Basics of Food Preps
January 29, 2010, Submitted by: Ken Tweet
Disruption to the food supply chain
A basic essential to survivalism is having enough food to eat and water to drink. In today’s modern world, we take it for granted that there will always be food on the grocery store shelves. There are many built-in assumptions to that thought process. Here are a few examples of what could disrupt the supply chain of having food available at our grocery stores (most grocery stores have only a few days supply on hand).
- trucking or transportation system breakdown (there are many ways for this to happen)
- regional disaster (hurricane, earthquake, fire, etc…)
- panic due to pandemic, terrorism, or economic collapse
- power outage (local, regional, or worse)
- food shortages caused by large scale crop failures
The systems in place from the large scale mass producing farms, through the distribution chain to the grocery stores, are maximized to produce the food for the hundreds of millions of us. It was not long ago when much of the food we eat was produced locally or even in our own backyard gardens. Today, tens of millions of us live in city centers and their suburbs while we rely on the food manufacture & distribution pipeline to run perfectly in the background to bring us our food. Wherever there is a system in place that is so essential to modern day living, we must first recognize it, and second, prepare for its disruption. Having enough stored food is the most responsible thing you can do to become more self sufficient in your life.
Get started with your food preps
The way to get started is quite simple. You start small. The way that Lauren and I started was simply buying a few more of the items that we normally would purchase during a grocery store run. If we were normally picking up 4 cans of green beans, we would get 6. Instead of 1 bottle of honey, we would get 2. Doing it this way makes it easy on the pocket book too. One important thing to remember is to concentrate on buying the foods that you would normally eat. Don’t go out and buy all of the stereotypical food storage products (many of which are perfectly fine), I’m saying that for a normal short to mid term storage inventory, you should stock up on the foods that you are used to eating.
When you are storing your extra food, develop a system that allows you to rotate your stock. Use the oldest first, etc… There are many ways to go about this, but one simple method that we use with some of our supplies is that we always pull inventory from the right, or the front (depending on if your stock is front-back or left-right oriented). New stock goes to the back of the row or to the left side of the row. For longer term storage it always make sense to use a black sharpie pen and date the product (month / year).
How much food to store?
The quantity of food storage is a personal question that only you can answer. In my opinion, at a minimum you should have 30 days food preps for each member of the family living in the house. This will get you through the majority of the most likely minor disruptions that could occur. Preparing beyond 30 days begins to account for the larger scale disruption scenarios, while the odds of occurrence goes down as the scale of the disruption scenario goes up. Although it may be less likely for a large scale power grid failure due to terrorism than it is for an ice storm that keeps you inside for a week, just imagine the horrible consequences when large numbers of people run out of food for more than a week. Look what happened recently in Haiti as a result of their massive earthquake. People were killing for food within days. It is a established fact that the veneer of civilization is so thin, that after 3 days without food there will be chaos.
The choice is yours. The more food you have in storage, the less dependent you are on the system that only has a 3 day supply in the distribution chain, and the better you will sleep at night.
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