Friday Food Storage Quickie: Feed Someone Else
Sharon December 5th, 2008
Ok, usually these focus on little things you can do to improve your own food security. But this week, I want everyone to put a little extra effort into improving the food security of others, at whatever level they can. What can you do? It varies based on your income, where you live, how shy you are, etc… but everyone can do one or two or three of these things.
And since I’m asking you to do stuff, I thought I ought to give back a little. I’ve got a signed copy of Kathy Harrison’s wonderful book _Just in Case_ to give away – it is a terrific book, the clearest and wisest guide to getting started on preparedness that I know. Sign up in comments for a drawing, I’ll let one of the kids pull a name out of a hat, and I’ll send you a copy. Make sure you mention in your comment that you are in for the drawing, and we’ll draw on Monday and announce the winner!
1. Talk to someone about having a reserve of food – it could be a family member, a friend, a person at church or even someone you meet in the supermarket. It could be as you are checking out at the farmstand “I know, doesn’t it look like a lot of potatoes – but given the times, it feels important to have some food, in case times get even tougher.” You can talk to one person or a group of 50 – preach from the pulpit or chat over tea or by the watercooler. But talk to someone about why it is important to have some food stored up. You don’t have to discuss peak oil and climate change – you can talk about unemployment and what grandma did.
2. Offer to help someone get started with food storage. Talk to a neighbor “I just noticed that tuna and rice are on sale – these days food prices are so high – would you like me to pick up a couple of extra bags or cans for you?” If someone you talked to wants to know more, well, show them/tell them what you’ve been doing. Start a neighborhood preparedness group, and get together once a month. Start a buying club, or a food price stabilization group – everyone gets together and tracks the sales, or orders wholesale or helps find good prices.
3. For those not in the dead of winter like us, talk about the food resources around you. Are fruit trees going unharvested? Could they be gleaned and given away to the food pantry or shared with friends? Are there wild foods you could introduce a friend, a neighbor, a niece or nephew too “Look, honey, that’s lambs quarters. It doesn’t look like they spray here or it is too near the road, so let’s pick some for a salad.”
4. Give the gift of food security. Trying to figure out what to give people for the holidays? What about a gift certificate to the local farmer’s market or a membership in a coop, a basket of produce from your garden or root cellar, a book or class on food storage and preservation? Perhaps you could give a young person you know with their first apartment the gift of an afternoon of “setting up the pantry” – you can help them shop, clean and set up. Or perhaps you might teach a friend how to can, dehydrate or make gifts of food.
5. Donate locally. Give food, money, and whatever else is needed to local charities. Keep a close eye on your food pantry – particularly after the holidays. If you don’t have money to donate yourself, at least spread the word that the battered women’s shelter desperately needs food and toiletries, that the soup kitchen needs someone to bake bread, and that the animal shelter needs kibble. One charity I like is www.seedalliance.org – they give free organic seeds to prison gardens, food pantry gardens, school gardens – anyone who needs to learn to grow food.
6. Help someone in need directly. Maybe you don’t have money, but you’ve got an extra coat, some home canned food that you can’t give through the food pantry, and you can give someone who lost their car to the Repo man a ride to pick up her son at daycare. Ask around through religious institutions, social service programs and schools, and you’ll find someone you can match up with and help.
7. Don’t forget the world’s hungry. As things get bad here, the food crisis has gotten knocked off the front page. That doesn’t mean it has gotten better – the world is full of desperately hungry people right now, and they need our help. Donate money – my favorite programs are the heifer fund www.heifer.org, and the Mennonite Central Committee www.mcc.org, but you may have your own. Feel free to suggest more in comments.
8. If you don’t have money to give, or even if you do, make sure you also remind governments to keep their commitment to the World Food Program and the world’s starving people. We’re throwing billions away on keeping the rich institutions - but the US and other nations haven’t ponied up their promised donations to keep people from starving to death. DO NOT let them get away with it.
What Else? Anyone have any suggestions? How many of these can each of us do this week? And don’t forget to put your name in for the drawing before Monday!
