Lessons Learned: Eating our food storage

It was time to move and that meant deciding what is important enough to make it onto the moving truck. I sat and stared at the full shelves of food storage, taking in the expiration dates and the dust covering some of the bags and decided this food didn’t make the cut.

Fortunately, we had a few weeks before things got serious with packing so our family decided we should put our storage to the test. Could we live off of it in case of emergency?

The first couple days were good. Pudding, pancakes, canned food, jello, orange rolls. I was feeling all right about things for those 2 days.

Day 3 I was digging through my recipe books. “How else can we use wheat? Homemade pasta? Pizza crust? More bread?”

Day 4 The whole family was starting to feel pretty off. Generally our family eats lots of fruits and vegetables, a variety of foods, you know, healthy stuff. Now we were working on the fourth day of food that had been sitting on the shelf and SO many bread products. Our bodies were not reacting well.

Day 5-6 Nothing was improving and I was struggling to come up with ways to make the food we had more palatable.

Day 7 Was the last day of our experiment. None of us were happy about the way we felt and the next bread product that showed up on our table.

This experiment taught me a lot about storing food. It’s not just about having enough calories, it’s about having the right balance of food and (even more important) food your family will eat.

Find foods you and your family enjoy. It will make life easier when things get tough. Buy extras of things you really like and then rotate them out to keep them fresh. Try the foods you store, but freeze dried fruits – they keep all the vitamins/nutrients of fresh fruit and they taste delicious.

Make your food storage work for you. Make sure you’ll be grateful for it, not only because you have it, but because you’re willing to eat it.