STORE WHAT YOU EAT AND EAT WHAT YOU STORE

The most important thing to remember when starting your food storage plan is:-

Store what you eat and eat what you store!

This is especially important if you are on a tight budget for purchasing with your food storage. Do not waste food. If you have something stored that you cannot use, maybe you can exchange that item with another family for something you do use.

Start making your own bread, use half milk and half powdered milk each day and gradually increase the amount of powdered milk you use.

Work out what your family eats and the amounts used over a 2 week period and then start working out the amount you would need for 12 months or even longer.

Try new recipes using food storage. If your family likes it, then you can include the ingredients in your list. The Internet is an amazing place for recipes.

The next thing I want to discuss is the storage life of foods and how to correctly store them to maximise the length of time they can be stored.

Four factors that affect food storage:

Factor #1: The temperature:
Temperature has more to do with how long well dried foods store than anything else. The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) states, "Each 5.6 Degree C drop in temperature doubles the storage life of the food". Obviously there is a limit as to how far this statement can be taken. Basically, it holds true from room temperature down to freezing. The temperature must remain stable. Shifts in temperature can cause deterioration.

Constant storage Temp in Degrees C Storage life in years
5 degrees - 40 yrs
10 degrees - 30 yrs
15 degrees - 20 yrs
20 degrees - 10 yrs
25 degrees - 5 yrs
30 degrees - 2.5 yrs
35 degrees - 1.25 yrs

Note: the above chart is not for a specific food, but is a general guide.

Factor # 2: Product moisture content:
Food with excess moisture can spoil right in their containers. This is an important consideration when packing food with dry ice as moisture condenses and freezes on the outside of the dry ice. For long term storage, grains should have a moisture content of 10% or less. It is difficult to accurately measure this without special equipment.

Factor #3: Atmosphere the product is stored in:
Food packed in air don't store as well as in oxygen free gases. This is because air contains oxygen which oxidises many of the compounds in food. Food storage companies have a couple of different processes for removing the oxygen:

• Displacing the oxygen: This is done by purging out all the air in the product with an inert gas. Nitrogen is almost always used because it is the most inert gas known. People doing all their own packing occasionally use dry ice which gives off carbon dioxide gas, and probably works just about as well.
• Absorb the oxygen: Oxygen absorber packets do just that. Air contains about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, leaving about 1% for the other gases. If the oxygen is absorbed, what remains is 99% pure nitrogen in a partial vacuum.

If oxygen absorber packets are used, care must be taken to use a storage container that can stand some vacuum. Mylar (foil pouches) with oxygen absorbers are not affected by the vacuum.

Factor #4: The container the product is stored in:

To get the best storage life out of your product it must have a hermetic (air tight) seal. Containers that do this well are:

• #10 cans (ones your standard spaghetti or baked beans come in)
• Sealable food storage buckets
• Sealable food quality metal or plastic drums.

Whatever container you use, be sure it is food grade as your product can be tainted with whatever the container is made from. The base of the container should be stamped with the letters HDPE and the triangle of arrows with the number 2 inside. This denotes that it is food grade plastic.

What to store?

In order to know what to put in your food storage...you first need to determine who will be eating the food. There are three choices; bugs, the sewer system or your family. You decide!

If you do not store your food properly; moths, weevils, bugs or mice will get it, no matter how well you store your food. If you do not choose to store the right foods and rotate your supply, nobody will eat it.

The aim is for you to store the right foods, rotate your foods, and your family will eat it.

Remember the SIEGE MENTALITY.

They store foods with the vision that in the not too distant future every family will be sequestered into their own "bunker" - fending off scavengers.

PRACTICAL AND PROVIDENT assume that when the storage will be used it will be most likely during periods of unemployment or storms, which make getting food impossible. That during this crisis, life will go on pretty much the way it has always gone except that you will be eating from food storage and not from the shops.

On the surface, siege food is easier. There are only a few foods that need to be stored and the amounts to store have been worked out for you already. But there are some drawbacks. Siege food is workable. There is a lot of work to prepare the meals, a lot of adjustment on the part of the families, but it is possible. Here is a list of some of the problems that must be solved:-

Leavening Agents

Where is the yeast?

Just about everything you can do with wheat requires yeast or baking powder or sourdough starter.

Here is a rule of thumb:

- Half a pound of yeast

- One pound of baking powder

- One pound of baking soda

per person per year

Yeast is a living thing and it will die on you. Store it in the freezer and rotate . Dispose of it after it has reached expiration date. Dead yeast is good for nothing.

Water

If you are going to rely on wheat and beans and powdered milk, you're going to need to store over and above amounts of water to what is recommended to drink.

Remember it is recommended that we store two weeks worth of water only.

What and beans are useless without first soaking them in water. Powdered milk is useless unless made up with water. Plan on three cups of water to one cup of wheat or beans.

Power

What and beans need to be cooked. There is not much you can do without this process. It is against the law in Australia to store kerosene or petrol, so the very thought of storing flammable liquid is out of the question.

Honey

For children under the age of one, honey is a no-no. Honey causes Botulism in young children. Botulism is fatal. Use sugar instead.

Non-Fat Powdered Milk

Children should not drink non-fat or low-fat milk. Fat is a vital building block for young children's bodies.

Wheat and Lactose Intolerance

"In our family, we spent a year of our early marriage as food fanatics. Out went the sugar, the white flour, anything processed - even red meat for a little while. We knew we had to ease into healthy eating. We did everything right. incorporating whole wheat flour into bread recipes with white flour, adding more as time passed and reducing more of the white processed flour. Finally we reached the point of exclusively using our own stone ground flour.

We felt wonderful.

