The truth is that even if you think you are perfectly secure, you probably aren’t.  All you have to do is think about recent occasions when regions had power outages or crises for weeks on end, and when a buffer of food and medical supplies, and evacuation plan and lots of warm blankets would have been welcome.  Think Kentucky ice storms, Northeast ice storms, Houston and New Orleans Hurricanes…honestly, we all know it could happen.

So I would advise everyone to take a little while and see what your situation is, and maybe set some new goals for the fall and winter to improve – we all have things we can improve on.  So here’s a little quiz.  All questions are true/false. 

True or false:

Water:

1. I have two weeks of stored water, including my water heater and rainbarrels (if rainbarrels, you need a filter as well).  Stored water should be a minimum 1 gallon per person per day (2 is much better), plus 1 quart for each pet.

2. I have a plan for getting water (if you have a well) if the power is out for an extended period.  This could be a well bucket, a manual pump, or another water reliable water source. I have tested and used this source, and know that it works and is reliable.

3. I have a way of filtering or treating contaminated water, should my city or well water become unsafe to drink.

4. I have some familiarity with my local water infrastructure – I know where it comes from, and my community has a plan to handle water emergencies, including extended power outages. 

5. If I don’t have a reliable water source and am relying on stored water, I have a supply of alcohol-based hand-sanitizer for cleaning and hygeine. 

6. I know how to set up a composting toilet and handle hygeine issues.  If I live in a densely populated area, I’m prepared to talk to my neighbors about this stuff to prevent the spread of disease

Food Storage:

1. I have several familiar recipes that my family likes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks that I can make several times each from my food storage without any other ingredients. 

2. I have food storage to last *at least* 3 weeks?  3 months?  Six months or more?  My family could eat wholly from our pantry for this period, and, even if they didn’t love it, would enjoy the foods generally.

3. I have special foods for those who have special dietary needs in my family and among the people most likely to come to us in an emergency.  If these foods are different than our normal ones, I have used them, and know that everyone will and can eat them.

4. I have fresh foods in cool/cold storage or in the garden year ’round that allow for a diet including fresh vegetables and fruits to supplement dry, canned or other preserved foods.

5. My food storage includes a variety of staple grains and legumes, not just wheat.  I know how to cook and use these grains, and my family likes them and eats them regularly. 

6. If I rely on a freezer, I either use it only for supplementation, or have a backup plan for how to prevent food waste (throwing a big party, canning or preserving it) if the power is out. 

7. I have the tools to preserve and store foods that I grow, forage or purchase in bulk.

8. I have stored food for my pets and livestock.

9. If my family regularly consumes meat, dairy or eggs, I have the animals to reproduce this, stored equivalents or a family that is comfortable with doing without and a store of recipes to make sure they don’t miss it.

10. I have a store of vitamins and understand the basics of nutrition so that we can eat well from our pantry.

11. I take advantage of bulk purchasing, seasonal abundance and sales to expand my storage as much as I can.  I also take advantage (or direct those more in need to it) of free food, through foraging, gleaning, dumpster diving, etc…

12. I have a budget for food storage and preparedness, and I add a little to my storage every week (or whatever period you use) by preserving, purchasing or foraging.

Evacuation Plans:

1. My family has “grab and go” bags that include basic necessities to allow us to manage up to a few days in transit or a shelter if we must leave our home rapidly.  These include copies of important documents and photos, portable, easy to cook foods, medication, matches, water, hygeine items, a change of clothes, children’s needs. 

2. My family has an evacuation plan including a meet up spot, a plan for picking up children or elders from various sites, a family member who can take messages and coordinate communications if people are out of touch, and transportation security – ie, bicycles, or stabilized gas for the car, directions to likely locales, etc….

3. Everyone in the family knows what to do if we get separated.  Friends/family that we might evacuate to know we might arrive and are willing to help.

4. We have plans for pets and livestock should we need to evacuate.

Health:

1. We have multiple first-aid kits (Independence Days includes a comprehensive discussion of this) and know how to use them.  All adults and older children are competent to provide first aid, evaluate whether something needs more medical attention, and handle an emergency if medical attention isn’t immediately available.  Not only do I own the books, but I’ve actually read them .

2. I have a three week supply of any needed medication or a viable substitute that I have tried and that works.  I also have copies of all my prescriptions, including glasses. 

3. If we are quarantined, I have basic nursing skills and know how to care for a sick person, and to reduce risk of infection. 

4. I have the capacity to boil water and heat food, to prevent fires while using new tools, to keep warm or cool and handle basic hygeine issues even during an extended power outage.

Tribal issues:

1. I know which of my family/friends might come to us in a crisis.  I have made basic preparations to meet their needs in an emergency, at least for a short time.  I have enough food and clothing, and at least a sleeping bag or two to offer.

2. If I am anticipating children, parents or extended family to rely on me in the long term, I have made preparations for this in my food storage, medical storage and supply of other basic needs.  This includes covering special needs like diapers for infants, medications for elderly parents, etc…

3. I have sent people I love a letter saying “if you ever need to come here I would welcome you.”  The letter includes back-road directions and is designed to get them thinking about such an eventuality.

Community:

1. I am familiar with my local foodshed and watershed, and am working with others to expand it.

2. I am encouraging others to build up a reserve of food and medicine, and to find ways to meet other needs, at either the individual or communal level.

3. I can teach others the skills I’ve gained, and am willing to do so.

Ok, scoring: If you see a “false” that’s an indication that that’s a place to begin working.  How did you score?  Remember, if you have work to do (me too, trust me!), don’t panic – just do a little at a time.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to fill a bottle with water or pick up an extra package of bandaids and one of dried beans.  It all adds up over time.

