I Counted My Food Storage and It Was Mostly Wheat

I'm staying on the shelves a little longer, because the jam jars got me looking and then I couldn't stop looking. September is when I do this anyway. The stores are clearing out summer stock and the apples are coming in, and I figure if I'm going to find out what's wrong with our food storage I'd rather find out before October than after a windstorm.

I found out, and it wasn't a disaster. It was something more embarrassing, which is that we're very well prepared for a family that doesn't exist.

What does the Church actually ask for?

Less than the lists in my head, as it turns out. Those lists came from my mother's generation and from a few lessons I sat through in my twenties, with a lot of numbers in them and a lot of pounds per person. The current statement is shorter and calmer.

We encourage members worldwide to prepare for adversity in life by having a basic supply of food and water and some money in savings. We ask that you be wise, and do not go to extremes. With careful planning, you can, over time, establish a home storage supply and a financial reserve.

(Gospel Topics, "Food Storage," churchofjesuschrist.org)

Further down that page is the part that matters most for a house like mine, about the three-month supply. It says to store foods that are part of your normal diet. Normal. The pasta you boil on a Wednesday, the peanut butter, the canned things you already open. The wheat and the rice and the oats come after that, as a second layer for the longer term, and they sit on top of the everyday food.

The phrase the Church quotes for all of this is "prepare every needful thing," from Doctrine and Covenants 109:8. I looked up the verse because I'd always heard it as a grocery commandment. It's in the dedicatory prayer for the Kirtland Temple, and it goes on to name a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith and a house of learning, among others. Needful, in that verse, covers a lot more than flour.

What was on the shelves

Thursday after lunch, Ben went down for his nap and David was upstairs on a call with his headphones on, so I took a notepad down to the basement and wrote down every single thing. I counted the cans and read the dates off the bottoms.

There was a sealed 25-pound bucket of white rice, which we'd actually use, because rice shows up at our table about once a week. There was a bucket of hard red wheat that I bought at the cannery the winter Caleb was born. Six cans of pineapple chunks, bought on sale for a ham dinner I've never once made. Three boxes of pasta. Two jars of peanut butter.

No beans at all, but that's only because the beans live in the kitchen cupboard, where I can reach them on burrito night. Six one-gallon jugs of water, three of them with a film of something at the bottom that I decided not to think about.

I stood there with the notepad and did the thing I'd been putting off, which was to think about what I'd feed Ben. He eats buttered noodles, bananas, cheddar cubes and the heel of the milk-and-honey bread. That's the whole list, and it hasn't improved since I wrote about Ben eating four things. Two boxes of regular noodles is about three dinners for him. Bananas don't keep. Cheddar doesn't keep either, not the way we eat it. And the wheat would be no use to him whatsoever.

I did boil a cup of that wheat once, in 2017. Forty minutes, a pat of butter, brown sugar. David ate his and said it was nice, which is what he says about everything I've made that he won't ask for again, and the rest of the pot went out to the chickens.

The bucket hasn't been opened since. It still sits on the bottom shelf with the lid on, looking like a plan.

Water, which I'd forgotten about completely

Food is what everyone talks about, but water is what I'd have run out of first, by a wide margin.

The number I keep seeing is two gallons per person per day, for drinking and for cooking and for a little washing. Five of us live in this house, with Emma in Provo for the semester, so that's ten gallons a day, and thirty gallons for three days. I have six. That's a little over half a day of water for the house, sitting in a basement that also has a bucket of wheat in it. The three cloudy jugs got dumped on the garden and refilled, twenty minutes with the hose and a funnel. The other three I left alone.

What I'm doing about it, which isn't much

The Church's suggestion for where to begin is to work out what it costs to feed your family for one day and multiply by seven, and that's your first week. Then you build toward a month and then three months, a little at a time, with no debt and no panic buying. If I'd read that in 2015 I'd have skipped the wheat and bought extra noodles.

So this week I bought six boxes of regular pasta, which cost me about the price of a movie rental, and a second case of peanut butter that I'll never have to think about, and I carried all of it down the basement stairs myself while Lily held the door and offered opinions about which shelf it should go on, none of which I took. From now on I'll put one extra of something we already eat into the cart every time I'm at the store, and write the month on the lid with a marker so the oldest one gets used first. We'll see how I'm doing by March.

The wheat is staying. It's thirty years of shelf life that I've already paid for, and I'd like to learn to cook it, probably as a pot of something with onions, which I suspect is what I did wrong in 2017. But I'm not buying any more until somebody in this house will eat what I make from it. If you've got a version your kids ask for, tell me. Old recipes turn up in odd places, as when Lily found Grandma's recipe card, so maybe somebody's grandmother has the wheat one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where do I even start if I have nothing?

With a week. Figure out what a normal day of food costs you and multiply by seven, then buy that much in things that keep. A case of canned tomatoes or a few extra bags of pasta on each shopping trip is a real start, and so is a jug of water filled at the sink.

Do I need the long-term stuff like wheat and rice?

The Church puts it second, after the three-month supply of food you already eat. I'd get the everyday layer sorted out first and add rice when it's easy, since rice is something most of us actually cook. Wheat is a project, so don't start with it.

What if my family won't eat beans?

Then skip them. Ours get eaten on burrito night, which is the only reason I keep any, and a shelf of something that comes back up the stairs untouched is wasted money. Buy what your kids already ask for.

Is it okay to use my food storage?

Yes, and please do. Use the oldest cans first and put new ones at the back, so what's down there is always food you've been eating.

How much water is enough?

Two gallons per person per day is the number I keep finding, for drinking, cooking and a little washing. Multiply it by the people in your house and by three days, then go look at what you actually have. I had six gallons against a need of thirty.

I'm going to go on counting for a while, probably without any more cans to report. The basil by the back step went to flower this week, so I pinched the tops off this morning, and the whole step smells like pizza night.

with love, Melissa