Shalom,
Sharon
- Food Storage , food storage quickie
- Comments(109)
Just this week I purchased some number 10 cans of non-fat instant milk and scrambled egg mix for my brothers’ family and for my dad, and had these mailed to them as Christmas gifts, citing the sense of security I receive from having such items in my posseesion “just in case” a natural, economic, or political disaster should visit. They are not totally unreasonable people and are cognizant about the possible dangers of the future, but just haven’t taken any steps to prepare. So part of my message to them was that the items they are receiving are a good start to a long term food storage program. I hope it gets them moving.
Please enter me in the drawing for the book, “Just In Case”. Thanks.
Please include me in the drawing. Thanks
Please put my name in the drawing as well. Thanks so much for the opportunity. I’m just starting out and need all the help I can get!
Coincidentally, today I talked to one of my friends about the economy and the coming Great Depression. She was right on board, so we may start a garden together. She and I both have a tendency to kill even silk plants, so maybe we’ll figure out how to grow green stuff together – if we do a lot of researching.
Please enter me in the drawing.
I’m still in the learning phases. I’d like to put in a bigger garden next year, and hope to partake even more of our neighbor’s fruit trees that otherwise go to waste. Looking ahead, hubs and I have talked about rebuilding the root cellar when we live on our farm (it had to be crashed in for safety reasons), I plan to keep the chickens when they become our responsibility, and I’d love to eventually grow our own wheat to grind. I’ve indicated to my MIL that I’d be interested in learning the ins and outs of her pressure canner!
Other more sustainable things we’re doing – nursing the baby, using cloth diapers, looking at a wind generator for the farm, and I’ve been eyeing hubs’s pet cow for milk, although she doesn’t like me very well.
Thanks for this nudge and opportunity!
The book sounds great and I’d love to be in the drawing!
What a great idea, giving to someone else and/or helping someone else with food security, for the Friday focus. Thanks for reminding me, I will do that!
[...] Casaubon’s Book » Blog Archive » Friday Food Storage Quickie: Feed Someone Else Ok, usually these focus on little things you can do to improve your own food security. But this week, I want everyone to put a little extra effort into improving the food security of others, at whatever level they can. What can you do? It varies based on your income, where you live, how shy you are, etc… but everyone can do one or two or three of these things. [...]
An idea that occurred to me is: if you go to a Costco once a month or so, buy one extra case of cans per trip to donate. Usually not much more than $8. They have everything from diced tomatoes to chilis to mandarin oranges….Food pantries would love the cases and it won’t hurt the pocket book as much.
Please dont put me in, we have spent the last 15 years setting up ,very slow process though. We found it hard to convey an idea of coming desperate times , over the last few months it is getting a little easy though.I wish you and all the folk reading your words the best of luck.Regards.
I would love to be in the drawing for Kathy Harrison’s book
Thanks for the reminder of that book. I had looked at it before, but now I ordered it (yeah, sorry, from Amazon) for my sister for her birthday. But I have 2 more sisters, so please put me in for the drawing.
Thnaks for all your wise and inspiring words.
Julie
Please add me to the drawing. I’d like to learn more and share more. Thanks!
For those who are worried about the neighbors turning into cannibal zombie hordes, I like John Michael Greer’s point that if your value is in a stockpile, there will always be people who plan to rob you of it, but if your value is in skills, you’ll be everyone’s friend. I don’t subscribe to doomerism, but the Great Depression wasn’t TEOTWAWKI either, and FDR made it illegal to own gold or for a farmer to grow unapproved wheat to feed his own family (claiming the right to do so under the commerce clause, since if he hadn’t, he would have been forced to buy wheat, conceivably in interstate commerce!). It might indeed be wise not to tell the neighbors if you have a lot of food stored, not so much because they might come to seize it, as because if the government decides to “crack down on hoarders” they might rat you out, and unlike looters, government agents once resisted will never stop coming until they have wiped you out.
So, I would suggest emphasizing process: not that you have a giant pile of food at any given moment, but that you have the skills and means to procure and prepare food on an ongoing basis. For example, give people homemade bread, jam made from your fruit trees, or teas from your herb garden. Let people know that you can teach the relevant skills and can share, say, sourdough starter or vegetable seeds with those who are interested. This all will make people think of you, in case of trouble, as someone whose skills could be useful to them indefinitely, but not as a goose who already has a nestful of golden eggs.
