Emergency. Food Supplies

Sometimes I see videos about emergency food supplies, or just an ad on someone's video.  You need to be prepared, they are warning.   The supplies they are selling are sometimes fair ideas, and sometimes not so good.  I don't think it makes sense to put away a few hundred or even thousand dollars worth of what amounts to prepared food.  

I could be convinced that an emergency food supply is a good idea, however,  I don't think most of the ideas I've seen and heard are what needs to be done.   

I found myself in a difficult situation for a long time once.  I had had a severe relapse of rheumatoid arthritis and completely destroyed my right knee.  At the time I was married, and my husband was kind enough to do the grocery shopping.  When my sainted husband died, I was in a predicament.  It was nearly impossible for me to do the grocery shopping.  Yes, I could stagger into the store to an electric cart, and people would help me out with my treasures,  but it had been hard to get into the store without my knee, and getting the groceries into the house was incredibly hard due to pain.  If I asked Mom to pick up some things for me, she would bring over one roll of toilet paper, or a Big Mac.  Of course, this is a person who probably wasn't dealing with a full deck.  In any case, the food situation was on the fringes of dire.   What to do?  

I did something I didn't actually think would work.  I had sprouting seeds and began to live off of sprouts.  Is this diet sustainable?  Well, I still am not certain, because that isn't all I ate.  However, it did make it possible to limp along for more than a month between trips to the grocery.  

I had sprouting seeds because I had been sprouting for the purpose of adding greens to my diet.  This seemed to be a surprisingly good way of making things happen, plus there was no problem with supply, since I didn't have to go shopping.  This bag of broccoli seed is $18 on Amazon.  It takes about two tablespoons for a quart of sprouts.  In about five days you have sprouts.  How many quarts do you think you could grow out of this bag?  I think probably twenty or thirty.  And it's not a large bag.  

Was I planning to live off broccoli sprouts?  Well, there are all sorts of seeds to sprout.  Broccoli is a good one though.  I liked it because it contains sulforaphane.   Just a broccoli component.  Sulforaphane did miracles for pain so I ate a lot of broccoli sprouts.  In my research I did learn that it's. recommended not to eat more than a quart a day.  

What other sprouts did I grow?  A lot of people like to grow alfalfa sprouts.  Probably a big reason for this is that they are extremely easily to grow.  I had a little stockpile of them and began to grow a lot of them.  Alfalfa is a type of legume, and legumes have a lot of protein.  

And another favorite is mung sprouts, which I had a nice supply of, so I grew those too.  Mung is another legume and has the protein found in legumes.  

So, that's how I started.  I would estimate that I ate about two gallons of sprouts a week.  That's not so much.  About a quart a day.  I began to read about making recipes with sprouts.  I mostly just made stir fry.  I fried onion, then scrambled about two eggs and mixed it into about a quart of sprouts, usually mung, and fried it into stir fry.  I liked it.  I also put soy sauce on it.  

I floundered about with the sprouts for a little while, when I realized one can order a variety of beans and lentils off Amazon, and it is delivered to your home.  

This  pail of chickpeas is $74 on Amazon.  How much would that make?  A lot.  I cooked chickpeas and mashed them up and fried them.  I thought they were yummy.  But that's me.  

What else?  

This bucket of one gallon of navy beans is $30 on Amazon with free delivery.   I made navy beans, and just ate them with butter.  And I did think they were good.   The bean and legume list goes on.   I suppose it's possible to sprout a lot of the beans and peas, but I usually just stuck to broccoli, alfalfa and mung, time honored favorites among th spouters of the land.  

Another favorite of mine is split peas.   Twenty five pounds is around $72.  

That's mainly what I ate for more than six months.  I went to Walmart's about once a month and bought around eight dozen eggs, a bag of onions, several quarts of half and half for coffee, and a gallon of coffee.   I bought a couple of bags of lemon for lemonade.   One might wonder, especially those that know about "completing the protein," but wait.  What about rice with the beans or peas to complete the protein?  Well, I mostly didn't eat any kind of grain because of food allergy.  The completing the protein happened with putting eggs in stir fry.   What was my monthly grocery bill?  Around $75. 

