridge or freezer in the fridge or freezer, even if you've vacuum sealed it. Just because it's encased in plastic doesn't mean it's safe to let thaw out. Always thaw frozen foods in the fridge.
Storage
Ok, so you've got your food. You've got jars, cans, boxes, bags. I've mentioned cool, dark, even-temperatured places several times already. Light is your enemy, heat is your enemy, temperature variations are your enemy. Unless you've got a climate controlled garage or live somewhere it's always cold, don't even bother trying that. A free standing garage can go from negative temperatures in the winter to over 100F in the summer. Ideally you want a cellar or cold store, although if you're just stashing canned goods and dried things like pastas, you're probably ok with a closet in your house.
The lower the temperature your foods are stored, the longer they'll last. The difference from a 70F house to a 55F cold store might be a dozen years longer edibility for some of your dried foods. I live dangerously, I frequently eat canned goods past the use-by date. I don't suggest that to anyone, but for myself, if I don't note serious discoloration, expansion in the can or noxious smells when I open a can that might be even a year past the expiration date, I tend to eat it.
Use!
How can you NOT do that? Rotation. Now's where that log you made earlier comes into play. Set your goods up so the oldest are easiest to get to, and newest hardest to reach. There are even pre-made steel rails that mimic the can dispensers you see in grocery stores nowadays, so you can stack cans and dispense them at bottom while filling the rails from the top. These can be bolted onto walls in closets or storage areas, even flush inside walls in between the studs if space is tight.
Keep track what and when you pull something out of inventory, so you can use it to figure out the rate at which you go through certain things, and know if you're going to need to eat something more often so as not to wind up with expired food.
Still running out of time and have too much food? Time for a get-together :) Get your friends or relatives over, and use up large quantities of canned tomato paste, dried lasagna, green beans and the like. In fact, a nice way to add variety is to schedule regular get-togethers, just like many churches do. Make it a good old pot-luck, and have people bring along the recipes. Find something you like, and you can add it to your meal rotation. If you live alone, shared meals might be just about the only way to use up the sizes of goods most things come packaged in anyway.
Suggest that your friends also start food stores, and give them help and hints. Let them come up with their own menus, though, so that when you have exchanges, you don't always wind up with the same foods.
Use is a never-ending feedback loop, as your tastes change over time and you decide you don't like to have some foods as often. Modify your food stores as you learn new storage techniques, or recipes.
What's come before
AlphaGeek's 5 part disaster preparedness diaries
monkeybiz' survival rant diary
Surviving Food Crisis I
Survival Sundays Ch 0 - Be Prepared