-Sharon

Anyway, in editing down _Independence Days_, I had to take out a lot of the links in the back of the book – or rather, for a long time I made a page and promised that I’d actually do something about it eventually.  Well, the book is now out, and it says that you can go to my site so I finally put them up at the top of my site on the “Food Preservation and Storage Link Vault” page.

I haven’t tested all the links and I’m sure there are good ones I’m missing – please feel free to add them in comments, or to email me using the contact form or at jewishfarmer@gmail.com if you notice a broken link or have a good reference for me to include.  And I hope this helps!

Sharon

Think about how archetypical the ability to celebrate in difficult times is – in mainstream American literature, for example, Christmas is the archetypical celebration, but it crosses cultures – there are plenty of stories in every culture about the holiday that almost wasn’t.  Think about the literature of an American childhood – Tiny Tim, Laura Ingalls and the March girls of Little Women are always figured as pulling together a way of making Christmas different, real and special, even in the most troubled of times.  And this is no accident – the ability to celebrate central holidays is proof that “we are all right even if things are tough” – proof to children, certainly, who need stability, but I think proof to adults as well.

When you build your food storage, it should include the components of festival foods – those few special things without which it “isn’t really Passover” (note, the beauty of matzah is that it tastes pretty much the same whether stored for 10 years or fresh ) or “that we always have on Dia de los Muertos.”  This may involve some recipe triage – can you make good stollen with canned butter, or with coconut oil, which lasts longer than butter?  How long does cranberry sauce store, anyway?  What would you do if you couldn’t get a goose, or a tofurkey or a ham – or whatever the traditional feasting meat is.

You may have to let some foods go – one of the things I learned when I converted to Judaism and began keeping kashruth is that it is surprisingly possible to adapt most recipes to keeping kosher.  Vegans, those dealing with gluten or other intolerances, etc… all find these things out.  They also find out that there are some things that probably they just won’t get.  I can make decent mashed potatoes without butter.  I cannot make really fabulous mashed potatoes without butter, nor can I make my father’s mashed potatoes with carmelized onions and cheese, at least not with a turkey at Thanksgiving.  So I’ve accepted that that’s no longer in my repetoir for Thanksgiving, and while I like the basic mashed pototoes ok, have decided that our family likes roasted potatoes with garlic and chiles even better.  So, mashed sweet potatoes, but no mashed potatoes (they show up as the centerpiece of dinner now and again as a treat, and that’s actually better, since they are so rich – really, who needs that much lily gilding, along with the turkey, the sweets, the pumpkin pie, the roasted onions, the…)

But I think it is important to keep as much basic structure of your accustomed meals as possible – if not the turkey, at least the ingredients of pumpkin pie, if not the marinated brussel’s sprouts, at least Grandma’s marinade, applied to some other available green.   This is the time to invest in the things that make your family identity special – the ingredients for the lasagna you always have, the wine that marks a special meal, the favorite preserve you only bring out at the holiday.  These mark the day as “like the past” and tie us to family and tradition, even if family can’t be here, or we can’t afford to go to them. 

You can endure an austerity diet, a great deal of stress and poverty much better if a few times during the year, there comes a moment of excess – one in which you eat as much fat and sweet as you could want, in which you drink more than you usually do, and in which you feel yourself momentarily freed from your constraints.  In our ordinary lives, where we often can eat and drink to excess routinely, where we are pressured to make the holiday perfect, or spend too much, we can think we’d be glad to be freed from these excesses – and sometimes that’s true.  But the stripped down version, in a stripped down life, one that maintains essentials in tough times, is, I think another thing all together.

My family can’t imagine Chanukah without latkes, or without gingerbread cookies, which come from my own family’s Christmas celebrations, but are now, made in Jewish shapes, part of our Chanukah.  Passover must have matzah, of course, and Sukkot and Thanksgiving both require pumpkin pie.  The sabbath means grape juice (wine for the grownups) and the ingredients of challah.  These are small things to add to my storage – I don’t need a six month supply of cranberry sauce, a couple of jars will suffice.  But they matter vastly in excess of their space – they remind us that the cycle of the year goes on, and that joy goes on, even when it seems most difficult to remember.

 Sharon

It also comes from the fact that seasoning for a long time was assumed to be intuitive.  Most old cookbooks simply say “add sweet herbs” or “to taste.”  But I can’t count the number of times I’ve put “to taste” in a recipe, only to receive 30 emails asking me how much I really mean .  We like quantities, we like precision – we like to be told how things are supposed to taste.  And if you look at many (not all, and things are getting better) cookbooks, things are supposted to, well, taste pretty bland.

Perhaps because my family’s favorite culinary cultures are Asian, we use herbs and spices in large quantities – I buy them in bulk at ethnic grocery stores, or order them in bulk from various suppliers (more on this later in the post).  And, of course, I grow them.  Besides the usual American culinary herbs - parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme…plus oregano, mint, chives and basil, we grow a lot of others, including a range of Vietnamese herbs (Vap Ca, Rau ram, Rau om), variations on the classic themes (orange, lemon and nutmeg thymes, zaatar (an oregano), pineapple sage, african, cinnamon, holy, lemon and other basils), and less common culinary herbs (fennel, lovage, sweet cicely, lemon and lime balm, savories, salad burnet…you get the idea) 

 For most of us, as we adapt our diets to food storage, spices and herbs are going to be more important, and in simply much larger quantities than most Americans use them.  Most cultures that have relied heavily on staple foods season those foods heavily, either directly, or by using spiced and herbal condiments (I’ve written more on the value of condiments here http://sharonastyk.com/2009/01/22/condimental/.)

And that means adding spices and herbs to our food storage, and preserving/storing them correctly.  The first thing to know is the good news – most spices, provided that they are fair traded, are a good thing to buy from far away – so if you don’t live where cassia trees or vanilla orchids grow, you don’t have to worry much about using cinnamon or vanilla beans – things that are shipped in dry form, and used in comparatively small quantities (even if it is more than 1/4 tsp at a time ) are a good use of shipping. 

