Food-Storage for All

Today John called from work and said figure out an updated plan for our food-storage and make it work. Since I'm doing all this work on finding sources and running down prices and options I thought I might as well share what I've been finding out.

The first step I recommend is visiting Food Storage Calculator to get an idea how much food you should store based on how many people you are responsible for and for what length of time you want to prepare for. This is just a calculator for grains and beans/legumes. I'll find the full blown version later and add it below. This is a great place to get started and they also have a list of Family Home Storage Center Products and a current Family Home Storage Center Products List Usually these centers are well stocked with food stuffs that you can buy/and even dry pack can if desired. Dry pack canning is where you take an empty metal gallon can and seal it with a machine. This is a good way to store grains and other products with very low moisture.

These are non profit centers run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. However due to high demands on their system, some centers can be "sold out" and even poorly stocked lately. Our local center has only dry cocoa powder and powdered drink mix, and their slots for canning are booked a month ahead. They do however still have the metal cans and a few other supplies.

Since just making an appointment and running down to the LDS canning center is not a quick option at this point, I checked to see what other suppliers are in this area. If I want to spend the whole day driving I could make it to Walton Feed but since I want to place a fairly large order I'd need to schedule that ahead of time. They have a great product list you can download and even carry whole grain spelt for those who suffer with wheat allergies. I'm not in the mood for that much driving so I'll investigate my other options. They do ship out products so that might be a possible options in the near future.

If you're planning a trip to Oregon. There's a wonderful place to stock up on Food-storage items Bob's Red Mill They have an amazing line of healthy products for cooking from whole grains to almost any conceivable type of flour. They're prices are not the cheapest but they're very wholesome and often they have small packages available at your local grocer. The cool part about stopping by is that they have 25lb bags instead of 2lb bags of whatever you're looking for.

A fairly simple solution for me is to call WINCO foods and place an order for wheat berries and any other items they sell in their bulk foods department. The problem can be finding the phone numbers to their stores as they don't advertise. I suggest next time you stop by you ask for their phone number and write it down in a safe place. They take orders over the phone and will have the items there in approximately 48 hours. You must pick up your order within two days of it's arrival.

The main complication from ordering from WINCO is that their products come in 25 lb paper bags. This is not suitable for long term storage and you can no longer just take the products you've bought and can them at the LDS Canning sites. Here are some other solutions:

1)Get on the waiting list and check out a canner from the LDS Church canneries

2) Store items in 5-6 gallon plastic buckets with handles for easy transport. One family I know stores these buckets under their kid's mattresses.

3) Large metal garbage cans can be filled with all sorts of items if stored on pallets. I also suggest duct taping the edges of the garbage cans to seal out pests and dust, etc.

This is just my getting started page and I'm burned out for the day so if you have any questions I haven't covered and just can't wait for more details. Give me a jingle on my contact form and I'll see if I can help you out!

Vickie

UPDATE: We placed our order at Winco and had to wait and see if they had the desired quantity of wheat berries in stock. They did and the order arrived within 2 days. The cool thing was they charged us the price quoted on Wednesday $13.08 per 25# bag instead of the $15 per bag that we were quoted on Thursday. The rice we ordered was in 10 #lb packages and there were 4 packages per box. I was imagining how to deal with all the rice and was thrilled that it was in such nice boxes. 40# is a little heavy for carrying but doable.