Don’t enter me because I already own the book! My 11-yr old loves to read it, as it is full of cute comic-book-type illustrations. Loaded with helpful info.
I love that book.
Shannon’s idea is great: If you have the means, add a case of canned food to your Costco cart and then donate to your area food bank. If you plan your trip right, you can stop off on the way home from your Costco run and give your canned goods then. Food banks truly will appreciate it. And ctdaffodil has a very good idea of including a simple recipe with her food bank donation.
I wonder if food banks ever give out cookware? It would be hard to cook rice without a pot and tight-fitting lid — although you can use foil wrap if you’re desperate.
We’ll be donating to Salvation Army mostly. Also preparing some baked goods for my neighbor who is a single mom with 4 always-hungry teenagers.
Please put me down for the book! I’m a definte newbie. My dh thinks I’m getting paranoid, and yet my MIL is on board. Probably because she suffered through the Japanese occupation of her homelands in WW2, she has first hand experience with real food shortages.
It is scarred onto her psyche for life. And even though everyone around her tries to reassure her that she will Never go hungry, I think she probably knows better than to use the word NEVER.
Now to convince my dh and boys to get on board…
Love your blog. Lots and lots of ideas- thank you!
Please put me in for the drawing. thanks
Please add me into the drawing. We just recently helped out both locally and world-wide. Locally, we donated to our women’s shelter specifically for their food pantry. It actually hadn’t occurred to us until they wrote about it in their newsletter. We’d wanted to donate to a food pantry, but every one in town is associated with a church that doesn’t match our religion and it just didn’t sit well with me. But then the shelter spoke up and we wondered why we hadn’t thought of it before! They support women and families who have moved out of the shelter as well!
We also donated to a charity in Thailand–a man who is supporting 40 orphans all by himself!
Please put me in for the drawing
Please sign me up for the drawing.
We are blessed with Tillers International in our community, a nonprofit who teaches low-capital farming (i.e. with draft animals) to farmers in the developing world (and here in the US as well). My husband and I, and our daughters, enjoy spending our volunteer time with them.
Please enter me into the drawing for “Just in Case.”
I actually JUST returned this book to the library earlier today, and it is excellent. Along with your blog and a couple of other resources, I’d been using it to help me to take some first steps toward slowly building water and food reserves and creating evacuation kits for myself and my husband. The book was due today, though, and I couldn’t keep it nearly as long as I would have liked. It is in high demand, and could not be renewed. I would really love to have a copy to keep.
Coincidentally, I also just found out today that the local library system will be purchasing copies of “Depletion and Abundance,” which I’m excited about. I had requested that they review the book for purchase, and they notified me today that they decided to purchase multiple copies. Happily, I’ll get the chance to read your book soon, and it will be available for others to read in my area.
I really appreciate your blog and words of inspiration, Sharon.
Please put me in for a chance at the book! This is a great post, and very timely. Our knitting group was just discussing these topics!
Please put my name in the hat. Love your blog and love this post.
My mom was always storing food for “just in case” and I got into the habit from her. My adult son shrugged off my bringing him canned goods, rice, and dryed beans to store at his house as being something “my crazy mom does”. Well, today he said that he’s scared about the economic situation the US is in and asked what else he should be buying. If I win the drawing, the book will be for him.
Don’t bother entering me in the drawing, but, Ros, I would love to get a pdf of your cookbook. I have a few older cookbooks along the same lines, but I find that some of them assume that you would just naturally have a bunch of stuff in your kitchen that supermarkets don’t really sell anymore.
You’ve inspired me again, Sharon, the gift of a CSA membership is a great idea!
Sharon,
Please put my name in the pot for the book
drawing as well.
We give to Heifer (we love that the recipients of the animals, once they are doing well, give to the next family in their area who needs help, thereby making them benefactors, not just benefactees, and also raising self esteem).
Also, gradually encouraging friends to order more things from bulk food coop for the winter.
I qualify as shy;) but want to to do more.
Thanks for the ideas.
