If you lose your income or see it drastically reduced, after awhile the primal fears assert themselves. Can you keep a roof over your family’s head? Will you be able to eat? It’s more and more common to see Americans skipping meals because they can’t afford both food and rent or food and medicine. It’s a tragedy and a disgrace.
Assuming you still have a job, you might want to consider putting together a pantry with enough in it to see you through more than just the end of the week or even the month. I’m talking about a serious food supply that can sustain you and yours, albeit with diminished variety, for the better part of a year. It’s quite doable and could take some pressure off should your family income suddenly go away.
This kind of pantry is not something stocked full of freeze-dried broccoli and expired MREs you picked up at the local Surplus store. It consists mostly of non-perishable foods you would normally eat anyway. Shifting to a radical new diet in a time of serious stress is not a trivial matter; you’d be surprised what normal, intelligent people would find it difficult to eat when crunch time comes.
A little less than a year before my layoff I could see that things were not going well for the larger economy so I started making some preparations “just in case.” One of those was setting up a store of food, and it has literally helped to feed us since I lost my job.
There are three main questions people have about a program like this. How does one acquire it, what goes into it, and where do you keep it?
The first is that you can either go out and spend a bunch of money at Costco or Smart & Final and call it a day. Not the best way to go. It’s better to build gradually; where you normally buy a can of something, buy two and store it. Watch for sales and play the coupon game wherever you can. Look for grocery outlet stores that sell discontinued canned items and other foods that for some reason or other won’t end up on a regular grocery store shelf. These goods are perfectly fine, but sometimes can’t be sold because of something like a problem with the label or some other inscrutable business decision that made it better to sell off cheap than through regular channels.
Some things can and should be bought in bulk, such as rice, beans, rolled oats, flour, sugar, and a few others. Cartons of canned vegetables are also a good idea, as well as canned soup, both the non-condensed kind and the condensed varieties that can also do double duty in other recipes, such as cream of mushroom soup (Garrison Keillor’s “Lutheran binder”) and others. We also like having cans of broth (chicken, beef, vegetarian) as soup and stew starters and other uses. Tomato sauce, peanut butter, pasta are also good to have. Stock a few treats if you can; I included a couple of large jars of kalamata olives, because to leave them out would be to invite an intolerable level of barbarity.
Try to rotate through your food storage. Strictly speaking, most canned foods will keep almost indefinitely, but by eating from your food storage, you learn what you really do and don’t want to store, plus you learn how to use what you have.
A clean, dry, dark place without wild temperature fluctuations is best for keeping your pantry. A set of shelves in the garage or basement will work, as will a regular clothes closet (it’s remarkable how much will fit in an average closet fitted with shelves).
One final word. Your storage might become a life-saver if you find yourself on the receiving end of a natural disaster or the like.  There will be those around you who will need to eat. That final word is: Share.
