Food Storage Kick off! – Hive and Nest

I posted over at Segullah today about Food Storage. I’m going to put my post up over here too, because this coming Monday is going to be the grand kick-off of Jennie’s Food Storage Item-of-the-Week and we might need a little motivation. I did this a couple of years ago and people are still asking me to start it again. I am but your humble servant so I will oblige.

I am Mormon and my job at church is to motivate/enable/threaten people to prepare for the hard times ahead. If you are not thinking there will be any hard times ahead may I suggest you read a little book called The Bible. Even if you are not religious, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that economic times are not looking that great and, politically, things are looking shakier every day. Add to that some deadly influenza viruses and/or earthquakes and things might look a little dicey for the future. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that you can feed yourself/partner/children/pets if the truckers went on strike? Or you lost your job? Or a drought happened? Or you were afraid to go out of your house for fear of catching something horrendous? Or Chinese troops invaded America (OK, now I’m getting carried away).

The plan used to be to have a year’s supply of food. Mormons are known for having stockpiles of food like wheat and powdered milk. For whatever reason (maybe people don’t know what to do with that stuff), we are now being asked to have a three-month supply of food we normally eat. Whether it’s cereal or spaghetti sauce, you should have extra on hand.

Here’s how it works: each month will have a theme (such as Toiletry Month where we focus on, get this, toiletries. One week may be bandaids, then next might be toilet paper. You get the idea.) It’s a little easier to keep items in mind if there is a theme that runs through an entire month. Each week I will assign a product to buy. You buy as much as you can afford or have room to store. It’s your decision. But at least get something.

Some of you might be the kind who get really jazzed about comparison shopping or couponing. While I applaud you, the idea behind this food storage thing is to get it done. We aren’t going to save up several weeks worth of items until we do a Costco run. No, no,no.

This is about making things easy.

It’s about getting stuff bought. So when you run to the grocery store because you’re out of tortillas and milk, throw a few extra items in your cart. I don’t want you to burn out because you’re making things too complicated.

Every Monday I will post a new item to concentrate on during the week. Hopefully after a while increasing your food storage will become a habit. Before you know it your pantry will be bursting.