I was afraid I would have nutritional deficiencies from my diet, but this didn't happen.  If anything, I think my overall nourishment and health was improved.   After a few months of this I had a total knee replacement, and in a few weeks was able to have a more normal life.  I didn't bother with my emergency diet anymore.  But it was very reassuring to know what to do to have an emergency supply of food.  

Oh, by the way.  My little dog, Scottie, also lived on this diet during my days of trouble with my legs.  He was thrilled with it, and lost no weight, continuing in very good doggie health.  Would a cat have liked it?  This I don't know.  

Some people have told me that they think it's pointless to have a food stockpile for hard times.  People would just steal it, they say.  I did have some food stolen.  What was that?   Someone came in one day and hauled off my twenty five cans of tuna, and 12 cans of corned beef.  Was this a person in need?  Well,  I think they wanted to go to the Helene free grocery.  But the real source of food for my diet was the beans and legumes.  No one has ever stolen any of those.   I really doubt if theft of split peas would ever be a big threat.   I find it bizarre that anyone would have stolen my tuna and corned beef. 

May I make an important point?  When people are telling you about emergency storage food supplies, how much room would their ideas wind up taking in your house?  A room the size of a pantry or utility room?  Maybe the amount of space that would be a nuisance, anyway.   How much room do you think five gallons of seeds would take up?  Not much.  Even if you added a few buckets of dried beans and peas, it still wouldn't take up much room.  A few buckets of dried beans would keep you feed for a long time, maybe more than a year.  And suppose the day never came that you needed them?  Big deal.  Maybe $100 to 150 wasted.  And sprouts you really should make anyway.  How much room had been taken up?  A little stack two feet wide?  Seeds conserve space.   Oh, there are three or four of us! you cry.  OK.  A six foot area. 

One last thought.  An emergency food supply would do well to have canned goods.  I didn't do this though.  Sometime maybe I'll think this through and write about it.  

Another last thought.  My ordeal with my legs happened about ten years ago.  Did Walmart deliver ten years ago?  I don't know.  But the fact is that Walmart today will deliver all your groceries to your door free of charge.  The delivery person would like a tip.  Walmart suggests 10%.  Oh bull!  I usually tip $5 or $10, but it's not required.  The delivery service is a great invention, especially if there is a problem getting to the store.  It doesn't matter why you want delivery.  Recently Walmart's sent me a notification that they will also deliver prescriptions.  I'll never be hungry again!

It's nice to have a nice reserve of food on hand just for everyday use.  

OK pps.  Final final point I want to make.  How long will dried beans, peas and seeds last?  This us a question that I think is important, but I'm not sure the world is waiting to hear about it.

Years ago, around 2006, I bought some Mason jars and a whole bunch of dried lima beans - just bags of beans from a shelf at Walmart.  I put the beans in my Mason jars, thinking I was on step one of my great food storage journey.  I also had a device, I think it was called "The Food Saver,"  that I think cost $150 at the time. It would vacuum seal bags and also Mason jars.  So I vacuum sealed about a dozen Mason jars filled with dried lima beans in order to have lima beans in the event of a famine or whatever.   So the wheels of my crazy plan were actually put into motion one day around twenty years ago.  So what?  So after 19 years I opened one of my Mason jar time capsules to see if the lima beans put away in the time of a pharaohs was still good to eat.  It made perfectly good lima beans, just as good as if I had bought them at Walmart yesterday, yet they had been sitting in a cupboard for almost 20 years.  Good as new.  The seeds I used to sprout broccoli, alfalfa and mung were not especially fresh.  I had been sprouting off and on for about five years.  It had started when I saw an ad for about 15 pounds of sprouting seeds, a book by Ann Wigmore, and some sprouting trays being unloaded for about $10.  During those years I had dabbled with sprouting, but most of my seeds were neglected, still sitting in a box on the stairs.  And when the day came that I began to seriously use them for food, they were in good condition and easy to sprout.  They still sprout right now, 12 years later.  I feel that the way seeds stay viable is exciting from the standpoint of having food stay good long term in food storage.  I don't think vacuum sealing beans and seeds is necessary.  A lot of my sprouting seeds were just sitting around in open bags for several years and still sprouted like it was springtime.  I like the vacuum sealing idea though.