Warm Wishes
Oh, I’d like a chance for the book (please put me in for the drawing, thanks!)
Thanks for the link for seedalliance.org. I just made several gift donations to Heifer International. They aren’t local, per say, but what I like about them is that they don’t concentrate on one area of the world and they offer a chain of giving. They gift livestock to folks even in the US.
I am going to finish up my holiday “shopping” from this seed alliance link!
Great post/great tips!
It helps to read comments first before posting your own! I just wanted to adda thanks to Sara and the SOS link. I am in Northern Indiana too and I recently purchased some similar mixes from 10,000 villages. The ones I bought were made by women in Colorado. I had no idea there was a similar program in Indiana!!
I learn so much here!
Live in a small town in central Ky. House on a corner lot. Big trees all around. Only place with full sunlight on a narrow strip of land in the front yard about 10ft from the street. Made 18′x 24″ planter, and filled it with vegies. In plain view of any passer by. Thought it sent a good message. One old fellow helped himself to some tomatoes.
Sharon, you’re just so cool.
Good Sabbath to you and yours today!
I’d love to be in the drawing for the book … I’ve got the general concept of “need to store stuff we can use” but I could really use some more guidance on specifics.
For some reason this post made me think of the conversations I’ve had with my mom – she remembers cousins being sent to the uncle’s farm, because at least there nobody went hungry … and she remembers growing up very, very poor in northern British Columbia, where her family only had milk (powdered at that) because the neighbouring First Nations people shared from their government allotments. Hard times can, indeed, come, and it would be good to be prepared.
We are fortunate in that we are “the uncle with the farm” for our family … we have a dairy cow, a calf, some sheep, chickens (lots of eggs), and a garden that could use some significant improvement. I know I can fill my parents’ freezer with meat from our own stock, and we have enough butter and eggs and milk and produce to share, ,too … and that gives me peace of mind. I’m gradually expanding my concept of “my people”, too … I want to make it as wide as I possibly can. I’m one of those people who doesn’t feel called to help the world-as-a-whole so much as to help those in my corner of the world. May God help me to do a good job of it.
Please enter me in the drawing.
Oh, and also, could you start posting about 4 times a day? LOL Kidding, of course. I love reading your articles.
Long-term storage canned meats, canned cheese and canned butter, as well as the usual dry foods are available here, http://www.internet-grocer.net/product.html , at a discount, if anyone’s interested.
Thanks for this reminder, Sharon – it’s easy to forget that other people need help sometimes as I work to get my own stores and preparations in order. But, I’m going to devote some time to the local food bank, and I plan to volunteer there as well, because time is important too, and might offer a chance to talk to some people about the issues at hand and form community as well. I’m also considering giving MCC gifts to a few people on my list – my folks don’t want anything (although I’d love to get them some preparedness things, they wouldn’t be so happy with more stuff in their house right now, which is part of the reason I’m working to stock up for all of us), and gifts like this seem to work well.
Also, it can be worth giving money to food banks, if it’s affordable for people. Often times food banks can buy two to three times the food that an average person could for the same amount of money, and they can get what they really need.
And, while I’m here, I’d love to get in on the book drawing. I’ve been eyeing this one, but haven’t bought it because I’ve been focusing on food storage.
Oh Sharon please put my name in your drawing. I talk to people every chance I get about buying a little extra “cause you really never know”… Thanks for all you do. steve
De-lurking for a moment ….
Please put me in the drawing for the book. I’ve been reading here for several months after stumbling around the internet looking for canning instructions and finding so much more about food storage here! We started looking into doing much more scratch cooking and even canning about a year ago when my husband had a kidney stone “event” he is *very* interested in never repeating. He was asked to lower his sodium intake, and when we started really looking at labels (of even very plain canned things, like tomatoes), we were appalled. Consequently, I have most of a bushel of tomato sauce in my freezer this year due to not getting our hands on a canner until after the season was pretty much over. *sigh*
At least I have him sort of in the habit of donating to the local food shelf network already. “Used to it” in the sense that I take care of our yearly donation and he doesn’t grumble about it. Out loud.
