Do any or many CC board members “prep” for a disaster in terms of having an emergency food supply?
A lot of people do this. My understanding is that Mormons are strongly encouraged by church leadership to have a year’s food supply.
I don’t have a year’s worth of food, but I would guess I do have two or three month’s worth. Virtually all of this food is non-perishable food that I buy on sale. For example, if pasta is on sale for 50 cents a pound (or sometimes 38 cents for 12 ounces) I’ll buy 30 or 40 pounds. When cheese is $3 a pound I’ll buy enough so that we have 20 pounds in the refrigerator. Last year our local grocery had sugar for a dollar per four-pound bag; I bought 20 bags and wish I had bought way more, since it keeps forever.
You get the idea. We have a very full pantry, mostly composed of deeply discounted groceries with very long shelf lives. Part of my motivation is that we save a lot of money by stocking up on on-sale groceries, but I am also motivated by the desire to keep eating in the event of a natural disaster or civil unrest. Having lots of food on hand is really the only “prep” that I do for a disaster. I know lots of people do more.
If the grocery shelves were to be empty tomorrow, how long could your family survive living mostly on what you’ve got in your pantry today? Just curious.
If it were winter, I would have more because we occasionally get snowed in. But it would all consist of peanut butter, crackers, canned food with tops you can pull off, and other things that require no cooking and no refrigeration.
I don’t see the point of buying things like pasta that have to be cooked or things like milk that have to be refrigerated because the electric power in our neighborhood goes off pretty regularly in any kind of storm and sometimes even if there isn’t one.
There are at least 6 boxes of half-eaten boxes of stale cereal the kids picked out at the beginning of summer. Adding in the soup varieties no one will eat in the cupboard, and the various items languishing in the freezer, three of us would survive for a couple months no problem. Unfortunately, my youngest daughter would only last about a week because none of those things would pass her lips. She could probably scrounge up some leftover holiday candy though to last a little longer.
I’ve lived in central Utah for 23 years. This is true, and quite a few do it.
In typical new house construction, the area under the front porch will be a part of the basement, but without HVAC. The porch will be a slab of concrete. This creates a water-tight space that is warm enough not to freeze, but cool enough for long-term storage. A lot of Utahns are avid gardeners and do a lot of their own canning. Some local businesses specialize in 30-gallon drums of oats and such.
It would depend on if power went out and if I could use the stuff in my freezer or not. Possibly a couple of weeks if we didn’t mind eating stale bread or moldy cheese. I have a small galley kitchen with little storage. I do have a hand held can opener I could use on cans that don’t have a pull tab.
I’ve wondered about this too. We waste a lot of food in how we eat now that if we were in a disaster situation we wouldn’t. People would eat others’ food they didn’t finish at dinner. People would make sure to eat any leftovers and not let fruits/veg etc go bad (or more likely go ignored in the fridge). They wouldn’t dump half empty bowls of cereal and soup. They wouldn’t try to live off “snacks.” Right now I have about a dozen dead tangelos, at least two dinners of leftovers, and a lots of fading salad makings at our house. None of which we will likely eat.
I’d guess we could go 6 weeks or more of a restrained diet in an emergency. But we’d run out of cheezits in about 3 days.
We have a gas stove, so in disasters involving only electricity we could still cook. We also have a generator that would keep one of our refrigerators going for a few days. One of the few items I buy that isn’t deeply discounted is that I try to keep a few cartons of shelf-stable milk on hand. This comes in handy when we run or the milk in the fridge goes bad.
If the situation were bad enough, at some point we would be reduced to using our outdoor grill as a stove and oven, and would have to cook over a wood fire. My understanding is that people did this at one time.
@BunsenBurner provided a link to Costo emergency food supplies. My view is such things end up costing a lot of money, since many will never be eaten except in a disaster. If I have 50 pounds of rice, pasta, sugar, etc., I’m going to eat it one way or the other.
Right, one of the things I insist upon is the food rotates in and rotates out. Nothing in our house probably stays in the cupboard or freezer for much longer than 3 months. Maybe that turkey chili I hate…
I wish I was better at this, though I do buy big quantities of rice and sugar. Living in southern Florida it’s hard to store much food. We are very prone to bugs, and it’s quite humid. Our garage is a bedroom so we don’t have room for an extra freezer.
I like the idea of buying things that you would use anyway.
My point is that emergency freeze-dried food can be stored a loooong time without taking up much space and needing special storage conditions (and makes easy camping dinners, too). For folks who live in disaster prone zones, it might make sense to have one of those buckets instead of compromising their nutrition by buying and living off empty carbs like potatoes, pasta, etc. which they buy to serve the dual purpose.
What is even more important than food is clean potable water.
