Nine meals from anarchy, Part 4: Start slow if you must, but get started!

I’d say there are two basic rules when it comes to stocking up on food for the long-term: First, stock up what you normally eat anyway. And second, get started!

But how many of us do neither?

I’ll admit, it took me about two years to really wrap my mind around the idea of “food storage” — after all, with so-called “just in time” inventory in grocery stores arriving, well, just in time on a regular basis, what’s the big deal? Food will always be on the grocery shelves when we need it, right?

Let’s recap a video from a few days ago:

http://www.youtube.com/v/gWnV1kQM0z4

On the spectrum of disasters, 30 inches of snow really is a cakewalk compared to a Category-4 hurricane like Katrina — at least with the so-called “Snowpocalypse,” people more or less knew it was coming, and they had a bit of time to prepare for it (although whether they actually did so is a different matter altogether). Yet in both cases, before and during the storms, preparation either becomes just an afterthought, or it leaves you like a deer in the headlights, overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear.

Time to take baby steps. Then more baby steps. And more baby steps. And then pretty soon you’ll be miles closer to where you want to be.

But get started now.

The first thing to do, obviously, is to look at what you normally eat and just buy more of it and use less of it each time you go to the grocery store. It’s the same way with budgeting money — the way you build up a surplus is to spend less than you earn. But to do that, first you need to know where your money is going. And in the case of food, it’s good to sit down, make a written list of what you normally buy — written lists will help keep you on budget and on track — and then build up your pantry from there.

Cheaper is better

It’s a lot cheaper to eat at home than to eat every meal at a restaurant. So why do so many of us think that the “best” way to build up our food storage surplus is to buy prepackaged dehydrated or freeze-dried foods from various companies we’ve read about online rather than preparing our own food storage as much as possible? I’ve perused dozens of sites selling dehydrated or freeze-dried foods for long-term storage — but on a per-serving basis, many of these items being sold through such companies costs just as much, if not more, than what you’d pay for a meal at a decent sit-down restaurant. And just like a lot of “normal” prepackaged foods, a lot of the dehydrated and freeze-dried items I’ve seen listed for sale have all the same drawbacks as the normal American diet — too much salt, too little fiber, not enough vitamin content. Why would I pay a lot of money for those things if I can make them myself for a lot less money? The flip side of the coin, however, is that by not “eating out” via prepackaged food storage items, we can get a lot more for our money and we can tailor our food storage to our own tastes, and we can take steps to avoid the extra salt and (some) fat. Fat and protein will be very important if we find ourselves in a more physically demanding environment for an extended period of time, so we want to make sure we have an ample (but balanced) supply of both in what we’re stocking up on. But by taking control of our food, we can control what goes into our food storage.

Four pounds of spinach, after dehydration, courtesy of my Nesco dehydrator–fits nicely in a 1-quart mason jar:

 

Getting started

Driving a sports car that gets 15 miles to the gallon is great if you can afford to fill up twice as often than if you get 30 mpg. But more often than not, you’re going to want good gas mileage. And how many of us have money to burn anyway? So also with your food storage: You want to get the greatest “mileage” for your food storage dollars. Fat, protein and carbohydrates are the building blocks of our diets. And even though beans and rice has gotten a bad rap at times because, well, it’s “just beans and rice,” the combination of the two is one of the most complete meals in the world. You get all three major nutritional building blocks in this simplest of meals.

You’ve got to be kidding…

Even casual car buffs know that there’s a HUGE difference between an Edsel and a Lamborghini. But they’re both cars, so what does it matter?

That’s like saying that Steak’n Shake must be just like Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse because they both have “Steak” in their name.

And so it is with beans and rice–your food storage can be really cheap but really good. Googling beans and rice recipes brings up more than 1.3 million results, enough recipes to last you at least a few weeks.

We frequently eat the same type of bread when we make all kinds of different sandwiches–pastrami, peanut butter, ham salad, grilled cheese–so what’s unusual about the thought of making hundreds of different beans-and-rice dishes out of, well, beans and rice? What kind of beans do you want? Pintos? Light red? Great Northern? Lentils? Split peas? Garbanzos? Black beans? Do you want white rice, basmati, brown rice, parboiled rice, medium grain, long grain?

I remember being amazed as a kid when I heard a commercial that said I could have a Wendy’s hamburger 255 different ways. Did I want ketchup? Mustard? Pickle? Mayo? Mustard and pickle? Cheese only? Tomato, ketchup and mayo? Onion? Everything except ketchup? Plain? Only tomato? It’s the same hamburger. But I could eat a hamburger a day for 255 days and not have it made the same way twice. So why can’t we do the same thing with rice and beans?

What it all boils down to is how long you want to be able to eat with the limited money you have, and starting now to stock up you beans, rice, veggies, spices and everything else that will make your food storage anything but boring. I’ll post photos and more tomorrow to show you how you can get started making your own food really cheap and making it just the way you want it.