Hoarding. I've been hoarding. Like my tiny grandmother who would stuff sporks and condiments into her purse by the fistful whenever she went to fast food restaurants.
Lately if I hear bad news something inside me snaps and I think: "Oh god! I have to buy 100 pounds of all purpose baking flour RIGHT NOW!"
I went to this thing a couple weeks ago in Muskegon and listened to some lady from TheAutomaticEarth talk for two hours about how we're all screwed, economically, and the best case scenario is being uber-nice to our neighbors so that maybe they won't shoot us in the head in exchange for our food or the gold we horded for the coming Peak Oil Mad Max scenario...
...and do you know what I did immediately after that presentation? Do you know what I did?
I went to the grocery store. I made a bee line for the grocery store and went directly to the dried bean aisle and started calculating cost per pound of various legumes in my brain as I stood there shell shocked.
Eventually I came to my senses and bought beer instead.
I thought "what am I doing? I'm standing here in the grocery aisle seriously budgeting how I'm going to stockpile beans!"
I bought no beans or solid grains that day. Not solid, anyway.
And yet...
And yet...
For some reason I found myself a few weeks later back at the bulk food store eying up various 5 pound buckets with air tight re-sealable lids for the storage of grains after visiting a Mormon website with a spread sheet calculator for stockpiling food for a year for a family of four.
Do you know how much wheat it takes to feed a family of four for a year?
It's simply insane.
Hold on. Let me pull up my spreadsheet to give you an exact number...do not mock me!
I'm watching you.
Okay...896 pounds of grains/pastas for a YEAR for a family of four.
And, seriously....corn meal? The damn calculator recommends 75 pounds of corn meal. Does anybody actually eat this stuff? I probably have eaten maybe 2 pounds of corn meal in the past year, mostly by breathing while passing through the vegetable aisle.
And the vegetables I've been canning..lamentably few calories. All that work.
Seriously. A drop in the bucket of the annual caloric intake. 300+ cans of vegetables and counting and it's just a drop in the damn bucket. Not that veggies aren't important.
Cans of peas and corn were on uber sale at the local grocery store, Meijer, and I bought 98 cans of them.
I'm telling you, this is becoming an obsession and I never dealt with food insecurity, growing up. There was always lots of that watery "refrigerator soup" my mother used to make (I love you mom). Vast cauldrons of it sitting around. And saltines. Always plenty of food.
But today I had a couple extra bucks in my pocket and went to Goodwill to see if they had some tupperware type things to keep the meal worms at bay as I stock up on massive quantities of pasta whenever it's on sale.
Anyway, the moral of the story is...
...the moral of the story...
The moral...
I'm sure there's a moral somewhere.
It's just freakin' weird is all.
Tomorrow I'm going to the farmer's market again, and I'm going to buy seconds of whatever there is by the half bushel, I just know it. I'm kind of hoping that one place still has the half bushels of carrots. Doubtful this time of year, but maybe. Maybe. They had half bushels of broccoli a couple weeks ago and I bought one for five bucks...it's in my freezer now. Taking up half the space in there along with my half bushel of frozen bell pepper strips.
Apples.
I have 48 jars of applesauce I've canned in the past month from apple seconds and they cost about 44 cents per pint all tallied...not bad for apple sauce.
Shut up.
Don't look at me in that tone of voice.
I now have 45 quarts of tomatoes. 12 pints of tomato sauce.
Ain't enough, man. Must has more, but the farmer's market is almost certainly tomato free now. Maybe there are some stragglers. But apples are in season and overflowing. And the squash are cheap this time of year.
I gotta cut this out.