The Preparedness and Survival Site

Part 1 of a series of articles contributed by forum member Cutter.

In this section, we will talk about food.  All those LTS foods are great and handy but people have been surviving problems large and small for millennia without them.  Something else to consider is that it can be a real shock to the system to abruptly change your diet.  The last thing you need is for your body to rebel against dinner in the middle of a crisis.

What is the work around?  The stuff you eat every day.  Canned goods are heavy but they keep well with minimal care and are much less expensive.  Make out your grocery list and then double the quantities.  The catch is that you must make sure that you buy your list first.  After your grocery list is filled, start over in the store and start buying the double portion.  Stop when you get close to or hit your money limit.  Anything you can’t buy that trip, be sure to carry over to your next shopping list.  You will run out of room before you run out of groceries to put away in an amazingly short period of time.  Watch the sales.  If something you normally pay $.69 a can for is on sale at 3 for $1, you end up getting an extra unit and still saving $.38.  This kind of buying puts you ahead of your progress curve in a hurry while at the same time stretching your prep budget.

Plant a garden even if it is only a couple of buckets of dirt on the patio with a couple of tomato plants.  When they start putting food on your table, take the money you would have spent to buy that produce and purchase other, storable foods.  Speaking from experience, your garden will grow in size from year to year.  You just won’t be able to resist planting “just one more thing.”

With the gardening, another opportunity presents itself.  If you plant enough, it should produce more than you can eat.  Process and store it.  Freezing is good.  Canning and dehydrating is better.  I am expanding into the canning and dehydrating this year myself.  If you freeze foods, try freezing them in water.  It keeps freezer burn from developing.  Nothing is more irritating than to find out the 2 bushels of green beans you froze in perfect quart bags are so freezer burned that they are almost inedible.  Now imagine it is 20 pounds of beef.  Freezing in water works great for fish.  I have eaten fish that was frozen up to seven years earlier.  It tasted almost as good as if it were caught that morning.

You could also get bitten by the flea market bug and sell your excess at a farmer’s market or flea market.  Shoot, set up a table in your yard on Saturday and have a garden yard sale.  You could also trade with neighbors that grow things you don’t.  That arrangement works out well for everybody if you can pull it together.  I grow corn.  I am the only one in the neighborhood that grows it.  For some reason, I seem to be the only one that can get it to produce.  None of us can figure out why.  Everybody around here likes corn, so I grow a lot of it.  For my trouble, I don’t have to grow the cucumbers and squash I like but still get them.

Try hunting and fishing.  If you don’t like it, stop doing it.  On the other hand, if you do like it, you can add a goodly amount of meat and fish to your diet and stores at a bargain price.  The real bonus is two-fold.  You have a new hobby or hobbies you enjoy and the meat and fish you harvest are generally lean and free of all the chemicals that store bought meats have added to them whose names you probably can’t pronounce.

Buy in bulk.  Generally, bulk packed foods cost less per a given unit than convenience sizes.  This is due to less packaging and processing cost.  Bulk buying works especially well for meats.  You pay for a butcher or meatpacking plant to make those nice steaks in the cute Styrofoam packaging.  Instead of that, buy a roast and cut it to your liking.  This works even better if you buy on sale.  I do all our beef and pork this way.  We have very little waste from servings that are too big and we get good cuts of meat.  I do buy processed chicken breasts just because I’m the only one in the house that likes dark meat.  I even buy these in family packs.

If you want or need to break down bulk buys into smaller lots, save some of the containers.  Five gallon, food grade buckets are perfect for caching if you do that sort of thing and are safe for storing drinking water.  They come in handy in the garden as both carriers and planters.  Plastic grocery bags are great to have on hand if you sell or trade your excess produce.  People buy more when they can easily carry more to the car.  As a bonus, you are being green by recycling the bags in a non-conventional way.

Don’t forget to rotate your stocks.  Long Term Storage (LTS) food is just that.  It is designed and packaged to sit on a shelf for years on end with little or no care.  The foods we have talked about here, with the exception of unprocessed fresh foods, will keep for a long time but will go bad.  Use it from the oldest to the newest and continue to do so when you reach the levels you want to maintain.  I have found that marking the date when it was put into storage in a conspicuous place on the container helps greatly.  I use my stores from top to bottom, front to back.  I add to my stores from bottom to top, back to front.  It requires some moving and re stacking of goods as I use and restock but is worth the time and effort.

With all of this, there is one thing you must remember.  Save up enough money to go out to a restaurant at least once a month.  Let somebody else do the cooking and cleaning up once in a while.  Or at least do something just for fun.  It is a good reward for all the hard work you do to save money and helps you to avoid getting discouraged.

Good luck and good eating!

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