The best way to store spices is in their whole form, grinding them as you need them, or in small batches not kept more than 1 year.  In some cases, you may never have met whole spices before – a nutmeg, mace or true cinnamon bark is something unusual.  You will need a way to grind them – you can use a mortar, although this is quite a bit of work, or a mexican style metate (this is a bit easier, since it is rougher, but some spices do get caught in the stone and are hard to capture for eating), as long as there is power, an electric coffee grinder (don’t cross-use it with coffee, unless you like spice flavored coffee and coffee flavored spice) or a manual coffee grinder (this is what I use). 

 If you must buy ground spices, replace them every year, or keep them in the freezer for up to three years - use your nose – something that has little smell is not worth keeping.  If it has faded, you can use more, but it can be a losing proposition – you lose complexity as well as flavor over time. 

The best way to use most herbs, of course, is fresh, and chopping a few handfulls of them into food is a delight.  Depending on how much of each herb you use, a window box may be enough, or you may need a good sized herb bed.  If you live in a cold climate, you can often bring many culinary herbs inside for the winter – look for varieties suited to pot culture, and adapt them gradually – the dryness of indoor air can be a killer.  I find that basil simply doesn’t overwinter well for me, while rosemary, thyme, parsley and others do fine.  You’ll need to experiment.  Some herbs, like sage, which is at its best in the autumn anyway, will winter over with cover in even very cold places, keeping some green leaves to be harvested even in February.

If you are going to dry your herbs, you want to do so at comparatively low temperatures, away from direct light, in bundles of stem no thicker than a pencil (so that mold doesn’t form) and where there is good air circulation – I hang them in my kitchen, but you may have a better place.  Don’t hang them anywhere that gets to temperatures higher than 100 degrees.  When the herbs are dry, rub them off the stems, and store them in airtight containers away from light.

If you are growing spices (and all of us can grow some spices - I grow cayenne and other hot peppers, poppy seed, cumin seed, coriander seed, dill seed, mustard, fennel seed and celery seed), you will want to wait until the plants are ripe and, if your seasoning is the seed, wait until the seed is dry, winnow and clean the seed, and then store in a cool dark place in airtight jars.  Grind them as close to when you use them as possible for best flavor.  Or, use them whole, and “pop” them in a hot dry skillet to toast.

For chili peppers and garlic, you may need to actually dehydrate them in a solar or electric dehydrator, depending on your climate.  Some will dry right on the vine, even in my climate, but meatier peppers probably need a stint in the dehydrator.  A blender is a great tool for pureeing a bunch of chili peppers or dried garlic into powder (do remember to put the lid on – you do not want to inhale a big breath of chili peppers being blended – ask me how I know this ).

Another option for your herbs is tincturing in alcohol or vinegar.  We tend not to think of tinctures in association with culinary herbs, but with medicinals, but in fact, many culinary herbs and spices are used in tincture form – vanilla is a tincture of vanilla bean, for example.  Mint extract is a tincture of mint leaves, often in brandy.  Vinegars flavored with herbs make wonderful salad dressings, and are a form of tincture.  The advantage of tinctures is that they keep forever, and are truly essence of herb.  The downside is, of course, that they contain alcohol or vinegar, and taste of it, but small quantities, they flavor baked goods, pudding and other recipes.  I’ve been experimenting with tinctures of other herbs and some of them are excellent – tincture of rosemary, for example, is just delicious in baked goods. I love salad burnet in vinegar – the cucumbery taste goes perfectly with vinegars.

To make a tincture, take fresh or dried herb or spices, and cover them with either vinegar or 80 proof alcohol – vodka or brandy are traditional.  If the spices are whole, chop them up a bit so that the full value permeates the menstruum (a fancy word for “booze” or “vinegar” ) Leave for two weeks at room temperature (you can put the alcohol tinctures in the sun, but not the vinegar ones), and macerate the material.  Taste occasionally, when when the strength you want, strain out any plant material you don’t want.  We just leave our vanilla beans in the alcohol when making vanilla, but find that spearmint gets too intense after a while.

Finally, there are a few herbs that don’t preserve well most ways – basil, parsley, dill, cilantro.  These preserve best as frozen pestos – or if not pesto, mixed with oil.  Simply freezing these herbs doesn’t really fully capture their taste, and often results in offputting textural and color changes (basil turns black, for example) – but if you mix them with oil (or add cheese, nuts and garlic to make a pesto – and all of them make good pestos, btw), they freeze beautifully.  We put up a lot of basil puree – it is one of the best reasons for a freezer, IMHO.

The reality of food storage is that it depends heavily on the quality of your cooking – and the quality of one’s cooking depends on wise use of the wonderful and intensely flavored gifts of herbs and spices – so if you believe you may ever have to rely on it, you will want a good supply of these.

The cheapest source for quantities of seasonings is probably an ethnic grocery store near you - people from India, Asia and Latin America use a lot more seasonings in their cooking than most Americans do, and they sell spices in large quantities, and whole -  my local Indian grocer sells cumin, coriander and mustard seeds in 1lb quanties for only a couple of dollars. This isn’t always the most ethical way to get them, but it is inexpensive.

Although they are not all fair trade by any means, the best tasting spices I’ve ever had in my life come from www.penzeys.com.  They aren’t cheap, but bought in bulk, the prices are reasonable for many things, and the taste is terrific.

Fair traded spices are available from www.mountainroseherbs.com (they also sell herbs and teas) and frontier bulk goods www.frontier.com. 

What if you’ve been using 1/4 teaspoon of oregano, and want to add more spice to your life?  Well, the best way to do it is to just do it – google around, try some new recipes, double the quantities of garlic, turmeric or ginger in your recipes (or maybe add just a little more at a time, depending on how adventurous you are) – like everything it takes practice. 

