As the Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for my ward, I am appalled that less than 10% of our ward members have a one year supply of food storage. Worst yet, those that do have food storage (even if only 3 months or 6 months) may not know how to use it when the need arises. A recent article states:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long encouraged its members to store extra food to provide for possible future needs caused by economic hardship, disasters or other emergencies.
If you store whole grain wheat, oats, beans, et cetera, and you have no idea how to use it, what good does it do. Some people do very well with food storage and are able to use it in rotation, that is, as they use it, they replace it so that the food storage remains fresh viable. Some people do very well at “pantry cooking” on making wonderful meals with their food storage.
The pantry cooking book contains more than 350 recipes using only pantry storable foods (ie no fresh or frozen ingredients required). This is a great resource to be able to build up, maintain, and utilize your food storage.
After all, you don’t want to store food that you dislike. If you can’t stand the taste of cooked cracked wheat cereal (even with honey on it), then maybe you should store food that you like and eat on a regular basis.
Want to share your story to help others? You can post your comment here, or you can share with the Church directly:
SALT LAKE CITY 14 August 2008 Church Public Affairs is asking Church members to share their experiences with maintaining and utilizing food storage by posting video, text or other content on personal blogs, video-sharing sites like YouTube, social media sites like Facebook, or other Internet sites. Members can then e-mail a link to their story to publicaffairs-slc@ldschurch.org The Newsroom site may link to some of them in an upcoming Web package on the Church welfare program, but in any case the stories may be beneficial to others who read them on the Web.
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I am glad about your website to share about food storage preparedness. I have recently receive my calling as a Food Storage Specialist in my ward, although, I am totally new about my calling. To begin serving in my calling: I am trying to do a personal survey visit to my ward families, and I do not have a list of catagory of all the names of food product to be a check mark list prepared, so I can give to the adult members in families to fill out so we can help them provide a sufficient food storage preparedness, as we know what are they eating to educate them in food storage. Meaning I am trying to find out what they eat first, and a catagory of list of food products I can printout on paper and easily give as visiting with families in my ward. Do you know where I can get such a list of all food products in my state in Ohio. Looking as searching for needed Answers….
You may want to start with foods that the family eats on a regular basis and build up a 3-month supply of those foods. Each family will typically have different needs due to likes/dislikes, allergies, et cetera. Long-term storage would be more broad. Most people do not have a long-term food storage. If they do have long-term storage, most of them do not know how to use it, and it has no value in times of emergency.
We had a sister come to our Relief Society and tell us how she had organized her food storage. One of the hardest things is to rotate the food so it does not get too old. I thought it was a great presentation and would like to share her ideas.
She made menus for one month then calculated three times for each item to get the amount for a quarter of a year. She had an empty wall in her basement. She built shelves along the wall and divided them into four sections; one for each quarter of the year.
She had one quarter’s worth of food in her kitchen cabinets. Then worked on filling each section of shelves in the basement. Each quarter she takes the oldest section of food in the basement and transfers it to her kitchen cabinets. That leaves an opening in the basement cabinet where the new food can be stored. This automatically rotates your food as you empty the oldest section and fill it with new food.