The easiest, and most inexpensive way to prepare for ANY emergency in my opinion is to start buying extra canned food. By simply going to the grocery store on your regularly scheduled days and grabbing a few extra cans of vegetables, pasta, spaghettio's, whatever tickles your fancy, puts you on the road to being prepared. If you live in a house that has a bbq then you have a way to heat most cans of food for a fairly long amount of time. I keep the regular propane tank that's in use for quite a while before I have to refill it, and I always have a full one on hand. If for some reason I can't use my electrical stove, I have a bbq that is fairly reliable should the need arise to use it for canned food. Here in Canada a large can of Chef Boyardee pasta with a pull tab lid is roughly $2.50/can. Sometimes it will go on sale and that's the time to buy. Vegetable are anywhere from $1.50 to $4.00 depending on the size that you are buying. I look at everytrip to the grocery store I grab two days worth of "extras." So that means for my wife and I (no kids), I will grab two large cans of Chef Boyardee, two cans of sliced fruit, pinapple, or pears, peaches even, and finally a couple of campbells soups, chicken or vegetable, again with the pull tab top.
Why a pull tab top? You may not have an electric can opener available. If you have tucked the cans into a bugout bag (to be discussed later), or grabbed from the house in a rush you may have forgotten a can opener. I just picture myself sitting with a rock or a stick and bashing the cans til they open...a messy proposition at best! So when you go and buy your extra canned food...pick up a can opener for a couple extra dollars, they usually come with the pry opener, the twist motion cutter and a bottle opener, three in one and you'll be thankful you have it when you need it.
So the disaster has happened, or is soon on the way...what are you going to do? Run out and buy extra food now, or stay at home and hunker down and come up with a game plan? Most people will be running out to the grocery stores and emptying the shelves of everything in sight. Make no mistake, it's not like the old days where the stores have back rooms full of stock..they don't. We now run on a JIT system...just in time planning. When an item sells it registers with the store that they need to replace it...it then magically shows up a day later on a truck.
There are so many factors that you have to take into consideration, who's going to show up and work when a disaster is looming? Do you really want to wait in line for hours because they are limiting the number of people into a store at a time? Wasting valuable minutes you could be doing something better at home. I would rather sit at home knowing that I've stored enough food for a couple months and concentrate on the other things that need to be figured out..like whether I'm going to stay or flee the city.
Don't limit yourself to just canned food. Why not keep an extra jar of peanut butter, jam, honey around...they store well and will eventually get used, just remember, for every item that's opened, you should have a new unopened one also. Variety is the spice of life. After a week of eating the same thing you will get bored and depressed pretty quick. Keep a variety of items that store well, cereals, peanut butter, jam, honey, energy bars, pasta, sauce and maybe a few spices. In a later blog I will delve deeper into food preparedness, but for now, just remember, a little extra in the cupboard never hurt anyone!
Here's a couple of interesting links on this topic:
http://www.emergencydude.com/emergency_food.shtml
http://www.suite101.com/content/how-to-establish-a-food-storage-system-a198237
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