What do you think?
Rate this book
Food Storage for the Clueless
This fun and comprehensive book starts off at square one and takes the reader through every step of becoming a food storage expert. It also features recipes and plenty of do's and don'ts in creating a successful storage program.
Paperback
First published July 1, 1999
4 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 18, 2022
More like 2 1/2 stars, but I'll round up because the authors do manage to insert a sense of humor into what's really a pretty dull topic.
I was hesitant to admit to reading this because I don't want to contribute in any way to that special brand of crazy the authors refer to as "siege preparation." As I've said many times, if anarchy reigns and we're to the point of shooting each other over a tin of pork and beans, I'm not interested in being around anyway. On the other hand, I am a fan of what the authors call "practical storage." I just didn't have a name for it.
I'm certainly no stranger to having a full pantry. We used to wonder if my mother starved to death in a past life because of the amount of food she kept on hand. We had a walk-in pantry, the biggest available consumer refrigerator, and two HUGE freezers packed to bursting. When room gave out, she started putting food under the beds and in my grandmother's freezer. This was for three people. It was beyond weird. I remember as a teenager as visiting friend gaping wide-eyed at our pantry and saying, "Is your family Mormon?" Nope, just operating under the neurosis of a food hoarder.
The thing is, when practiced in moderation and with some strategy behind it, the "practical" stockpile will get you through an lean period. The Hunger Games may be fiction (for now), but in just the last few years, I've seen an ice storm close down the town and knock out power for 3 days and I've known periods of zero income due to job loss or illness that have lasted as much as a year. Recently, an emergency meant no income for a couple of months. Thanks to things like a stocked pantry of versatile ingredients and my own (possibly inherited) obsession about never having less than a couple dozen rolls of TP in the house, we were not reduced to forming looting gangs or trolling the streets with assault weapons in search of weaker humans from whom to extort ramen noodles or dish soap. We may have had to get creative with meals as the pantry thinned out, but it wasn't traumatic. What it did, however, was get me to thinking about how to get smarter with my pantry because we don't eat a lot of packaged foods, and fresh veggies don't keep very long. When I saw this book pop into the library's acquisitions, I thought it might have some tips about how to store food people might actually want to eat and how to work it into rotation without resorting to either re-enacting The Long Winter from the Little House books where they spent hours a day hand-grinding wheatberries to keep from starving OR eating a lot of Crap-a-roni. And it does...to a point.
The authors, who are LDS and thus practice food storage as part of their religion, take a lot (and by that I mean "most") of the hard information from on-line resources such as FEMA, USDA, and the University of Utah website. Truth told, those sites probably have the information better organized and easier to use because the formatting in this e-book's charts was awful. What the authors add is some humor and a lot of anecdotes about their many blunders as they learned about food storage. They also add some good arguments for considering "practical storage" over the "siege" mentality and point out various problems with certain practices: rancidity, vermin, container breakdown, usability under duress, etc. One of the things I knew about but have seldom seen mentioned in preparedness information is the fact that people under stress are less likely to eat "any old thing" just to get calories and will actually refuse food that isn't familiar to them. That old chestnut about how someone will eat anything if they are hungry enough? Not always true.
Perhaps three of the most useful takeaways from the authors are these:
1. If you don't know how to use something or can't use it, it doesn't do you any good. All the dried beans and wheatberries in the world aren't going to help if you have no way to grind them, don't know how to cook them, don't have enough water to soak them, or are allergic to them.
2. Stuff goes bad. Cans rust, plastic breaks down, oils go rancid, flours (yep, ALL of it) contains eggs and/or larvae. (What? You didn't know this? You just thought I was nuts that I put all my grain in the freezer for three days after buying it? Joke's on you. You've been eating weevil eggs all this time and didn't know it. Don't believe me? Google "granary weevils.")
3. If you don't have water, very little else is going to do you much good for long. I admit this is where I utterly fail and being emergency-ready. We refuse to pay a buck a bottle for essentially the same thing that comes out of the tap, so I never have bottled water in the house. We use a Britta pitcher and call it good. If our water were to be compromised, we'd be screwed. Considering the big ol' quake fault line that runs near here, not smart.
I can't say I found anything in the book I didn't already know. I can't even say it changed how I'll stock in the future because we're trying to eat more fresh foods, not less, and the idea of having to work a bunch of dehydrated or canned stuff into our meals is counterproductive to our everyday goals. I'm probably take their advice on the water and some of the freezer tips. That's about it. (Oh, and it did explain the LDS' apparent obsession with fruit leather and Jell-o.)
