3 Month Supply

Most of you know but in our church, our leaders encourage us to store food and otherwise be prepared to provide for ourselves and our family in case of an emergency.

We have been working on our food storage lately. We decided to focus on getting a three month supply of everyday foods that we can eat if we were not able to go to the store for whatever reason. We have here one week out of thirteen for our three month supply:

Here is the menu for the week:

Breakfasts
Granola and powdered milk (for two days)
Oatmeal and powdered milk (for two days)
Toast with peanut butter and honey (for two days)
Whole wheat kernel pancakes, syrup, canned fruit

Lunches
Tuna sandwiches and fruit leather (for two days)
PBJs and applesauce (for two days)
Macaroni and cheese and fruit (dehydrated or freeze-dried) (for two days)
Canned soup and bread

Dinners
Refried beans, rice w/ Ro-tel tomatoes, homemade tortillas, canned salsa

Spaghetti, jar of marinara sauce, canned green beans

BBQ sandwiches (BBQ sauce and home-canned chicken, pork, or beef) and fruit salad (canned peaches and mandarin oranges w/ pudding mix)

Zatarains red beans and rice, canned corn, garlic biscuits

Tomato soup and grilled cheese, apple juice box

Canned soup and bread

Fry bread (fried pizza dough with refried beans, shredded cheese, and salsa)

Snacks
Pudding cups
Granola bars
Popcorn
Rice Crispy Treats
Beef Jerky
Candy
Fruit snacks

This is a lot more snacks than we normally eat, maybe I went overboard. But part of me thinks that snacks will go a long way to comfort little people in a stressful time. Who knows.

--If you are wondering where the cheese is coming from, we bought a case of this:
We were considering buying Velveeta for cheese but decided we'd spend a little more and get the canned stuff. We're not so into fake cheese either way, but at least with canned cheese we won't have to rotate it and eat it nearly as often. It has a much longer shelf life than Velveeta does, and it shreds. We ordered it from this website and were very happy with the customer service. We purchased a few cans to try before buying an entire case. We think it tastes like Kraft Singles. There are some other interesting items for sale on that website if you're interested in looking around.

We got our freeze-dried and dehydrated fruits from FoodWise in Gilbert. They sell these foods in various-sized PET containers so you don't have to buy an entire #10 can of something if you don't want that much. We got an assortment of fruits in 13 quart-sized containers, one for each week. When we empty a container the store will refill them for the price paid minus the price of the PET container so you save by reusing your containers. This was the most expensive portion of our storage.

There are also basic items that we will need for our meals that are not included in our containers like ingredients for bread, wheat, beans, flour, salt, etc. These items are stored separately.

We decided that in case of an emergency we wanted to cater our meal choices around the things that the kids will like the most so we don't have to worry about them not wanting to eat in a time that's already stressful. Yes, this does make our menus not as healthy but that's just how it is. Maybe I'll be able to figure out how to do healthy and kid-friendly some other year.

I give credit to my friend Autumn for the idea of how to rotate our food. Each container is labeled with a month of the year. Ours are labeled November 2009 through November 2010, making thirteen containers. Each month we will empty the food out of one container and put it on our shelves to be used up, either through eating it or donating it sometime that month. Then, we will fill the container back up with another week's worth of food. Everything will get rotated once a year except for a couple of items like our cheese and probably our freeze-dried and dehydrated fruits. We spent more money on these items that have longer shelf-lives and we don't want to replace them as often as once a year.

The expense
Obviously, buying this much food at once costs a lot of money. We started out stockpiling food when things were on sale but our supply was building very slowly. We decided to put a hold on building our savings account and put the money towards our food storage for a few months. I'm not saying this is the right thing for everyone, but if you're wondering how we paid for it now you know. We had some money saved but didn't want to take it out so instead of depositing money into our savings account after a paycheck we would withdraw the money in cash and keep it in an envelope to spend on our three month supply. Now that we have completed the task we are going back to saving our money. I tried collecting receipts to calculate how much it cost us but misplaced a few of them. If you might be interested in doing this I could pretty easily estimate the costs. My friend Autumn and her husband used their tax return one year to purchase their food. By the way, if you want to see her run-down of this method you can check out her blog.

Pros and Cons
There are some disadvantages to this method of food storage of course. The largest ones I see is that my grocery spending is going to go up. I try to buy only things that are on sale. When I was shopping for our three month supply all at once I either bought sale items or bought in bulk. But, when I am replacing these containers every month I will not have that luxury. Another con, I have more mac and cheese, canned soups, and other processed foods than I really want in my house. And maybe when I refill my containers I can think of some better substitutes. Storage is also going to be tricky. As I type my containers are still in my front room.

And, the containers I bought are a little too big, so that makes some wasteful space that I will have to find room for. I figure I can fit about half of my containers stacked in my hall closet, four in Owen's closet and one in each of the other two rooms.

Though we feel like we can deal with these inconveniences because the beauty of this system is how easy it is to use in the event of an emergency. The system makes rotating food so easy and you don't have to keep a running total of every single item you want to store.

Now we'd better go put all this food away.