The best way to start a Food Storage, is with Emergency Preparedness. In fact, it’s one of the most popular reasons why people decide to get going on a Food Storage in the first place. Help someone start out their journey right- with some of the following ideas:

Options that are Free or Under $1

Emergency Preparedness Plan

Print out our Emergency Preparedness plan that has detailed checklists to help a family make their family plan, build a disasters kit – including a 72 hour kit, and put together an evacuations list and car kit. Roll up the pages, tie it up with a cute ribbon and attach the Day 1 tag.

An Option that is $5-$20

Car Kit or 72 Hour Kit

Make, or purchase a pre-made Car Kit, or 72 Hour Kit. These can be found at stores, or online. Consider even just putting together a little first aid kit for someone’s car. Don’t forget to attach the Day 1 tag to your kit!

Quick Stove

Perfect for your 72 hour kit, give a Quick Stove. This self contained stove is ready to use at any time. Food Storage Made Easy readers get 50% off by using JODI&JULIE as their referral code.

Insta Fire/span>

Perfect for a72 hour kit, give a set of Insta Fire Individual Packs. These come in a set of 24, so you can give them all to one person, or give them as stocking stuffers.

A More Expensive Option

Volcano Grill

A great emergency preparedness product is the Volcano Grill. They are fantastic for powerless emergency situations, and fun for any outdoorsy person to use for camping, backyard grilling, etc.

Back to the 12 Days List

1. Natural Disasters
2. Economic Crisis
3. Health Benefits
4. Everyday Emergency
5. Religious Reasons

Today we will be talking about the fifth reason, Religious Reasons, and encourage you to visit our Facebook Discussion on this topic. We learn so much more from each others real life experiences and opinions, so come on over and join the conversation. (You don’t need to be a member of facebook to read the discussions).

If you start researching “Food Storage”, you probably know that it is a very common practice among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to have a food storage. Leaders of the Mormon faith have long counseled members to be prepare for uncertainties. Because of this, many members have or “try to” have food storage programs in place. Some examples of leader’s counsel include the following:

“Many more people could ride out the storm-tossed waves in their economic lives if they had their . . . supply of food . . . and were debt-free. Today we find that many have followed this counsel in reverse: they have at least a year’s supply of debt and are food-free.”

President Thomas S. Monson, “That Noble Gift—Love at Home,” Church News, May 12, 2001, 7.

“Everyone who owns a home recognizes the need for fire insurance. We hope and pray that there will never be a fire. Nevertheless, we pay for insurance to cover such a catastrophe, should it occur. We ought to do the same with reference to family welfare.”

President Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008), “To Men of the Priesthood,” Liahona and Ensign, Nov. 2002, 58.

For more information on the LDS teachings and recommendations on food storage, here is a pdf you can download and read. Also, click here to read a Mormon woman’s perspective on why LDS women do food storage.

Whether it be religious based, self-reliance based, or just plain preparedness based, we agree that having a food storage is wise and great counsel.

1. Natural Disasters
2. Economic Crisis
3. Health Benefits
4. Everyday Emergency
5. Religious Reasons

Today we will be talking about the fourth reason, Everyday Emergency, and encourage you to visit our Facebook Discussion on this topic. We learn so much more from each others real life experiences and opinions, so come on over and join the conversation. (You don’t need to be a member of facebook to read the discussions).

While you would never think of STARTING to do food storage to prepare for “everyday emergencies”, it sure is a nice side benefit once you have some food storage accumulated. Here are a few every emergencies that we have found food storage to help with immensely:

Recipe Ingredients: Right in the middle of cooking dinner, you run out of one of your necessary ingredients. Instead of having to run to the store for that spice, egg, soup can, etc. … you run down to your basement instead.

Dinner Emergency: Do you ever have one of “those days” where all of a sudden it’s 6:00 and you have a hungry family and hadn’t planned anything for dinner? Food storage can help! Look into your three month supply foods and you’ll always have something quick and easy on hand from Mac N Cheese, to Spaghetti, Hamburger Helper or beyond.