There was other stuff that just made me do an eye-roll. The "buy bulk!" tip is great if your religion says "breed as many kids as you can," but pretty useless for small families. And, to be fair, the author's admit that if the stuff is just going to go bad before you use it, there is zero savings.) The "use coupons!" tip is a non-starter unless you live on junk food or buy a ton of heavily perfumed cleaning stuff. I find maybe one coupon every six months for something we buy. Not a lot of coupons out there for broccoli or chicken. To the tip about making sure you have a backup supply of medication on hand, I ask, "Have you ever TRIED to get insurance to approve that?" Hell, our insurance company wouldn't even approve a refill a week early when we were going out of town. So, your mileage on their tips may vary, especially if you eat a lot of packaged foods, love canned soups, and aren't on expensive meds.
The LDS have been doing this food storage thing for a long time, so at least on paper have a handle on it. I may not agree with any part of their theology, but I admit I respect their organizational skills. The practice of a 72-hour kit is brilliant. Accepting that the word "emergency" could as easily mean a illness or unemployment as it does an earthquake orTrump presidency complete societal breakdown civil unrest is just practical. Teaching that someone else's emergency and being generous with your own resources in their need might be as important for the soul of humanity as calories are to the physical body is promoting generosity as a human virtue not just a theological mandate.
I was hesitant to admit to reading this because I don't want to contribute in any way to that special brand of crazy the authors refer to as "siege preparation." As I've said many times, if anarchy reigns and we're to the point of shooting each other over a tin of pork and beans, I'm not interested in being around anyway. On the other hand, I am a fan of what the authors call "practical storage." I just didn't have a name for it.
I'm certainly no stranger to having a full pantry. We used to wonder if my mother starved to death in a past life because of the amount of food she kept on hand. We had a walk-in pantry, the biggest available consumer refrigerator, and two HUGE freezers packed to bursting. When room gave out, she started putting food under the beds and in my grandmother's freezer. This was for three people. It was beyond weird. I remember as a teenager as visiting friend gaping wide-eyed at our pantry and saying, "Is your family Mormon?" Nope, just operating under the neurosis of a food hoarder.
The thing is, when practiced in moderation and with some strategy behind it, the "practical" stockpile will get you through an lean period. The Hunger Games may be fiction (for now), but in just the last few years, I've seen an ice storm close down the town and knock out power for 3 days and I've known periods of zero income due to job loss or illness that have lasted as much as a year. Recently, an emergency meant no income for a couple of months. Thanks to things like a stocked pantry of versatile ingredients and my own (possibly inherited) obsession about never having less than a couple dozen rolls of TP in the house, we were not reduced to forming looting gangs or trolling the streets with assault weapons in search of weaker humans from whom to extort ramen noodles or dish soap. We may have had to get creative with meals as the pantry thinned out, but it wasn't traumatic. What it did, however, was get me to thinking about how to get smarter with my pantry because we don't eat a lot of packaged foods, and fresh veggies don't keep very long. When I saw this book pop into the library's acquisitions, I thought it might have some tips about how to store food people might actually want to eat and how to work it into rotation without resorting to either re-enacting The Long Winter from the Little House books where they spent hours a day hand-grinding wheatberries to keep from starving OR eating a lot of Crap-a-roni. And it does...to a point.
The authors, who are LDS and thus practice food storage as part of their religion, take a lot (and by that I mean "most") of the hard information from on-line resources such as FEMA, USDA, and the University of Utah website. Truth told, those sites probably have the information better organized and easier to use because the formatting in this e-book's charts was awful. What the authors add is some humor and a lot of anecdotes about their many blunders as they learned about food storage. They also add some good arguments for considering "practical storage" over the "siege" mentality and point out various problems with certain practices: rancidity, vermin, container breakdown, usability under duress, etc. One of the things I knew about but have seldom seen mentioned in preparedness information is the fact that people under stress are less likely to eat "any old thing" just to get calories and will actually refuse food that isn't familiar to them. That old chestnut about how someone will eat anything if they are hungry enough? Not always true.
Perhaps three of the most useful takeaways from the authors are these:
1. If you don't know how to use something or can't use it, it doesn't do you any good. All the dried beans and wheatberries in the world aren't going to help if you have no way to grind them, don't know how to cook them, don't have enough water to soak them, or are allergic to them.
2. Stuff goes bad. Cans rust, plastic breaks down, oils go rancid, flours (yep, ALL of it) contains eggs and/or larvae. (What? You didn't know this? You just thought I was nuts that I put all my grain in the freezer for three days after buying it? Joke's on you. You've been eating weevil eggs all this time and didn't know it. Don't believe me? Google "granary weevils.")
3. If you don't have water, very little else is going to do you much good for long. I admit this is where I utterly fail and being emergency-ready. We refuse to pay a buck a bottle for essentially the same thing that comes out of the tap, so I never have bottled water in the house. We use a Britta pitcher and call it good. If our water were to be compromised, we'd be screwed. Considering the big ol' quake fault line that runs near here, not smart.