We both grew up in less than ideal income situations, so it’s weird for him to consider us to be better off than many people. I read the statistics, and am simply livid that there are people going hungry in *my* city, in the middle of the mid-west farm belt.
Our donation is a little bigger than usual this year, and I’m looking into scratching out even more next year. I’m going to have to look into a planned giving kind of deal — monthly or so instead of one concentrated bunch at the end of the year. Our garden was bigger this year too, but we get a LOT of shade. I’m looking into stealth gardening/edible landscaping for next year.
Thanks so much for all of your information, even if reading this particular blog scares me on a regular basis. (At least lately.) It’s good to know that there are real, viable alternatives out there when the energy crunch of my childhood returns to stay.
Excellent ideas. I’d love to be in the drawing for the book!
I had a wonderful experience yesterday. A widowed friend of ours passed away recently, and in helping her family (all from out-of-country) take care of her belongings, my husband and I volunteered to bring home a carload of clothing and shoes and look for people to share them with and then thrift anything that wasn’t taken. I wracked my brain trying to think of the right person/people to call. I finally thought of a friend of my mum-in-law’s, another woman who’d lost her husband a few years ago—a person with only a small income. I asked my mum-in-law to call her. The friend came over and I realized that her build, size, and even coloring was almost exactly the same as my friend who’d just passed away. Even the shoes, which were all very good quality, were a perfect fit. I’ve never seen such a fashion show! My sister-in-law came over too and picked up a few pieces, and the three of us had a wonderful time suggesting outfits and watching the little miracle unfold. It’s so gratifying to see a windfall come somebody’s way, and to be even a little part of the process of sharing abundance. There’s nothing as empowering in tough times as giving.
Great post with lots of suggestions! Please enter me in the drawing!
I have been trying to talk to both my just out of college daughters and my MIL about food storage, the pantry principle, not wasting food, etc. I’m not sure exactly how much is getting through, but I keep trying! Hopefully, things won’t get so bad that they are smacked by reality and find themselves in desperate straits!
I’m in for the drawing! Thank you for doing that. Very nice.
I’m very interested in learning about canning and preserving so I can just continue to do that with food all winter long. Why wait till the end of the summer, as we know, gardens don’t produce immediately, and we will need food for the early spring and summer.
The kids and I will donate to the food pantry here.
Jyotsna
Great post! Please also enter me for the drawing.
I agree with Dewey about John Michael Greer’s point about skills instead of stockpiling being useful. What has kept running through my head lately, almost a mantra, is “What can I do to be useful to my neighbors?”
We do some food storage, but I’ve been mainly concentrating on making our garden more productive so I can teach my neighbors if any get interested. Right now most of them think of us as those crazy people with the gardens in the front yard. We’ve added chickens to our household, too, so soon I should have eggs to share.
Thank you for your thoughtful post and wonderful ideas. Please enter me in the drawing as well.
It’s a little thing, but I want to give food storage for the holidays as well. And we’ve decided any money we receive as gifts will be spent on food storage, too.
Thanks for all you do.
Please enter me in your drawing
Thanks
Count me in for the drawing. I have already talked to neighbors about stocking up. Those who have not I have included in my stocking preps to be able to help feed them.
Count me in too, please. I have started a small food co-op with about 10 families where we buy from a distributor that works with all organic farmers, most of whom are local to my state. I am also trying to get a local seed bank started here in my area, too. We expanded our backyard garden area and built our first greenhouse with all reclaimed materials, mostly from Freecycle. I love being prepared and use the old saying “Remember to tie the camels” for the way to live your life.
Thanks for all of your valuable info you put on your blog. I’ve shared it with lots of people to get them started
New reader here; please put me “in” for the drawing.
I’m a suburbanite just outside of Chicago, with a medium-sized shady front and backyard, and a boatload of zoning regulations controlling property use. What is a suburban mini paradise of shade, green, and privacy on a city-sized lot is not suitable for mini farming. No chickens allowed here. Any advice re: websites that address suburbanites?
Our specific high-income suburb (selected for schools, big issue in Chicago) appears placidly unaffected by economy thus far. But we are very close to large working-class neighborhoods with significant unemployment, crime, and social problems. Living in an older near-in suburb, we actually have mass transit rail and bus service readily available, as well as walking/biking distance schools, shops, and Trader Joes/Aldi/Whole Food range of grocery stores. Our real estate burden, utility costs, and 10.25% sales tax are extremely high.
