Personal Peak Prep - Food Preparation & Storage

This guest post is about the personal activities and preparations of someone who’s name you might recognize, but who wishes to remain nameless here. I’ve separated it into multiple posts based on topic.

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Food Preparation & Storage:

Last year, expecting a dramatic rise in food prices, we bought and stored 15 shelves of food, mostly cans, spices, salt, rice, beans, wheat berries, sugar & honey. We did have to fine-tune it, as the mice were quicker than we were on ‘undoing’ some of the storage. This year, we made a decision to begin to eat through the food we were storing to see which we needed to continue to add to, and which were not good purchases. If we don’t want to eat it now, we won’t want to eat it WTSHTF, so we don’t consider it a good purchase.

I’ve also begun to prepare more meals from scratch, like baked goods,and my husband has begun to make wines, so we see how much faster we go through things like ‘sugar’ that we thought would last forever in large quantity.

We put out the word on the free-lists in our area that we wanted canning jars, particularly with the glass lids, and we drove around collecting nearly 1,000. We bought a large canner from Lehman’s and learned to can, putting up about a ½ bushel of green & yellow beans for our first attempt.

We stepped up our drying as well, listing the foods we use most often during the winter, buying it in season, and putting it up by the bushel. Things like herbs, tomatoes & green & yellow peppers, that reconstitute well in soups.

We took seriously the mandate to store food away for the winter, too, and bought bushels of winter squash, onion, carrots, and other root vegetables (we would have saved the pumpkin, but the livestock love them too much). We’ll see how long they last us, and how many more we’ll need to buy next year. We are in the process of figuring out the best place in our home to store them. It is a trial and error process.

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2 Responses to “Personal Peak Prep - Food Preparation & Storage”

  1. J Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 11:13 am

    I find it’s hard to know just how much to start ‘hoarding’. Is it really economical to purchase large quantities of stuff, only to “have” to eat it before it goes bad? How much is enough and is “enough” really too much? Is our idea of “enough” really going to be a typical amount in the future - maybe we should be getting used to the idea of a lot less?

    and where do you put it all is the other issue…
    J, prepping in ON, Canada

  2. e4 Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    J - I found the Crisis Preparedness Handbook very helpful in calculating what to store, how much to store, how to store it, etc. Here’s an online resource for another food storage plan.

    Gamma seal lids for food-grade five gallon buckets are nice, though they add up if you want to store a lot.

    But you are right, the more you dig into it, the harder it gets to figure it all out…

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