Sharon

The two major objections to a freezer are that generally speaking, food kept frozen would be better kept by other methods of preservation.  This is not true across the board, of course – for example, let’s say that you have an electric stove, coal fired electricity, and you happen to be the owner of a super-efficient sunfrost freezer, and you mostly use your freezer to preserve foods for less than 3 months – in that case, it might be more efficient to freeze. 

On the other hand, if you have a gas stove and an old freezer, the odds are good that it is almost never more efficient to freeze things than it is to can or otherwise preserve them.  As is always the case, the environmental impact of things is complex, even in and of itself. 

And the actual question of whether canned or frozen chicken is better isn’t really all the answer – there are other questions – is your freezer enabling you to cut down on other things – trips to the store, say?  If you live in a place where you can walk to shopping, it is probably more efficient not to freeze, and to let commercial freezers do the work.  If you live far from the store, the gas you save may balance out the effect.  Or, can you, as we do, use your freezer to help get rid of your fridge?  We use ice packs from our freezer to enable to turn off our fridge, making a substantial savings in wattage, since chest freezers are generally much more efficient than your average fridge.  Can you share a freezer with one or two other households?  Divided between them, it might make sense.

But I really don’t want to encourage people to go out and begin relying on freezers if they don’t already have one, simply because the cost – economically and environmentally – is so very high. Moreover, in a freezer, your food is vulnerable in ways it isn’t in any other storage method.

Statistically, even when freezers are working, more than 20% of all food put in a freezer is lost to freezer burn and decay – so freezers are already a problem – too much stuff gets buried in the back or the bottom, and wasted.  This problem can be reduced with good management, so IMHO, a commitment to a freezer means not letting things get wasted.  There’s something particularly disturbing about burning coal to preserve food, only to throw it out.  In contrast to the high rate of wastage associated with freezers (somehow people seem to think that freezing something puts it in permanent stasis, rather than merely retarding decay somewhat), home canned food gets wasted only 7% of the time. 

But moreover, freezers are vulnerable to either localized (and by localized this can be as local as “my husband accidentally kicked the cord out and we didn’t notice until it was too late) or widespread power outages.  The reality is that if you keep food in your freezer, sooner or later, you will probably have an extended power outage.  Can you afford to lose hundreds of dollars worth of food?  Only you can answer that question, but for many people, the real problem of the freezer is that you can’t afford the potential loss.

One possible way of mitigating this problem is to be good at pressure canning – if you have an alternate heat source, and are willing, when the power goes out, to spring into action to preserve anything that can be preserved, probably by pressure canning (dehydration would be great, but often when the power is out, the weather is not conducive to solar dehydration, and your electric one won’t work ).  This is a lot of work – it is our backup strategy – in our case, since most of what we store is our meat supply at the end of the butchering season, I know those chickens and turkeys will simply be canned, and am reasonably sure of not losing them. But then again, I have a wood cookstove, a supply of wood, and experience pressure canning. 

Now I like a lot of foods better frozen than other methods of preservation – but then again, I like the layered eggplant casserole at the expensive italian restaurant better than I like my own version, but life’s like that sometimes .  And since I like fresh and root cellared food even better than frozen vegetables and meat, the solution for me personally is to try more season extension, to root cellar more and better, and to grow more animal feed so that some of my chickens can be kept over the winter and butchered as needed. 

For the moment, we’re keeping the freezer, but I admit, I’m ambivalent about our own use of it (primarily to sell meat off the farm) and about recommending freezing to anyone.  Yes, if you already have a freezer, and are going to run it, you might as well run it full.  But would I recommend people go out and buy a chest freezer?  I don’t think so – too much embodied energy, too high a cost, too much dependence on fossil fuels, too many other alternatives.  I can justify ours because of our profession, and also because our net energy consumption (because we’ve been able to get rid of our fridge) is lower, but the next step is freezer-free.

Sharon

While some of these are stories of major disasters, others are stories of increasingly common personal disasters - job loss, falling through a safety net, injury or illness.  The most common reasons for needing a reserve of food is simply that bad thing happen to us. And implied in choosing *not* to have a reserve is a level of dependence – it says “I’m just going to cast myself on the charity of others.”  Now there is nothing wrong with needing charity – I believe strongly that in a large measure the reason for government is to provide a safety net.  But along with one’s absolute right to take help when needed is the responsibility to do what you can to avoid taking help, particularly in times like these, when more and more people do need it.  There is never any dishonor in needing the food pantry.  But I think there is some in choosing, when you have a choice, not to protect yourself and your own, and thus, falling back on what are supposed to be solutions of last, rather than first resort. 

I recently got an email from a single Mom.  She relies on food stamps and child support to supplement her small income and make sure she can feed her three children.  Well, one month, her ex didn’t pay up, and the food stamp payment didn’t arrive because of an administrative error.  She had no money at all after the utility bill and house payment were made.  While she wouldn’t have starved, she would have had to spend much of her time going around to relief agencies begging for help, and they would have gone hungry - except that she had managed on her small budget to accumulate a large food reserve.  While she missed fresh food, her family ate, and she was spared the panic that she would have felt otherwise. She said her children really enjoyed the meals she cooked.

Last year, during the Midwest flooding, I got several emails from people who told me how helpful it was to have a reserve of food, but in particular, water.  Because water was contaminated in so many areas with agricultural chemicals and manures, which can’t necessarily be fixed by boiling, one person wrote me that their water was actually nauseating in smell.  There was no way his young son or pregnant wife was going to drink that stuff, so he was enormously grateful that they did not have to, that they had enough water stored to get through until the supplies stabilized.  He also wrote of how shocked his neighbors were when he offered to have them over for a barbecue – they were stunned that they still had food enough to share a week into the event.

