Using Sales to Increase Food Storage

An article in September's Ensign points out a simple method for increasing our amount of food storage cheaply. Grocery stores will often have very large sales on some items of food (sometimes they are sold for less than they cost the store), in an attempt to attract more shoppers, who will hopefully buy many of the more expensive items too. When these items are non-perishable, they can be bought in large quantities, with most set aside for food storage. Over time, it should be easy to get quite a variety of food this way.

The article also addresses storing food in a small apartment - something very important to us, since our current apartment is quite a bit smaller than our previous one. Our primary problem now is that our kids enjoy climbing on the food storage...

Two Cans of Corn

Dry Pack Canning

Here's a great introduction to the Church canning centers:

The Mission: Put Up in Bulk

Much of our long-term food storage is from a dry-pack cannery, and we were surprised by how inexpensive it was. I definitely prefer doing dry-pack canning, rather than wet-pack (ie, canned goods such as jams, green beans etc.). Different canneries handle different items, but it is quite affordable, and comes very well-labeled to be part of food storage.

Of course, because of the size of our apartment, our food storage is mostly behind our couch...

Confusing Expiration Dates

Lifehacker has posted a short note listing some resources for figuring out if your food is still good. Knowing when to throw food out is definitely important for food storage, and just for shopping in general, so I thought I'd post a link here:

Read and Understand Your Food Expiration Labels

I was glad to find out that that yogurt that we ate a little while after the date was probably OK.

Food Storage

Feelings become strained, quarrels more frequent and nerves frayed when excess debt knocks on the door. Resources channeled to make payment on debts do not put one crumb on the table, provide one degree of warmth in the house, or bring one thread into a garment. Many more people could ride out the storm-tossed waves in their economic lives if they had their year's supply of food and clothing and were debt-free. Today we find that many have followed this counsel in reverse: they have at least a year's supply of debt and are food-free.
President Thomas S. Monson, “That Noble Gift—
Love at Home,” Church News, May 12, 2001, 7.

ProvidentLiving.org has put up a recent article from the Ensign about rethinking some of our ideas about food storage.

Family Home Storage: A New Message

This is something that Julianne and I have to strategize about. We live in an apartment, and it's not exactly a large one (the San Francisco Bay area is not known for affordable housing). Because of this, we have had some difficulty storing extra food. Julianne has developed a number of tricks in the three different apartments we have lived in over the years.

Many apartments have extra space above the kitchen cabinets. In apartments where this is the case, Julianne stacks canned goods as far back as she can. Since she used to work in a grocery store, she has to constantly remind me to keep them sorted with all of the labels facing forward, for the best aesthetic effect. Any LDS member who sees it is immediately impressed at the innovative decorating scheme (non-LDS friends may just wonder why you have so much food).

We also have large buckets right in the kitchen filled with flour, beans and rice. We use them as chairs whenever we have too many guests for our four chairs.

In our current apartment, where we have very little extra space, we actually push our couch about a foot and half out from the wall so that we can store food behind it!

For water storage, we reuse various beverage containers (and periodically buy large bottles of water from a local warehouse store). We then put as many of them as we can fit into the fridge - since fridges are more efficient when full.

We certainly don't have a year's supply of food yet, but we have quite a bit - and are looking for innovative ways to store more.

The article at Provident Living also has some great new information about how long various foods can last. Based on recent research, many foods can last for a very long time without taste or nutritional degradation.

Based on personal experience, however, I can say they really don't last forever. For example, the 15-year-old canned turkey we inherited from my mother-in-law's food storage may have been nutritionally acceptable, but we never could find a way to make it taste good. And then there was my grandmother's apple juice. Perhaps not sealed as carefully as it should have been, and left a little too long in the basement, Grandma's home-made juice led to one particularly exciting family gathering. Parents poured their kids a glass, poured themselves some, and then catching a whiff of the juice, ran around the table grabbing it back from the kids.  You don't want to serve hard cider. I believe there is something in the Word of Wisdom about that... 

Read the article from Provident Living for more advice about how to store foods, and to learn which foods can last a very long time when stored properly. 

Example of Self-Reliance

“If we are not taking care of ourselves physically, we are not in a position to help others,” he said. “For emotional and spiritual strength, we need to exercise faith and obey the commandments, pray daily and study the Scriptures and serve others.

“If we don’t have faith and are not serving others and drawing on the power of God, we are not being successful parents and disciples in serving other people.” Bruce Priday, Lenexa Stake President, in an interview with the Kansas City Star.

The Kansas City Star has posted an article about an LDS family that has worked hard to be self-reliant. I was impressed by how much of their house was designed around food storage. Definitely worth a read.