I can't say I found anything in the book I didn't already know. I can't even say it changed how I'll stock in the future because we're trying to eat more fresh foods, not less, and the idea of having to work a bunch of dehydrated or canned stuff into our meals is counterproductive to our everyday goals. I'm probably take their advice on the water and some of the freezer tips. That's about it. (Oh, and it did explain the LDS' apparent obsession with fruit leather and Jell-o.)
There was other stuff that just made me do an eye-roll. The "buy bulk!" tip is great if your religion says "breed as many kids as you can," but pretty useless for small families. And, to be fair, the author's admit that if the stuff is just going to go bad before you use it, there is zero savings.) The "use coupons!" tip is a non-starter unless you live on junk food or buy a ton of heavily perfumed cleaning stuff. I find maybe one coupon every six months for something we buy. Not a lot of coupons out there for broccoli or chicken. To the tip about making sure you have a backup supply of medication on hand, I ask, "Have you ever TRIED to get insurance to approve that?" Hell, our insurance company wouldn't even approve a refill a week early when we were going out of town. So, your mileage on their tips may vary, especially if you eat a lot of packaged foods, love canned soups, and aren't on expensive meds.
The LDS have been doing this food storage thing for a long time, so at least on paper have a handle on it. I may not agree with any part of their theology, but I admit I respect their organizational skills. The practice of a 72-hour kit is brilliant. Accepting that the word "emergency" could as easily mean a illness or unemployment as it does an earthquake or
April 2, 2018
I think of you have any interest at all on anything to do with food storage, you should go find you a hard copy of this book and then go to town. It has everything you'll ever need.
September 29, 2018
Good basic information on starting food storage. I liked the shelf life list. It could have been improved if there was a discussion/chapter about Mylar bags for long term storage.
July 2, 2008
I'm a food storage nut. I love reading about it and talking about it and cooking it. I love making wheat sloppy joes and wheat pudding. Well, not really wheat pudding. That turned out really gross.
This book is a fantastic resource. It covers food storage, but branches out into sourdough, yogurt, dehydration, non-food storage and lots of other interesting and important topics.
This was my first food storage book and it's so complete I haven't felt that I needed another. There are not many recipes so you will probably want a few recipe books or internet searches. It also doesn't teach first aid or survival skills (it does list some things to store, but doesn't talk you through how to use them).
An excellent addition to your preparedness library. I was clueless, and now I'm not.
This book is a fantastic resource. It covers food storage, but branches out into sourdough, yogurt, dehydration, non-food storage and lots of other interesting and important topics.
This was my first food storage book and it's so complete I haven't felt that I needed another. There are not many recipes so you will probably want a few recipe books or internet searches. It also doesn't teach first aid or survival skills (it does list some things to store, but doesn't talk you through how to use them).
An excellent addition to your preparedness library. I was clueless, and now I'm not.
September 21, 2010
This was written by a husband/wife team who "have seen or done it all" with food storage. They had some good ideas--the best one for me was how to determine how much food storage you need for your family, which they did by looking at what you bought or cooked with for a month and then multiplying it by 12 for a year.
I know that seems pretty obvious, but it was a breakthrough for me. I'd never been able to figure out how much to store for a year! :)
I know that seems pretty obvious, but it was a breakthrough for me. I'd never been able to figure out how much to store for a year! :)
April 15, 2011
Countless resources for food storage, cooking with food storage, emergency preparedness, and so forth. I refer to the book often. I liked that the book help me indentify what type of food storage person I am. I'm hoping to incorporate my 'seige' items much more. I hope to work on a specific portion of the book (sprouts, sourdough making, excetra) each month, and one day of the week to making meals out of food storage. Very helpful.
January 15, 2009
This is a concise easy to read guide to food storage. It has some great recipes in it. A good book to read if you are "clueless" as to where to start for storing food. I really liked that it had step-by-step instructions on making sourdough and also a chapter on dehydrating.
January 30, 2008
Yes, that would be me when it comes to food storage... clueless. This book explained a lot and has lots of helpful tips.
June 8, 2008
I had to give this back to my friend, but I did learn A TON from it! WOW! I really enjoyed learning about myself and what a lazy sack of potatoes I am. Great for food storage starters like ME :).
July 9, 2008
Lots of great info on food storage--I have used the info here a lot
January 13, 2021
Loved this book with great ways to work on food storage that makes sense and isn't overwhelming!
August 9, 2011
Kathy & Clark finally made me understand "food storage." And their great wit & humor added a great deal to this often dry subject!
January 16, 2023
Great ideas! Great info!
May 16, 2008
I love this book! It has great ideas for recipes, shopping, etc. A great reference book.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews