Nine meals from anarchy, Part 3: You really DO have enough space for food

Before I started stocking up on months worth of food and other necessities, just like a lot of you I greatly overestimated how much space all of my food, water and other things would take up. And overestimating how much space you need for important stuff like food and water (is there anything more important to your physical survival?) will probably make some people not start stocking up in the first place because they think it can’t be done, so why try? So to help shoot down misconceptions that stocking up on food takes up too much space, let’s take a look at some photos.
Probably the most ubiquitous item among prepared people is the five-gallon bucket. They don’t take up much space, and they’re very useful and versatile. And so are the buckets:

The box in the picture is from an office-supply store–just your average case of 8-1/2-by-11-inch printer paper. The box itself is just over 11 inches wide and 17 inches high as it appears in this picture. And you can see from the photo that the bucket is smaller than this particular box. I don’t know about you, but I have at least a couple dozen boxes this size in various places around my house. One of these five-gallon buckets can hold about 25 pounds of rice, beans or similar bulk foodstuffs (sealed up in food-grade mylar storage bags with oxygen absorbers inside–more on that soon). So if I have a couple dozen boxes this size in various places around my small-ish house containing stuff that might not be as useful for my survival as, say, food, couldn’t I very easily find someplace to put important stuff like lots of food and move the boxes of paper, books, Christmas ornaments, etc., somewhere else if I really wanted to be able to eat for a while? I kind of like to eat every day, so I couldn’t see myself not making room for extra food, especially with the economic uncertainty in our country and around the world right now. I could lose my job tomorrow…you could lose yours, too…but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about food for a little while if I started buying and storing it right now.

“But I’ve heard that eating food-storage stuff gets boring…”

Yeah, I’m not much for boring food, either. Which is why I stock up on what I like to eat anyway, with a lot of spices and other accoutrements to keep my food from getting boring, bland or blah. Take a look at my latest, um, “cabinet meeting”:

These quart-sized mason jars are one of the handiest kitchen accessories around, and pretty darn inexpensive–about $9 for a case of a dozen jars. And buying spices in bulk quantities and storing them in mason jars will help carry your food a long way away from boring and will last you for a long time–just how long do you think it will take to go through a quart of cumin or garlic? Speaking of which, on the top shelf in this photo are (left to right) red pepper flakes, dehydrated tomatoes (which I dehydrated myself in one of my handy Nesco dehydrators), garlic powder and chicken (also courtesy of my Nesco). Visible on the bottom shelf are jars of cinnamon, cayenne, dehydrated spinach (back right) and cumin.
And to give you a top view of how little space you need in your cabinet for lots of flavor, here are a dozen mason jars in the box you saw in the photo at the top of this page:

I’ll continue tomorrow with this notion that you can cram a lot more food into a much smaller space than you think.