Our specific highly-specialized profession is not easily relocated to a non-urban or rural area, and there are significantly large lay-offs occurring now for architects across the nation, which make it even less likely to readily relocate, unless you’re ready to move to places like Abu Dhabi. DH’s firm has already cut 25% staff, and more cuts are eminent.
We try to live on one income for past decade. Our household already “eats in” for almost all meals, drive a hybrid, keep some “no spoil” foodstock, keep heat at 61 F, and shop almost exclusively at thrift stores, and if not, at deep discount. My mother thinks I’m a cheap and eccentric “doomer”.
Oh, in terms of other places to donate, I go like Oxfam, a British charity. They have an “Oxfam unwrapped” program that’s a lot like Heifer International, from what I understand.
Last year all my adult relatives got refrigerator magnets with pictures of the goat they had donated to a family in Kenya or the 15 school lunches they had provided for the schoolchildren in Namibia or the seeds they had bought for the farmer in Nigeria… And not one of them complained.
Hi,
please add my name to the drawing.
thanks!
Primarily because I’ve been reading Sharon for the last year, I am well stocked up on basics, and few non-essentials too. I’ve been a little pathological about “shopping for the apocalypse”, but then I’ve also just told myself over and over, “if the worst thing I do with my anxieties about the economy is to buy extra non-perishables, well, good on me…”
So I feel prepared, but I worry about my neighbors, so I’m donating cash to the local food bank. I’ve been trying to figure out how to give gifts of “A donation in your name has been made to the food bank” and for the most part I can’t think how to do so, except in addition to other gifts. Some people (no wonder I think of them as those closest to me…) will absolutely “get it” and feel good that I donated in their name, but others are likely to be pissy that there was no “real” gift in the box I sent to them, and others actually hostile towards the idea.
In the past I’ve thought about Heifer and other organizations, but this year I think I need to keep everything local in order to do my part to be sure my neighbors have what they need. I want my community to survive this depression, even if it might not thrive. So when I think about a burger or a beer with a friend, when I think about Christmas shopping, or grocery shopping, or having someone help me do some work around the house, I am doing everything I can to eat local, drink local, shop local, donate local, and hire local. It might cost me a few dollars more in the short run, but it might help my across-the-street neighbor with three kids under 8, and it might help my neighbor who has a 5 yr old with cerebral palsy, and it might help my neighbor who’s wife left a couple of years ago and who isolates himself more and more every year.
Sharon- my brother, who lurks here but is too bashful to post- bought a goat.
Via heifer.org. Because of you.
That’s a pretty big deal.
Greenpa, I’m so happy to hear that! My kids are already arguing about what animal they will be giving away for Chanuakah – our family tradition is that one night, the children give an animal away to someone else, and that the ability to do that is their gift. The first year it was a llama named “Sticky” (Isaiah won the toss for who got to name it, and he was only two – they also write a letter to the kids who recieve it (and no, we have no idea if kids receive it, but who cares)), last year it was goats (named Layla and Tov by Simon) and this year the kids are campaigning heavily for a water buffalo (pricey, not sure of the budget) and debating what to name it.
We love heifer!
Sharon
Wow, look at all these comments! what a heart warming thing to read all these people who are helping themselves and those around them! How many more americans are out there who can do the same things? We may find out we’re made of sterner stuff than we think we are in our culture.
I seem to need all the heart-warming I can get the past few weeks so I come here for some of it.
I’m giving money to go to local food banks and a small donation to the excellent website (which I’m sure some of you may read) the Automatic Earth. I’m also going to give something to a local animal charity.
Peace to you all,
shamba
Please toss my name in for the drawing, too.
Thank you for all the important work you do!
Please include me in the draw, thank you for all our inspiration advice and hard work.
Debbie
A great post & reminder! I am already doing #s 5 & 7, and am trying to do more on a personal level. I am printing this out as a reminder to myself and for all the ideas. Thanks!
Please add me to the drawing, too.