Your point is completely valid. We tried to make it clear that it is indeed something to consider down the road how you would store and cook these foods in case of a severe emergency situation. But we found that sort of thinking to be the exact reason why we didn’t even START our food storage. To think that you have to have a generator, wheat grinder, solar oven, etc. before you should even start storing food is silly in our opinion.

We want to encourage our readers (most of whom are beginners at food storage) to think of food storage in every day terms, think of the short term benefits, and think of the economic benefits. There is a much higher chance of you losing your job than sustaining a long 6 months without electricity or access to fresh foods. So if people get started, start storing some food, start learning to use them, start saving some money … then they will have the confidence to tackle the larger issues like what to do if you had to rely purely on your food storage with no access to power, gas, etc.

As we make it clear throughout our site, we are still learning the basics and as we learn more we will share it with our readers. We never profess to be experts, we just want to share what we are learning along the way as it seems to help others who are just getting started. We will be getting to more advanced topics as we learn them, but we also want our readers to know that they CAN and SHOULD get started even if they haven’t thought through all that difficult stuff yet.

This method works well enough for #1 and 2, but doesn’t really help you in #3.

The point of having food storage, for me, is to reduce your reliance of the smooth and effective functioning of global and national foodstuffs supply chains. You can’t do that unless you are prepared with shelf stable food storage.

Every time there is a major emergency (a good example is the big earthquake in Japan in the 90s) there are millions of tons of “emergency food storage” that goes bad when the power stays off for a week.

If you have extra food, but aren’t prepared for a disaster, you’re just plain foolish. More of your money is tied up in food (some percent of which will spoil), and in a real emergency you have less cash to barter with for usable goods.

I’ll be watching on the 4th!
Joyce