I Dare You To Eat It

I just mailed a box with 50 copies of my book, I Dare You To Eat It, to a Stake Women’s Conference being held this weekend in Nevada. The Stake Home Storage/Emergency Preparedness Specialist contacted me through this website and asked permission to share ideas from my book in her presentation on food storage. The answer to her, and anyone else that may be interested, is absolutely YES! Please feel free to use the information and diagrams posted under the Strategies section. Please teach as many people as you can how easy it is to build a practical food storage. More people need to understand that food storage will not only simplify the daily routine and increase your ability to better provide for your own family, it offers the expanded opportunity to live as a true Christian, with the ability to help and serve others.

I don’t think we’re anywhere near the bottom on this global economic slide-down-the-hill. I constantly feel a great urgency that we’re in fact nearing the bottom of our opportunity  to have followed inspired guidance. Back in November of 1998, an advance warning came to us from the Prophet of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints, President Gordon B. Hinckley.  In his message, To the Boys and to the Men, he talked about how “the economy is a fragile thing” and then shared his personal feelings of being ”troubled by the huge consumer installment debt which hangs over the people of the nation, including our own people”. (Mormons)

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to hear Sister Sheri Dew speak on this very same topic, which was of course amazing, wonderful, and completely inspiring. On the drive home the thought came to me that the church’s dry-pack canneries will not always have food. As much as I don’t want to believe that serious food shortages could ever be a reality, they simply are and, like President Hinckley said, ”we had better give heed”.

So yesterday, I drove down to the cannery that’s nearest to my home and had a little impromptu chat with both the managers of the wet-pack (applesauce, salsa, jams, peaches, etc.) and dry-pack (wheat, rice, beans, pasta, potatoes, etc.) operations. What I learned was that food orders at the Bishop’s Storehouse have already doubled and continue to grow. That’s the bad news. The good news is that members of the L.D.S. church are still welcome to bring their neighbors and friends to the Home Canning Centers in order to share what is a flat-out remarkable system for preparing the most economical and durable long-term food storage.

Sometimes I worry that members of the church are waiting for some kind of alarm to be sounded from Temple Square with a booming voice over a loud speaker that says, “Stop what you’re doing and go buy your food storage right now!” But I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. Instead, the Prophet will give advance warnings, through General Conference messages, as he did over ten years ago.

“This is part of the temporal gospel in which we believe. May the Lord bless you, my beloved brethren, to set your houses in order. If you have paid your debts, if you have a reserve, even though it be small, then should storms howl about your head, you will have shelter for your wives and children and peace in your hearts. That’s all I have to say about it, but I wish to say it with all the emphasis of which I am capable.”

Anything we do today, that moves us towards the goal of a year supply of basic dry goods, a three month supply of foods we normally eat, some water, and a little savings of cash set aside, is better than doing nothing.