Greetings, people of steemit!
Today's post is about some of the food storage methods that I use. I store dry foods and canned foods for times of need. It might be as simple as a financial shortage, or as big as a natural disaster, it's always good to have extra food on hand. Some people like to have a couple of weeks worth of extra food, some people like to have an extra couple of months worth of food. The Mormons recommend a year's worth of food in storage. Some people might call that hoarding, but they tend to use that term disparagingly, without any understanding of why people store extra food.
In the days when a lot of people had gardens and grew most of their food, food storage was quite important. Now days, a lot of people go to the grocery store almost every day to buy what they're going to eat for supper that day. It's an entirely different mind set from canning and storing enough food to get to the following harvest season. I guess I'm somewhere in between these 2 thought processes. I can't grow a lot of my food, so I buy extra amounts of everything that can be easily stored. I'm not really sure just how many months worth of food that I actually have in storage, it changes with my usage and my finances.
I try to keep several months ahead on the basics, and some dry foods that I keep last longer than others in general usage. For instance, rice is relatively inexpensive, and you can store it for a long time in the right storage conditions, so I tend to have more of that on hand. Rice is one of those basic survival foods that you should always have on hand. Pasta is also a good dry food to keep, and also oatmeal. Of course, there are other dried foods that you might want to keep, depending on your personal tastes.
I use 2 different kinds of buckets to keep my dried foods in. I use cleaned out cat litter buckets for storing packaged goods such as boxes of crackers, and I use food grade 5 gallon buckets with air tight screw on lids to keep bulk foods in.
Don't mind the background, the basement is a bit of a mess, as usual.
The lids that I use on the 5 gallon buckets are called Gamma lids. You can get them from most of the big box stores, or you can order them through the internet. They are a 2 piece lid. The outer ring snaps down over the bucket rim and has a rubber gasket to seal the the rim. The lid screws into the rim, and also has a rubber gasket to form a seal when the lid is screwed in. The rim is a bit of a challenge to get onto the bucket, a rubber mallet or a piece of 2X4 comes in hand to help persuade the rim to snap down on the bucket.
Here's the buckets with the lids open. As you can see, I have 3 boxes of saltine crackers in the cat litter bucket. I have bags of pasta in one of the 5 gallon buckets, and whole corn in the other. The whole corn is saved for making hominy. There used to be a lot more corn in the bucket, but a lot of it has been used up. This corn is an heirloom variety called Bloody Butcher. I have found that it is a good flour and cornmeal corn, but it's not the best for making hominy. It takes more processing than the better hominy type corn varieties.
Here is a bucket for rice storage. These buckets won't hold 50 pounds of rice due to it's bulk. The bucket will probably hold 25-30 pounds of rice, but it's easier to move it that way. This bag is down to about 10 or so pounds now.
I also use cat litter buckets for storing some canned food that I pressure can. It helps to protect the jars a bit more than just having them setting on a shelf, which makes it better for longer storage.
I also have a place in the basement where I store potatoes, but it isn't really cold enough for longer term storage. The small potatoes have gotten really sprouty now.
The medium size potatoes are not quite so bad. These are Yukon Gold potatoes, which seem to store really well for most of the winter. I'm going to need to do something with these potatoes soon or they're going to get soft and sprouty.
Most of my store bought canned food just gets stored on shelves. The cans are durable, and as long as you keep them dry, they last a long time. I have some canned goods in the basement, and some are stored upstairs in the pantry where they're more easily accessible. I rotate my stock as I use up the food in the pantry.
I probably should have more food in storage than I do, but I do what I can to at least maintain the supply that I have, and add to it when I can. Food hoarding is always a work in progress.
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