Planning For A Shortage

It’s very inconvenient to be in the middle of preparing dinner or baking cookies and realize you’re missing a key ingredient. Consider whether your pantry or kitchen has reasonable options, such as an ingredient substitution, before making an unnecessary trip to the grocery store. A recipe substitution may change the flavor, color, texture, or volume…

Quick answer: prepare for a food shortage by learning your local risks, building a pantry of foods you eat, storing water, and learning safe preservation. Store enough shelf-stable food for at least two weeks and work toward more, rotate it, and plan meals around it. Preserve food only by tested methods, since improper home canning…

Quick answer: you can press oil from seeds such as sunflower or sesame with a home oil press, but yields are modest, equipment costs real money and homemade oil spoils faster than store-bought. For emergency preparedness, buying shelf-stable cooking oil and rotating it is usually more practical. If you do press your own, use clean,…

Quick answer: you do not need to spend much to start. Begin with what you already have, then add a little each week in this order: water, food, light and a radio, first aid and medications, copies of documents and cash, then warmth and sanitation. Ready.gov suggests building a basic kit with several days of…

You may encounter some new obstacles when it comes to filling your kitchen during a quarantine, in isolation, preparing for the potential of these events, or trying to stretch the time between grocery excursions to limit the danger of viral exposure. Learning to cook owing to restaurant closures, or learning to cook without fresh veggies…

The COVID-19 epidemic is altering our perceptions of supply chains and personal food security. Where can you go to keep meals on the table when stores and online suppliers can’t maintain the basics in stock, and you don’t want to keep making (often failed) supply runs to your local grocery store? Look into the ethnic…

My grandma used to tell me stories about growing up during the Great Depression. She’s told me about waiting in lines for cheese and bread rations, and how they could only afford one pair of shoes each year, which they wore until the bottoms were worn off. I’ve always appreciated the foresight and tenacity of…

We’ve compiled a list of specific food items to make it easier for you to find quality bulk items that are worth adding to your pantry after spending countless hours researching food storage and putting together a food storage calculator (to help individuals and families determine how much food they need in their storage), after…

Quick answer: Ready.gov recommends at least a several-day supply of non-perishable food for each person, and many people build toward two weeks or more. A simple way to plan is to multiply the calories each person needs per day by the number of days, then choose foods to match. The FDA’s 2,000-calorie reference is a…