The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon March 11th, 2008

In the first post in this series, I said that it is important to think about the “whys” of food storage.  I argued that there were a lot of good reasons to buy in bulk and to store food, and that emergency reserves were only part of it. 

That’s true, but I want to talk here about how to think about those emergency reserves in an extended crisis.   I know some participants here don’t think an extended, widespread crisis is possible or likely.  I know some other people think one is immanent.  I don’t pretend to know the answer - I only know that I will be a lot happier in an extended crisis if I have a food reserve than if not.  I also know that it is possible to have a purely personal extended crisis - a sudden major illness or extended job loss. 

Also early on, I said I’d talk about how to both adapt your storage to your diet, and your diet to your storage.  Both are essential parts of this project, and figuring out which one you need to do is part of understanding what an emergency food reserve can and can’t do.

In a true emergency, food storage CAN provide a cushion or a hedge, allowing you to go for an extended time without depending on stores, or to extend limited food dollars by relying primarily on stored food.  Depending on how much reserve you have, it might be enough to get you through a shorter term crisis.  If, for example, a crisis occurs during a dormant season (cold in the north, hot and dry in some parts of the south), it can help you get from one planting season to another.

Food storage CAN’T get most of us through a long term crisis - we will have to find some way to refill our stores and meet present needs.  Food storage DOES NOT obviate the need for gardening, or supporting local food systems.  Thus, if a crisis occurs during a growing season, it is probably wise to rely as much as possible on your garden and local food system, and save your food storage if you can. 

Because you are eventually going to have to rely on local food systems that means Food Storage CAN NOT and probably SHOULD NOT reproduce a conventional Western Diet precisely.  By this I mean that for most of us, neither a diet that relies primarily on stored foods nor one that can be produced sustainably and locally is going to look like a conventional Western diet.  So we need to begin adapting our diets now.  You might look back at my first post in this series on appetite fatigue and other reasons to eat now (at least some of the time) the way you may have to eat in the future.

Why can’t food storage or local diets work like the way you eat now?  Well, technically it is possible to eat a conventional Western Diet out of food storage.  How?  Buy a lot of icky things - powdered eggs, bleached flours, shortening.  Spend a lot of money on canned meats (or raise your own and can a *lot* of meat).   Buy a ton of ramen noodles, canned tuna and twinkies.  But there are two problems - some of this stuff is expensive, most of it is bad for you (and the badness will show up quickly if that’s all you are eating), and sooner or later you are going to run out.  And when that happens, you’ll have to make a major dietary transition quickly - which will not be pleasant.

In the meantime, the sheer quality of your food will be really, really poor.  That is, if you’ve been drinking lots of local, organic milk, you are going to notice the difference when you try and drink powdered milk - something I’d only touch at all for baking (this is a personal preference - I don’t drink much milk anyway).  If you’ve been cooking with good olive oil, a transition to shortening is going to be quite unpleasant.  Think of it not so much as keeping your conventional diet, but mimicking it, creating cheap knock-off foods that look vaguely like the originals, but don’t have the nutritional value or taste.  Food Storage CAN be used to get you a really crappy Western Diet that is probably worse than what you’d eat normally, but I don’t recommend it.

On the other hand, it is possible to eat an extremely high quality, nutritious, good tasting diet out of your food storage that is not a knock-off of anything - it is the real thing.  But this is different than how most Western people eat now. It relies on whole grains, roots and legumes at its base, with some preserved supplements.  Meals based on these foods take advantage of things that don’t lose quality in storage, that do taste good when kept dry.  That is, instead of forcing things that don’t store well into the shape of your diet, this centers your diet around foods that do store well.

Meat, milk and eggs, if you include them in your food storage, CAN BE USED as supplements, but generally not as centerpieces (I am speaking here only of storage, not of home-produced versions of these foods).  The reason for this is that meat, milk and eggs simply don’t preserve all that well - there are substantive losses in quality in any method of preservation.   So if we store these items (obviously, some people will want them, others won’t) it is to use them as a supplement, a taste of something desirable and familiar, not as an everyday centerpiece to a Western-style meal.

Everyone will have to decide for themselves how important these foods are to them.  But as they are doing so, they should also think about how their food storage integrates with the diet that their region is likely to provide them with when their food storage runs out.  There is nothing wrong with eating rice or grassfed meat or whatever while you have it.  But if you don’t know how to cook what does grow well in your region, and how to eat and enjoy it, you will have to adapt to a difficult dietary change at a difficult time. 

And the reality is that people in the US at least, do actually go hungry because they don’t know how to cook and eat the foods that they have access to.  That is, many poor people in the US don’t stretch their food dollars optimally in part because they do not know how to cook inexpensive staples.  (There are also a host of reasons why poor people who do know how to do these things can’t do them, but that’s another post).  Lack of cooking skill actually leads to hunger in the US.  So it isn’t just enough to say “Ok, if we ever get reduced to Corn and beans, I’ll learn to cook with them” - the truth is that if corn and beans are what grows well in your region, your family needs to learn to cook and eat them now.  Eating out of your Food Storage now CAN prevent real hunger and illness later.

Food storage CAN help you make that transition - it can ease you over to a diet heavy on root crops and peas, while still allowing you some rice and salmon to smooth things over.  But you can’t live on it forever.  That’s not to say it doesn’t have value - but  FOOD SECURITY depends on the creation of local food systems - systems that start at your garden, but go outwards, across your local foodshed.  Because no one can store enough food to last forever.

Thus, Food Storage SHOULD as much as possible be built on a foundation of supporting your local food systems - that is, some of us may not have much choice about where we get our food.  But those of us who do have some leeway in our budgets and do have choices should build our food storage as much as possible from local farmers - or at worst, direct from farmers that help build someone else’s local food system.  Dollars spent building up your food storage at the supermarket or Costco are dollars that are working *against* the thing that we most need to rely on in the long term - local food producers.  I’m not suggesting that we won’t buy some things that support the industrial food system - we’re all bound up in it to a degree.  But every dollar we can spend locally on things that our region grows well, or every thing we can can, dry and grow ourselves,  makes possible not just your short term food security (that is, the stuff you’ve got in storage) but the long term possibility of security in a crisis.

So what’s the gist of this?  We should be thinking about what food storage can and can’t do for us, what it should and should not do for us.  Yes, it can save our lives - in the short term.  But think of it as a bridge to the local food systems that are our long term security and hedge against disaster.

 Ok, coming up: Learning to Love Your Local Food Staples, Help Transitioning to a Lower Animal Product Diet,  a Tour of My Food Storage, The Chatelaine and Learning to Manage Your Stores - not necessarily in that order.

Cheers,

Sharon

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