Party Foods: If you get invited somewhere, it’s common to be asked to “bring something”. If your food storage is stocked up, you will always have some kind of item on hand to bring (even desserts!) This will help you from blowing your budget to go get ingredients to make something special to bring.

Convenience: Sometimes having that extra 5 minutes of time in dinner preparation can feel like it’s preventing an emergency Using dehydrated veggies can save tons of time on chopping and are just great for soups, stews, casseroles, etc.

Safety: Using powered eggs can prevent a salmonella “emergency”. Use them in your cookies and other batters and you can eat the dough, lick the beaters, etc. and know that you are safe. You also don’t have to be careful about washing your hands after cracking eggs into recipes. Who knew food storage could be so useful?

What other everyday emergencies have you run into that were helped by having food storage on hand? Let us know in the comments below!

As we have grown and expanded our food storage knowledge, we have continually added to our site. While the site has expanded with so much information, we still want to make sure that it’s still easy for beginners to navigate. Since we are about halfway through our Summer Crash Course we decided to give you a little break and announce some changes we made to our site recently to help you get the most out of our site.

You will see that the top navigation buttons have changed slightly. Here is a run-down of the new things to look for:

• The Start Here tab now contains helpful tips for how to best use our site and where to find the information you are looking for.
• The Checklists page now offers you a choice of how you would like to receive your checklists based off of what your preferred “learning style” is.
• We added an Emergency Preparedness tab as we have found that this is something people are looking for quite a bit, and we feel it is a prerequisite to getting started with your food storage. Check back on Friday as we will be adding some new sub-pages to this section which will include even more detailed information
• Tools and Products remain the same. We consistently put a lot of work into those sections so make sure to check them often.
• We added a tab for Recipes so that you can easily navigate to any of the food storage recipes we have tried and posted about.
• Links and About remain the same, although we will be revamping the links section soon to make it an even better resource for you.

Take a look around at the new sections and let us know what you think of the changes. We are trying hard to keep more experienced readers interested while still being able to help the brand new beginner. Believe us, we know how it feels to be getting started and get so overwhelmed with the abundance of information out there.

If you have an infant or a toddler at home, consider including these items as you put together your disaster and 72 hour kits for your family:

• Instant formula. Make sure to buy the kind you do not need to mix with water. Also, track expiration dates and rotate through them frequently.
• 5 small bottles for the formula. You can fill them with purified water to provide extra drinking water in your kit.
• Refrigerated bottle bag. This is helpful in case you get the chance to warm up or cool down the formula you can keep it at that temperature for around 4 hours.
• Plenty of diapers. The exact number needed depends on the age of your child. I recommend including about 20 disposables and also 3 cloth ones that can be washed, dried and reused in case you run out.
• A travel package of wipes. These are great for washing as well. If you have space I’d recommend just storing a full box of wet wipes.
• Pacifiers. Put in two just in case. If you’re stressed the baby will probably be stressed and it’s a comfort for them.
• 3 cotton/flannel wraps, and 2 muslin wraps.
• Baby food. Depending on the age of your child you will probably want to include some jars of baby food. Once your baby can eat mostly regular foods just pop these out of your kit.
• Washcloths. Stored around 10 small ones, it’s an eventuality, you’ll require them at some point.
• Small comfort toy/s. If you child has a specific toy or blanket that he/she really loves, try to grab that in an emergency. But if you can’t, then try to have a usable substitute that will help comfort the child in lieu of their favorite item.
• Clothes – and plenty of them! This is a tough one as babies grow so fast. One trick I recommend is that as you swap out their closets to put in the next size of clothes to remember to do that in the disaster kit at the same time. Make sure to include clothes for all types of weather and include lots of spares.
• Ziplock bags. These work great for storing used diapers or anything else that is dirty, or clean for that matter.
• Bulb nose syringe and saline. Saline loosens mucous and syringe sucks water/mucous/misc out of ears, nose, mouth etc. You never know if you’ll need one so it’s great to keep in your kit.
• Infant tylenol/motrin. It never fails that kids get sick as soon as you are somewhere WITHOUT your medicine. So this is a definite requirement for any child disaster kit.
• Desatin or other diaper rash cream and travel-sized baby powder. The last thing you’d want in an emergency situation is a sore bum and nothing to treat it with. This will be especially useful if you have to resort to using cloth diapers.