Then the body started telling us there was a problem. It would not tolerate anything with whole wheat in it. There more we ate, the more the intolerance grew.

Finally we gave up and returned to our pre fanatic lifestyle. We can tolerate small amounts of wholewheat".

Be aware of food allergies.

Be aware of diabetics.

Human Tastes

We need variety in our diet.

Week 2 of the 2011 Food Storage Challenge

Week 2 $10 challenge

3 kgs sugar and 1 box salt

Week 2 $20 challenge

5 kgs sugar and 1 box salt

We are storing sugar now because due to the floods in Qld, the prices are about to rise. Sugar is also used in our food storage as an ingredient in lots of things (including bread) so is a good one to store.

Salt is used as a seasoning. About 1/4 of a tsp is good for you (per day), and we are so used to having some salt in our food that it would taste very bland if we suddenly had to cut it out because we were using food storage.

The best salt to purchase is one with Iodine. Some people's bodies cannot tolerate Iodene though, and if you can't, store something else. You can also store things like chicken salt, rock salt or dried herbs instead as a seasoning if you already have a supply of salt, for variation purposes as well.

2011 Food Storage Challenge

This week I started my $10 a week food storage challenge. If you would like to join me in this, it will end up supporting one person for 6 months, or two people for 3 months. If you want to support 2 people for 6 months, double the quantity.

Of course, you should only store what you will actually eat. If you can't have salt, store something else. Remember to eat what you store and store what you eat!

Week 1 $10 challenge

2 large cans tuna and 1 box salt

Week 1 $20 challenge

4 large cans tuna and 2 boxes salt

Food Storage: Food Storage Mentatility

On my quest to keep going with my food storage, I thought I'd start putting up my collection of articles and information I have been given over the years. I'm really not sure where many of my info comes from, as it appears to have been re-typed from its original source, but it is extremely sound advice.

The first is about the mentality of 3 different 'types' of storers. Here goes:-

"Food storers usually come in three categories:-

SIEGE STORERS

• use money outside their regular food budget to buy in bulk those foods they hope they will never have to use.


• barrels of wheat - jugs of water - cartons of powdered milk - cans of honey fill their shelves, but they really do not know how to use them.


• they are waiting for the "end of the world" to use their food storage.

PRACTICAL STORERS

• eat what they store, and therefore do not spend extra money to buy food that they will never get to use.


• their shelves are full of foods they like because they buy a few extra cans or cartons or boxes of those things each time they go to the store.


• eventually they will have a cache of tuna or peanut butter or frozen corn on hand that could be readily used in case of a winter storm or a break in employment.

PROVIDENT STORERS

• spend less money on food and less time in the store because they produce and preserve much of the food they eat.


• there is no "emergency food" for these storers


• their regular diet includes their storage


• they can garden, dry, dehydrate, freeze and culture their own foods. They have learned not to rely so much on others for their food.

The aim is to get you somewhere between practical and provident.

Siege mentality bought basic foods that stored well. Put is somewhere safe until the disaster occurred. Every 10 years they threw it out and replaced it with fresher supplies and again waited.

It cost money to replace it every decade or so, but it was "insurance" well spent and you hoped you would never have to use it.

This is marginally better than no storage at all, but is the least effective. Assuming that all this food stored has not spoilt, how easy do you think it would be to switch from your fast and processed foods to powdered milk and raw wheat?

Now let us look at practicals.

How many times has this happened to you...

- at the end of a long day you're home. You fancy potato chips or a chocolate bar or even a tuna fish sandwich. You know you have seen this food item in the house, but you search everywhere and it cannot be found. You have choice. Choose something else or get in the car and go buy it. Maybe when you do you buy the can of tuna...you buy three extra tins as well for the next time. Then next time you're shopping again you will purchase three more, or you see your favourite tuna is on sale at the store, so you purchase more. Maybe you will extend your purchases to include jam or mayonnaise or other things you use on a regular basis that has a reasonable shelf life.

You may not recognise this as food storage because ti is done on a small scale.

From this example , can you see the difference between Siege Mentality and Practical?

Practicals eat the food they store.

If care and rotation is used in the storage of these foods, not one calorie will be lost in spoilage.

January Challenge 2011 - Store water

Store 2 weeks supply of drinking water per person.

I store my drinking water in washed and bleached PET bottles, filled with tap water.  Our tap water here is fantastic, so there is no need for me to purify it.

Keep your stored water our of sunlight and away from concrete floors if you can.  The bottles can soak up the smells of things around them and possible toxins.  Sunlight can release a toxin in the plastic of the bottle thus getting into your water. 

Check on your water and change it every 6 months if needs be.  I store both drinking water and washing water.  The drinking water I change frequently and the washing water I don't have to worry about.

I also store some containers (like the one pictured) of store bought water due to them being easy to pour and easy to take camping - just grab and go.

Dip recipes

Here are some of my favourite dips that are so easy to make:-


French Onion Dip
Mix together 1/4 sachet of french onion soup mix and one 300 gram carton of sour cream. Refrigerate for a few hours prior to serving.


Corn Relish Dip
Mix together one jar of corn relish and one 300 gram carton of sour cream. Refrigerate.


Feta Cheese and Sundried Tomato Dip
In the food processor, blend some sundried tomatoes, fresh basil, a drizzle of olive oil and feta cheese together. Drizzle in a little lemon juice. Should come out a lovely orange colour. If you are not a fan of feta cheese (hubby dislikes it immensely), you could use cream cheese instead.


Note: You can vary the French Onion dip by adding in a little blue cheese.
Add onion flakes/finely diced cooked onion to the Feta Cheese dip.


I added a little bacon to my feta and sundried tomato dip. Was VERY nice!