Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Pet food and personal items.
Don't forget the things in life that help you stay happy and centered. A
couple of decks of cards and a copy of Hoyle's topic of card games can break the tension and generate
a lot of laughs when times are tough. Don't forget the favorite board games and a stack of poker chips
too!
Open-pollinated seeds for gardening.
I recommend that you store a variety of seeds for gardening.
Use open-pollinated seeds, not hybrids, so you can save seeds from your garden for future needs, if
necessary.
Do not eat seeds for planting. If they are dyed a bright color, they may be poisonous. Also,
they will provide a hundred times more nutrition after the harvest than if eaten first.
Pleasure foods, including snacks, treats, sweets, and beverages.
These may not have much nutrit-
ive value, but they are great for lifting morale or giving yourself a little reward.
Calculating a Year's Food Supply
“
Store what you eat. Eat what you store. Use it or lose it!
”
—James Talmage Stevens,
Making the Best
of Basics: Family Preparedness Handbook
Because most stored foods have a limited shelf life, you are throwing money away if you do
not store food that your family will eat. The day that your life depends on your food stores is
the wrong time to find out you have an allergy to 90 percent of your stored food. Develop a
plan of rotating through and replacing your stored food to ensure that the food does not exceed
its shelf life and that you will actually eat the kinds of food that you have stored. The average
American diet of 3,500 calories a day leads to obesity. When the Soviet Union collapsed and
Cuba lost its main source for food imports, the average Cuban diet slipped from 2,908 calories
in 1989 to 1,863 calories in 1995, and most Cubans lost about 20 pounds (Pfeiffer 2006). The
following food-storage quantities are for one typical adult American male, for one year, con-
suming roughly 2,600 calories per day. Divide these numbers by 12 for a one-month supply
and by 52 for a one-week supply. Since not everyone has the same food requirements, refer to
table 3-1
to estimate how much food you should store. Totaling the values will give you the
equivalent number of typical adult males, which you will multiply by the figures for the various
foods (see example below table). Make your own adjustments based on family members, such
as counting a teenage female with an unusually large appetite the same as a teenage male
(equal to 1.4 typical adult males).
Food-Storage Quantities for One Average Adult Male for One Year
Grains—375 lbs.
You will probably want to store a variety of grains, including whole wheat, pasta,
oats, corn, rice, barley, and so on. Due to its longevity, most long-term storage plans focus on wheat.
Brown rice goes rancid in six months to a year (but lasts longer if stored with CO2 or nitrogen), but