A woman wrote me last fall from Houston, where many people were without power for several weeks after Hurricane Ike.  She said she was grateful for the stored food – because the grocery stores had no power, they were accepting only cash, and she and her husband had run out of cash a few days after the crisis.  They lived on their food, and had enough to share with their neighbors, also out of food.  Their only other chance would have been to be shuttled out of town to a relief center, and none of them would take their pets.  This meant they could stay safely home with their animals.

Another correspondent told me that her daughter was born two months early, from an emergency C-section due to a placental abruption.  Both she and her daughter were in danger, and her daughter remained hospitalized for several weeks.  Meanwhile, it was lambing season on their farm, and while she was spending all day at the hospital pumping breastmilk, and recovering from surgery and blood loss, her husband had the care of their young son during the busiest season of the year.  She told me that the home canned food she put up was their lifeline – the meals were boring, but they were already ready, and she didn’t have to feel guilt about opening jars of homemade applesauce and beef stew for her husband and son, when that was all she could manage.  They did not shop for a full month, and they were fine.

 I’ve had a number of correspondents from the ice storms that hit this past year in the Northeast and in Kentucky.  One of them told me that she and her husband were out of reach of any transport because of downed trees for 11 days.  They had no power, and thus no well pump, and they and the three other families on their road lived pretty much entirely on their stored food and water, cooking on their woodstove.  No one else had anything prepared at all.

I’ve heard many stories about the value of food storage in job losses lately as well.  A man emailed me to tell me that both he and his wife, employed by the same company, were laid off in January on the same day.  Their income dropped by 50% that afternoon, and he said that food storage made it possible for them to make reasoned choices, to take their time and figure out what to do, rather than going immediately into default on their mortgage.  If they’d had to buy food, they wouldn’t have been able to keep up the mortgage payments.  As it was, they cut back on everything else, and have been able to stay in their house until the school year was over and also actually sell their house, rather than losing it. 

In another case, a woman writes from a place where she’s one of many people in great distress.  She’s raising her grandkids, because her daughter is mentally ill, and she hasn’t had a job since November.  The food pantries don’t have enough to go around, and her neighbors who go to the soup kitchens say you have to get there early, and stand in line, because the soup runs out when the lines are still backed up around the corner.  My correspondent has enough money for unemployment to pay her rent, but not enough for much in the way groceries, and not enough in food stamps to get by, and she doesn’t want her grandkids to join the kids in her neighborhood who only get to eat at school.  But she’s got a big pantry, and even though she’s been relying on it for months, she says there’s still enough to invite in the neighbor kids after school for cookies and milk – the milk is powdered, the cookies have fewer chocolate chips in them than they used to.  But she’s keeping her grandbabies fed, and she’s making sure that some of the hungry kids in her neighborhood get something to eat other than tater tots on a tray once a day.

I hope for everyone that none of us ever need our food storage, that it is always an agreeable luxury.  But the odds are good that it won’t be for everyone.  And I hope maybe knowing that you can need it tomorrow, not just in the event of some huge disaster, makes the project seem less abstract and more real.

Sharon

Now for those of you planting right now, it is possible to use a few tricks to make some of the things you harvest come when you want them – not everything can be done this way, but since none of us have so much time that we can afford to waste it, there are a few tricks worth knowing.  For those of you not able to control the harvest – ie, you are getting things when the farmers have them, console yourself with the fact that not growing a garden,  almost certainly takes less time than growing one, even with the time saving tips ;-).

The way harvesting typically goes is that for a long time it is slow, slow, slow….and then oh, crap, what do I do with all these beans and the blueberries and the…  Now there are several ways to address this.  I know someone who takes her vacation in late July every year, so she  pickles, cans, jams and preserves her way through the bounty.  Other people simply recognize “ok, no point in picking more than I can put up after dinner and on the weekends, so might as well give the extra away.”  Others of us, perpetual optimists, take the course of saying “of course I’ll do it, even though I don’t immediately see how or when” and then end up with rotting tomatoes on the counter.  This latter one is not the recommended method, but I seem to do it surprisngly often

The first thing that helps is obvious – do you know when things are going to come ripe?  When you planted your currant bushes and apple trees, did you look at the ripening dates?  If the currants are always ready the second week of July, you already know that you have to make time for them then – they won’t wait.  So that means that when you are setting up your schedule, you can add “currants” to it, right along with the dentist appointments and the lunch with your sister.  One of the problems with domestic work is that we tend not to view it as important in the same way appointments are important, so we don’t make time for it.

The next thing you can do is ask yourself whether you really need to preserve everything in sight.  That may sound odd coming from me, but the truth is, some foods really aren’t that great when preserved, even if they are fabulous fresh.  I love fresh figs, but I think dried figs are only ok – so why not enjoy the figs while they are fresh and then just wait until next year – there are plenty of other fruits out there.  I adore fresh asparagus, but don’t think frozen, dried or canned asparagus is all that great, so I just look forward every year to asparagus season, and preserve other foods.  The idea of preserving is to make sure you have plenty to eat, and also to make sure that you get to take some essence of summer (or the wet season) into winter (or the dry season) – that is, that you take the abundance that the growing season offers and put it away.  But that abundance should be good – if you were starving, fine, you’d eat canned asparagus.  But right now, you have the choice of deciding whether to plant or buy more asparagus or more green beans.  So plant and preserve what you actually like to eat.

These strategies can help, but preserving itself is a time commitment, and when the food needs you, it needs you.  So find out when the CSA expects to have its peaches, look up when those Wolf River apples come ripe, ask around about when it is time to hunt for morels, and add them to your schedule.  If anyone asks, you can say you have lunch planned with Mr. Peach .

You also want to plan you plantings around your intentions.  If you want to root cellar your apples, instead of saucing or drying them, you probably want apples that are harvested late in the season, when it is quite cold – otherwise, you may have trouble storing them.  Some of our harvest planning comes when planting – if your beets are mostly going in the root cellar, you will want them to be ready when it gets cold, so there’s no point in planting them in April – they’ll just get woody sitting in the ground. 

