Prepping With Chuckles-The Importance of Food Storage

Welcome to my Prepper Posts which aims to help you be ready for any kind of short or long term disaster that might come along, and showing you the importance of being ready and able to help yourself when the authorities cannot assist you. I don't claim to be an expert on these subjects but I'll tell you what I can and direct you to prepper sites for further information if you are interested. Prepping is for normal people, and I aim to give you common sense reasons for thinking about how ready you are.

This week I'm looking at the importance of food storage in your home and why you need to have a few months supply ready for use. This is one of the first things mentioned in most prepper books, fiction and non fiction, as obviously food and water, along with shelter are the three things you must have in a survival situation of any kind.

When we mention food storage it is impossible not to think of the doomsday prepper with an underground bunker and years of food supply. What I'm talking about instead is a more realistic approach and a 3 or 6 month supply that most people should be able to have in their homes. But why is it necessary to have this extra supply? I'll tell you a bit about our family. 

In 1999 my late mother had stress and countless disputes with her employer. Her work was in admin but she was unhappy about cleaning duties being added to her job. We encouraged her to quit as my dad and I were both working full time. Months later my dad had a car crash-run off the road by a bus coming out a side road-causing damage to his neck and back and he was off for a year. He went back to work to find a new boss who basically accused him of putting it on and that dispute led to him sacking my dad a year later. The irony was that it happened on September 11th 2001, as my dad was watching the plane hit the second tower of the World Trade Center live on TV. That left me as the only worker and a year later I had a stress related breakdown and lost my own job.

Suddenly we had no jobs and wondered how we were going to pay the bills. Luckily we had a small mortgage and the building society we used reduced the payments for six months which gave us breathing space to get other bills dealt with and a tighter budget drawn up. Banks today would probably not have done that for us, so we were lucky. It was a tough couple of years overall. The real godsend for us was not having to buy any food during that first six month period because my mum was prepared.

We were not a family of preppers, not as you know the word. My mum's family struggled through WWII as most families did with rationing, living on soup and other cheap meals. They wasted nothing and when the war ended and things improved, both my grans kept full cupboards of soup, tinned meat, veg and fruit etc so that if anything bad happened, they at least could feed the family in the short term. My mum continued that tradition. She kept every kind of meat, pie, fish, frozen veg in the freezer, a full fridge and had full cupboards of tinned and packet food with good use by dates. In the winter there was always home made soup on the go made from ham and lentils and blended carrots. I got used to that way of doing things so when my mum died, I took over that job. 

But without that massive food supply, we'd have had to add the weekly shopping cost to the bills we had to pay with only government money to keep up going. I can't see how we would have managed.

Around 2015 I discovered prepper apocalypse fiction. The first time I read about the aftermath of an EMP it scared the crap out of me. No power, no electricity, newer model cars with electronic chips cease working, aircraft falling out the sky, (this is disputed in various EMP fiction), shops running out of food supplies in a couple of days and no deliveries coming in. People with no food in their homes looting and stealing to get something for an evening meal. People with food defending their homes from those trying to take it from them. It was a scary read. I realised that we were ahead of the game in having a few months of food should something happen but suddenly I wondered if this was enough?

I'm not going to go into the doomsday side of things but there are good reasons to have that food supply outside of a doomsday situation. Have a look at how much you spend on various household bills each month, mortgages, cost of petrol, cost of your shopping each week/month, pet expenses etc. Now for those married or living together and with two wages coming in, look at the available income you have now. Then take your partner's wage away completely, as if they have lost their job or are too sick to work temporarily for 6 months. Can you still pay everything? How tight does it leave your finances? What can you cut back on and what must you pay to keep your home warm and your family fed? Then think about not having to pay for food at all during that six months as your partner recovers or looks for a new job and how much that saves on your spending. Think about how you might cope if there was a divorce and your partner's wage is gone forever. Having that food supply to fall back on could be vital in helping to cut monthly costs as you adapt to a new reality.

We have also seen recently that a really bad hurricane on the way makes people run to the shops to clear the shelves like locusts at the End of Days as they have no supplies in the house beyond that night's meal and breakfast the next day. If you have those supplies in abundance already, you don't need to panic buy and be in that supermarket getting assaulted over the last 6 pack of bottled water. People think that maybe they can manage a night without any problem but don't factor in being cut off due to flooding, power lines being down for a week or more. Having that food supply in tins or meals that don't need heating can be a great relief if you are stranded for a while. If you are in a known hurricane zone, it is likely that you have an alternate cooking source ie camping stove or emergency generator to allow you to have the ability to cook hot meals and avoid some of the hardship of the situation.

You don't need to be a Doomsday Prepper to be keeping extra supplies of the essentials. The advice I have is that when times are good, stock up on food, clothes for winter, footwear, extra heating and cooking appliances, blankets, sleeping bags, batteries, medical supplies, bottled water etc that you might not need right now. You never know when a temporary issue might cause you to need them, whether it is a bad storm or other natural disaster, unexpected unemployment, temporary illness or something else. 

What is it they say-better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

Next time-what food to store and why.