Crisis Food Storage Preparation Tips
You have been preparing disaster food supplies and Food Safety Storage for some time. Do you have to wonder what will happen when you survive on your food stockpiles while others are hungry?
Keeping your food stores out of plain sight is a good idea. You should avoid ever talking about your preparations to neighbors and co-workers. You don’t want the word to spread. Once disaster strikes, you should stay off your neighbors’ radar. Yes, it’s selfish.
If you seem to have it too good, people will start to speculate, and your survival for you and your family may depend on not standing out.
You also much consider what you would do if someone tried to take your food supplies if they had a way of knowing about your food supply, that is.
Food Safety Preparation And Storage Tips
If you have been a follower of this site or any other ‘prepping site’ you should be getting a very good idea of what it means to prepare yourself and your family for any crisis that is thrown your way.
You have learned about what happens to food availability in a crisis. You have learned how to plan your disaster supplies and how to amass them.
You have learned about the dangers you are preparing yourself against and the reasons why there might be a food crisis coming your way. Think of the empty supermarket shelves right after the Covid-19 outbreak.
You have considered in detail what it means to properly prepare when you have a family and how to engage your children so that they grow up well-equipped to deal with life’s sometimes harsh realities.
It is time to look at one situation we’re likely to face at one point in our lives: food shortage during and after a disaster.
There Are Tough Choices Ahead
I am convinced that one of the main reasons people do not stay with prepping is because there are too many difficult choices. It’s downright unpleasant to think about.
Having the means to survive available to you affords you some choice, unlike those who have to take any opportunity they can find.
But the smartest choices will not be the ones that make you happy or make you popular.
You will have to explain to your children why their best friend, who is struggling with the rest of the community, can’t come over to where it’s safe and warm, where no one is hungry.
You will have to turn Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally away at the door, even though you have enough food to feed a small village, simply because you know that it has to last.
You will have to live with those choices if the people you turned away fare ill, but you will also have to live with those choices if they do just fine.
Imagine how Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally would feel if you turned them away because you expected months of hardship, but the disaster was over in weeks.
You let them go hungry, even though you had enough food in your home to last you through several of these disasters, and Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally, who aren’t preppers, are unlikely to see the situation your way.
Your Food Storage Plans Make You A Target
Having enough food to feed your family is great. There are some disasters when it is nothing but an asset.
If you lose your income, for example, your food storage will keep you fed, your stocked medicine cabinet will keep you healthy, and your additional heat sources will take you through the winter cheaply.
But what about in a wider, more high-impact emergency?
When the supermarket shelves go bare, and the larger community starts to go hungry, your food safety storage preparations will keep you fed, but they will also make you a target.
Once the looting starts, it is only a matter of time before the unscrupulous, or simply the starving, come knocking on your door in a less than friendly manner…. if they have a way of knowing about your food supply, that is.
You can only do so much.
Perhaps the tide moves the other way, and the disaster continues. Maybe what started as a small economic slump, the loss of your job, turns out to be a long national depression.
Then, you are faced with a much greater problem.
The truth of the matter is that while you can prep for most eventualities, at the end of the day, there is only so much preparation you can do.
Beyond a certain point, most foods will not last – certainly not enough that you can cover all of your family’s nutritional needs.
Not to mention that beyond a certain point, your pocketbook is going to empty out. Eventually, whether in a month or a year, you’ll reach a point when there is no money or space for more food safety storage preparations.
This is the point by which you have to be self-sufficient. Not all preppers will aim to be prepared for this long a stretch, but if you want to go on indefinitely, grow your own food!
Store seeds treated for a long shelf-life, or you may choose to start your own kitchen garden so that you can increase production steadily while living off your food
storage.
The choice is, as always, yours. But if you are preparing for a major disaster, after which the world or at least the economy may need rebuilding, it’s a good idea to look into survival gardening.
The Other Meaning Of Food Storage
So you may have landed on this post thinking that I had ideas of the other ‘food safety storage’ situations. Such as how do you store food for the long term so you may have it available if there are real food issues bringing on a shortage situation.
The easy way is to invest in 25-year safe freeze-dried food such as what you may find here.
Another way is a DIY solution that requires some ‘canning knowledge.’ That solution may be found in this post.