If you want to put everything up at once, you probably want a lot of paste tomatoes of one variety – an early one, or a late one – that way, the week you’ve devoted to tomato canning will provide you with lots.  If you don’t know when that will be for your local farm, talk to them now, maybe even put in a reservation for extras. 

If you would rather do this gradually, a little at a time, you’ll want a staggered harvest – instead of planting 50 pickling cucumber plants tomorrow, plant 10, and plant another 10 in three weeks.  Make sure you think about this in terms of perennials – instead of 50 strawberry plants of one variety, how about 15 each of an early, mid and late season.

What preserving technique do you want to use for each crop?  If I want to dehydrate, and use the sun instead of coal powered electricity, that means I need the crops to come ripe when it is still early in the season – my best dried apples will be from the early apples that ripen in August and September, since I can’t use my solar dehydrator much in October.  But if I want sauce, I’m going to enjoy standing over a hot canning kettle a lot more in chilly October, than I am in steamy August.  Sometimes you are stuck – the blueberries come in July, and there’s really no way to mess with that.  But a surprising number of crops have a wide range of harvest times.  Obviously, this will vary a lot with your climate, so think about what’s realistic.

Generally speaking, you’ll want to can when it is cooler, dehydrate in the warm weather, root cellar when it is getting quite cold, lactoferment in the cooler weather (fermentation happens *very* fast in warm weather, and it can be hard to keep the stuff), preserve meat when it is cooler (since you are less likely to have spoilage while smoking, drying, or cutting), preserve eggs and milk when they are flush (ie, in the spring and early summer), and make alcohol/preserve with alcohol and vinegar when it is warm (since things ferment so nicely. 

There are some crops that simply have to be dealt with when they are ready, and it makes sense to put a list of these together – strawberry time is june, sweet corn is at its best in August, the pumpkins are ripe in October.  So I need to remember that I’ll be making pumpkin leather in October, strawberry jam and dried strawberries in June and dried, frozen and canned sweet corn in August.  It is really up to you whether you’d like to do a bit at a time or in one swell foop – I actually prefer to simply suck it up and put up several hundred ears of corn at once, because I find the job so annoying that I’d just rather get it over with.  Since corn silk and bits of corn end up everywhere, I’d rather have the mess one time in the summer, two at most, and be done with it.  Other people might reasonably prefer to put up a dozen ears here, a dozen there.

In the heat of summer, if you are going to harvest, you need to have time to preserve – all of us have probably left something “just a little longer” in the summer, only to find swarms of fruit flies or a yucky pile of rotting fruit at the end of it.  Things go bad fast – and things get ripe fast.  Remember, that tiny 2 inch zucchini is going to be a 2 footer by tomorrow.  So keeping up with things is one of the keys to enjoying this.

So is getting many hands to make light work – if you have to husk corn or shell peas, don’t just do it, get everyone to do it.  Invite friends to come and help with the preserving, in trade for lessons or a few jars of jam.  The work bee has a long history.  So does “making your loved ones suffer a bit too ).  Make it as pleasant as you can – put on loud rock and roll, or quiet jazz.  Watch a movie while you snap the green beans, get sweetie to rub your back while you shell peas. 

There are tools to make things easier.  Some of them work, some of them don’t – it really depends.  A lot of it is a matter of preference -for example, I’ve used every imaginable tool to cut corn off the cob, and come to the conclusion that they all suck , and that a knife is no harder – the ring sort cause my fingers to go numb eventually, which probably isn’t good, the slide kind causes me to cut my fingers.  On the other hand, a good cherry pitter can save you hours of labor if you have a lot of cherries.  Experimenting with the right tools can make your life easier, but don’t assume that just because a tool exists, you need it.

Some steps that make preserving take longer can be skipped.  For example, I never take tomato skins off before I can tomatoes – I just decide that I don’t mind tomato skin.  Blanching when dehydrating is one of those things that varies a lot – a lot of books tell you to do it (I have one that suggests you blanch grapes, which is just totally insane), and it may well get you better textures or tastes, but I believe firmly it is always good to see if you can get away with skipping extra steps.  The exception, to this is in canning, where skipping steps can give you botulism poisoning, so that would be the only place I recommend against experimentation – otherwise, try it and see!

Some jobs can be put off – for example, I know someone who shoves all her tomatoes into the freezer, and then cans them in December, when she’s got no other canning to do.  I always think this is a great idea, and then don’t have room in my freezer.  Maybe you can get the farmer to store your apples or potatoes until it gets cold enough – just ask if you can pick them up in November. 

And you should always ask yourself “is the result worth the effort.”  Sometimes, if you are new to this, you won’t know, but after that first year, ask yourself – how convenient was it to have tomatoe sauce or salsa right there for all those meals? Do we really love pickled dilly beans enough for me to make them again?  Are we fig preserves people?  A lot of the time, the answer is yes – watching my boys devour an entire jar of pickles, for example, or being able to have green gage plum jam on fresh bread in January is definitely worth it.  On the other hand, while I like pickled beets, I find I don’t care enough to bother pickling them – I’m happy to eat them fresh out of the cellar. 

I’ve found that I save a lot of time that way – for years, we would blanch and freeze broccoli for winter, but we always would eat everything else first.  Finally, we decided we just don’t like frozen broccoli, and we’re happier with chopped frozen kale in the winter months – poof, that’s one job down.  Or we decide that an easier technique is as good – I like both canned and dried sweet corn, but it is less effort to throw the corn in the solar dehydrator than it is to can it, so I’m canning a bit less.

Remember, little bits count.  So you only canned 3 pints – so what?  That’s three weeks of jam, or three meals of carrots.  So all you had the energy to do was to hang up those herbs to dry today – great, you’ve got enough sage now for the whole month of December.  A little at a time adds up fast.  Yes, you may want to do bigger jobs sometimes, but every little bit helps!

