Food Storage Step 1
What should I store?
Providentliving.org is an excellent resource listing products suggested for a longer-term storage. A variety of grains, dried beans, pasta, and dehydrated potatoes all last 30 years or longer. The LDS Church’s recommendations can be met by using seven staples: I recommend wheat, rice, beans, pasta, potatoes, and oats, plus one extra portion of either wheat or rice.
All of these items are available at Home Storage Centers or what is commonly known as the Dry-pack Cannery. (The supplies are already there—you provide the labor, and purchase individual cans or six in a case.) Certain supplies are also available for purchase online at http://www.providentliving.org.
How much should I store?
If you use the Church’s web site, http://www.providentliving.org, there’s a handy “food storage calculator” that will tell you the amount of longer-term food storage you should have based on your family size.
My suggestion is to consider the number of people in your family and multiply it by 2. Now you have the number of cases needed in each of the seven food varieties (you may vary the products as you wish, factoring specific weights of each item until you reach the desired total.)
For example: my family consists of 5 people right now. So I multiply 5 by 2 and that tells me I need 10 cases in each of the seven categories of food discussed above. I’ve done the math and carefully calculated the weight: this formula will give you exactly the amount suggested by the Church, plus a few extra cans.
How much does it cost?
As you can see from the cost chart below, a one year, long-term supply at today’s prices is $235.56 per person and under $1,200.00 for a family of five.
If you could carve out $100.00 a month from your current budget (maybe that’s five fewer trips to McDonalds) and one hour at the church cannery every month (maybe you meet there as a family after work like we do) storage for 5 would be completed in a single year.
How much space do I need?
I used to think that to have the longer-term storage recommended by the Church, I’d have to add on to my house, but actually the space required is quite minimal. The diagram below shows that storage for a family of 5 is about 7’w x 6’h x 19”d, or the equivalent of two bookcases bunched together:
If your family consists of only 2 people, your long-term storage is going to look less like a bookcase and more like a credenza. From a design point of view, this type of “storage unit” is completely modular, can be reconfigured in any number of ways, is useful for the next 30 years or longer, and has the potential to save lives!
Consider this:
“If you ever have to eat your food storage, you’ll wish you had stored the food in the house and the furniture in the garage” (Oscar A. Pike, “New Tips for Old Food,” BYU Magazine, Spring 2008).