The most important thing to remember is to always be thinking about what is appropriate for your child’s age and stage of development. For example, if your child is no longer drinking bottles then there is no reason to keep formula in your disaster kit.

For those of you who have been to the Fun with Food Storage Party all week, you may already have received the party favor – Our Emergency Preparedness Plan Workbook. We made it in excel because that way you can customize and alter the sheets to fit your families needs. For those of you who don’t have excel or “hate” excel, -while Julie (the excel nerd) will never understand HOW that is possible… we have turned all the sheets in the spreadsheet into PDF’S. Your welcome! Thanks to a great comment we received on our Emergency Binder post last week, we added a sheet to the workbook for you to record what you would grab in case of evacuations (pictures, albums, laptop) in order of importance. This is new today so if you have already downloaded the file, make sure you get the new version and print out that page.

Make sure you have everything printed and ready to go because your first BabyStep Checklist is coming next week! And you better believe we’re starting with Emergency Prep.

If you haven’t already completed your “emergency plan”, be sure to go through the first component of our Getting Started page where we have outlined the basics of what you need to do. We include this under getting started because we feel it is important to have this done even before you get your food storage plan underway. For convenience sake, we have copied the information for you here.

Have a Basic Emergency Plan in Place:

• Before you begin your food storage, it is critical to have an emergency plan for your family. Read our article about this topic, or print out our simple checklist as a guide.
• The most critical component of your emergency plan is to have your 72 hour kits with food and water. We recommend creating your own kit as it is more cost-effective and you actually get REAL food.
  • To create your own 72 hour kit follow the instructions on our blog post or view our instructional video
    
  • To purchase a kit, check out an emergency supplies store or we really like the kits available online at America Family Safety.

Where are you on YOUR emergency preparedness? Let’s keep each other accountable. Post your updates in the comments section!

Step 1 – Make sure you have saved 1 milk jug and 3 2-liter bottles per person. Wash them all out with soap and let dry.

Step 2 – Multiply the number of kits you want by the items listed in the shopping list and purchase the food items from Walmart or your neighborhood grocery store. All the food will cost around $8-10.

Step 3 – Purchase a wing stove and fuel pellets from an emergency preparedness store such as Emergency Essentials or if one isn’t available in your area follow the links below to order online. Only one stove is NECESSARY per family, but they are pretty cheap so if you’d like to have one per kit that is fine too. It will make it much more convenient in a true emergency.

Step 4 – Cut straight down the middle of a milk jug diagonal from the handle. Go about 1/3 of the way down. At the bottom of that cut, make a horizontal slice coming from each side but leave about 2 inches of the jug intact. This should make a sort hatch that you can pull open and insert the items in. Watch our video below if you are having trouble visualizing how to do this.

Step 5 – Place the necessary items into each milk jug according to the contents list. Put the Tang and cocoa servings into small zip-lock bags (1/4 c. per serving). If you have extra food left over, stick it in as space permits. Tape the milk jug up. Tape the contents list to the outside of the jug and record today’s date and the family member who will use that kit. VOILA!

Step 6 – Fill your 2 liter bottles with water and store all of the items in an easily accessible place (your car trunk is the ideal place if you have room). Check out our Step 2: Water page for more information on how to properly store the water.

Instructional Video

Resources

Printable Shopping List
Printable Contents List
Outtakes video (HILARIOUS!)
Purchase Wing Stoves Online
Purchase Fuel Pellets Online