Sharon 

Project one – Sit down with a cup of tea.  I give you official permission to use another beverage if you prefer, but get a drink, tell the kids to go outside and play, the spouse that you are busy, get a pen and paper, and give yourself a little quiet time before you begin rushing madly off in all directions (and yes, I do know how hard it is to find the time – I’ve got four kids, remember ;-)).  Put on some music, breathe deeply, put your feet up, and relax a littlle.

All of the first projects under this heading involve drinking something and having time to think.  So wait until you’ve got them, and come into this not in a panic “I’ve got to get food now!” but calmly.  Now, you are going to do three things.

1. You are going to sit down and list 4 breakfasts, 4 lunches, 4 dinners and 4 snacks that use mostly ingredients that can sit on a pantry shelf or come out of your garden and *that your family likes.*  They don’t have to be complicated – in fact, ideally they won’t be.  If you can’t think of enough of each, begin thinking through the recipes you make regularly, and asking “could I adapt this – that is, could it use shelf stable tofu instead of the fresh stuff, could I try it with kale instead of spinach in the late fall.”  You can get seasonal about it, listing separate meals for different seasons, but if that seems overwhelming, just focus on four basic meals that everyone will eat – pasta with tomato-garlic sauce, your best dal recipe, stuffed wontons…whatever. 

This will be the basis of your first food storage projects – you are going to build up enough of the ingredients to be able to make these meals easily, without going to the store.  These are things you will eat anyway.  These are things that will save you time, if you don’t have to run out when you need the ingredients.  This is not a commitment to anything strange or weird – it is just shopping ahead.  So figure out how many times you want to be able to make these meals.  Let’s say you get the ingredients to do each of them four times (and if money is tight, it may take some weeks to gradually add a little extra to your cart) – by then, you’ll have 16 days of food you like in the house without much extra worry.  If you can get case or bulk discounts, you will probably even save some money.  And it is food you are going to eat anyway.  If you are ambitious, and no one has interrupted you, make the grocery list(s).

2. Now you are going to get up and walk around your house.  Because the next project is finding some space for food storage.  Now buying a few extra ingredients probably won’t require you to do any major rearranging, unless you have a miniscule kitchen.  Even then, you should be able to fit a lot of this food in the cupboards if you do some rearranging.  Don’t do it now – today we’re still drinking tea – but put that on your “to do soon” list – just sort through the cupboards, move the stuff you don’t use that often, consider getting rid of things. (You know how the nesting bowls always get cluttered because you only use the bottom 2 regularly, so the little ones are all over the place, and how your baking area has 6 little heart shaped tart pans that you use once a year, if that… that stuff can get moved to a different place, odds are.  We have the sense that all like things must go together in a kitchen, but this was not actually laid down as law anywhere I know of )

But if your goal is to get more food than just your meal list, you’ll need space for it. So now is the time to begin looking.  How are you fixed for closet space?  Could anything be packed up and moved around (remember, if you haven’t used it in a while, you probably could move it).  Are you storing any junk (and no, it doesn’t count if all the “junk” belongs to your partner, and your stuff is “good stuff” that is absolutely needed – first rule of decluttering is “you’ve got to get rid of some of your own stuff” ) that could be given away or sold?  What about under the bed?  What about the basement?  What about up along the top of the kitchen cabinets?  What about your bedroom?  Just because it is food, doesn’t mean it has to live in the kitchen.  Ideally, what you want is a pantry space – so now is the time to establish one.  What will you need?  Do you need shelving?  Need to rearrange furniture?  Need to build something?  Have a yard sale?  Again, don’t do it, make a list.  There’s still one more step.

The third thing you are going to do is make another cup of tea or other preferred beverage and answer some questions.  You may want to run these questions by other members of your family, or you may not, but the idea is to help you figure out what you want.  You don’t have to write the answers, although you might want to. 

1. What am I storing food for?  What are my concerns?  What kinds of situations are likely in my region? 

2. How much food do I want to store?  For how many people?  For how many pets?  How much water do I want to store?  Am I likely to have people outside my immediate household who are with us in a crisis?  Are there other things I want to store – clothing, medical supplies, tools?  What are they?

3. How much time and energy do I have to devote to this?  How much space do I realistically think I have to devote to this? How much money can I spend each week/month on this project.  What are my biggest constraints (ie, is my family not supportive, am I working long hours, are there no good sources of bulk food near me?)  How might I overcome them?

4. Where will my stored food come from?  How much of it will I grow/produce?  What are my goals for food preservation?  How much of my food will I buy, and from where?  What can I get locally, and what do I have to get through the industrial food system?  What’s the best and most ethical source for my food?  Remember, every dollar you spend is a vote – if you spend it at an industrial source, you say “great, do more of this” – if you spend it locally, you say the same thing to your local farmer.  Now every one of us buys some food through the industrial system it is safe to say, and some of us don’t have the money or the access to do more than get their food any way they can.  Those people are off the hook – but if you have *any* discretionary food income, you need to think a little about the votes you are casting when you buy food.  Also, how can I use my food storage to save money and time?

5. What do I imagine doing with my food storage?  Do I want it mostly to provide a hedge against a crisis, or for day to day use?  Do I imagine myself eating regularly out of it and replacing it?  Do I want to be able to share with others, or is my first priority protecting my own?  How will I prevent loss of food to age, insects, mold?  That is, what’s my plan for making sure the older food gets eaten regularly and that I’m adding more food as I go – food is not like antiques, it doesn’t get better with age .  How much am I and my family prepared to adapt our eating habits so that we get the most out of our food storage – that is, we save the most money, we make fewer trips, we always have food to hand, as well has having a reserve? 

6. Finally, ask “Do I have to do this all alone?” How can I get others – from my own family to my neighbors and my town or city involved in the project of becoming more food secure? How can I see my own food security as part of a larger community project. Do I have neighbors who might be interested in forming a buying club, a coop or simply in a “stocking up” club?  Do I have friends who would like to share the work of preserving?  Are there people in my community who could benefit from food storage – can I get them involved?  Should my community have a reserve of food on hand in case of a crisis – can I bring this up with my municipality?  What about water – does my community have water pumping stations for when the power is out?  Could they be established?  Are there community resources I don’t know about – gleaning programs, bulk buying groups, community kitchens, food preservation classes, friends with the same interests.  What’s out there?

And what’s in here?  Is my family supportive?  Neutral? Hostile?  Are there ways to get them on board?  How did I approach this issue, if they aren’t interested in participating - could I approach it differently, with a emphasis on saving money, or on likely short term emergencies (hurricanes, blizzards, power outages) in ways that would be less scary than the way I came at it?  Can I involve my husband, my wife, my partner, my kids, my parents, my friends?  Can I get them excited about helping with the menus, picking out things to store, building projects, saving money, working together as a family? 

Ok.  Now that you are done drinking tea, and probably have to pee , you can stop.  That’s enough for today – I know you are all excited, and I can’t stop you from running off to reorganize the kitchen and buy 60 cans of tomatoes, but I’d encourage you to stop here, and leave some stuff for tomorrow, so you’ll remain enthusiastic, rather than getting exhausted and overwhelmed.  Although if you really, really can’t stand waiting to reorganize a kitchen, you are welcome to come over and do mine .

 Ok, next step – the first shopping trips!

 Sharon

Tuesday, May 19: Introduction to Food Preservation, Setting Up a Basic Food Storage Plan; Planning for the Harvest; Food Storage FAQ

Tuesday: May 26: Water Bath Canning, Grains and Beans; Storing Coffee, Tea, Milk and Beverages; Do I need a freezer?; Buying Clubs and Other Strategies to Get Neighbors On Board

Tuesday June 2: Dehydration;  Preserving Herbs and Spices, Tools and Techniques, Where Heck do I Put All this stuff?; Cooking from Storage

Tuesday June 9: Fermentation – Kim Chi, Sauerkraut, Yogurt, Kefir, Beer, Sourdough and other pleasures.  Budget food storage.  Sources and Ideas for Stocking a Pantry.  Meats.

Tuesday June 16: Pressure Canning; Salting;  Storing Non-Food Goods; Holiday Food Storage; Food Storage with Children, Special Diets

Tuesday June 23: Season Extension and Root Cellaring; Preserving with Alcohol; Storing Medications; Community Food Reserves

Cheers,

 Sharon

I still think the ending of my first class was the best wrap up I could write.  So here it is again:

My littlest, Asher is a head first kind of guy – we calling him “the flying squirrel” because he thinks he can fly, as long as an adult is holding his hand (we hold on TIGHT).  He has no fear, merely boundless enthusiasm.  And when he was about 18 months old, he would yell “Bunt to the Whee!” when ever he was about to leap head-first into things. 

Well, it occurred to us that everyone needs a battle cry, and since “Spoon!” was already taken , “Bunt to the Whee!” is ours. (His present battle cry, btw is “Ears!  Local Ears!”  Don’t even ask.) 

Just in case you don’t have a battle cry, I wanted to offer to share mine.  Because I think you might need one too. Enthusiasm, and the courage to screw up are what is needed to feed yourself these days. Food preservation and storage  is one of those things that takes time and practice, and gets immediately clearer once you start doing it.

Growing food, storing it, preserving it – all of these things are overwhelming at first.  And despite my hubris in teaching this class, we certainly haven’t mastered everything.  Every year we mess new things up, and forget old things and make new mistakes.  But every year we get a little closer to our goals – to having a reserve to share with others, and to living off our own homegrown and home preserved, to taking fewer trips to the store and to being able to accomodate guests at any time. 

The thing is, sometimes you just have to dive in even to know what you don’t know.  Sometimes you have to make foolish mistakes so that you can figure out what it is that you are trying to accomplish, or how to adapt an idea from me or someone else to your real life.  To an extent information can help.  And to an extent, it probably can’t – you just have to dive in.

So I offer you my son Asher’s battle cry – Bunt to the Whee!  Now is the time to dive in – to make that first bulk purchase, to save those first seeds, to start cooking one or two meals a week from storage, to try the pressure cooker or canning jam, to experiment with whether you can dry those things in the sun, to build that solar oven and try that new lentil recipe, to ask the farmer at the market about buying bulk peaches or your neighbor whether she wants to come over for a day of canning. 

Most of all, I hope you’ll all jump in, and not be afraid to make a mess of it.  The mistakes are part of the process, and the process is central to the project.  What project?  Well, economic security – saving money so you can either do other things that matter to you or keep your house and meet other needs.  Food security so that you can feed yourself and help out those in need around you.  Political action – so we can stop giving our dollars to industrial agriculture, and start voting with them for something better.  And a little step back towards democracy – the ability to no longer be beholden for the food in our mouths to corporations we abhore.  The chance to depend on and trust in our neighbors and those around us building real and good food systems.  Community.  Better food.  All those good things.

That’s why we need a battle cry.  This isn’t just about the rice or the garden or the canning jars.  This is a small but important step in making a better way of life.  And I admit, it brings me a great deal of joy to know that some people out there are trying new things and making changes.  I sort of think about it (of course, I’m clinically insane, as we all know)  and my own efforts as a whole bunch of us, holding up our seed packets, jar lifters, grain grinders (the not-too heavy ones – we don’t want anyone getting hurt) and wooden spoons up above our heads, ready to take on the world and the screwed up food system.  BUNT TO THE WHEE!

 Cheers,

 Sharon