When will you depleat your food stores

I was wondering under what conditions you would consider depleating your food stores. I have a general fear of people dipping in too early in the game and not forcing themsleves to deal with hardship and adjustments and using up their stores "just to remain comforatable". Just looking for a little feedback on what you all have decided as to when to start using your pantry.

Thanks

Mule

 

I wouldn't start using the Freeze Dried stuff until it was absolutely necessary. That stuff won't get eaten until ts has really hit the fan.

 

weare trying to rotate more as alot of my canned stores are coming up on and rolling over two years..

 

We tend to go on the 'store what you eat and eat what you store' plan. So we basicly try to keep several months of food stocked up in the pantry of the types we eat every day. We also garden in the summer and normaly have some meat on the hoof out in the pasture. So we eat out of the pantry every day and simply replace what we use. Some times it dosent get replaced as fast as its used for a while, kind of like now where Im layed off and we dont have anything comeing in, then too thats the central reason why we stock up and prep. I figure statisticly its almost a guarantee everyone will at some point be out of work, or just without income for a time where as, while its possible, its not nearly as certain that the economy will colapse, the country will be invaded, some disaster will knock us back to the 1800s etc. We try to do what we can to be prepaired for those things also but the central theme for us is the same reguardless, be able to feed, house and protect our selves, same as in good times.

So like I say, we depleat our pantry a bit with each meal and rebuild it with every trip to the store, garden or livestock sales but our stuff will never expire since its always rotated.

 

So what happens when the prices start to sky out and you cannot afford to replace your "rotations"? Is there a point at which you have decided "we are not touching any more until--------"?

Mule

 

Asking your body to go without very little to no food is no different than wishing for your car to go without any fuel.

When I go for my stock is when I am broke and hungry, if I cannot start buying food in 2 weeks, then it is time to do some small game hunting, fishing scrounging, ect. ect. Some of us have year round greenhouse gardens that will sustain you and your family year round.

 

You make a perfectly Valid point. we have some dry goods( the dry stuff takes a concerted effort to soak (overnight) and to cook and is kinda' my "level II" stock) beans/lentils peas/rice and flour stored;( pastas do get rotated);we had sphaghetti and factory canned sauce circa '07 last night, personally I could live on beans and rice and what ever is slow enough to be caught or shot that day; wife won't eat dry beans now ( the crunching hurts her teeth and nursing and flatulence are a bad combination,lol), I figure when we get "HONGREE" it won't matter.
I've always heard you should keep
a pkg of dry dog food in your woods emergency pouch as you won't eat it out fishing,(cliff bars and snickers never seem to make it home to go out another day) but if you need it; dog food will keep you alive(which is the whole point here).


Part of facing the unkown...we may end up hungry some day; or some kid with a .22 will dump a mag into my groin over a garden tomato.Yes, I agree a semi load of food would be nice to have but c'hoo gotta' defend that mountain of vittles..., we could probably find the funds. For that matter I could blow some bucks for the cool socom 16
or SSG I'd like, then pay the divorce attorney. __________________I'm thinking a sealed#10 of heir loom seeds are a better long term source.

 

RC

That is the type of answere I was looking for. I have seen a couple of methods of storing food--- one is store what you eat so you eat (rotate) all the time and thus it is just a "floating buffer" and the other is "store stuff you won't eat until you are in SHTF situation which is a different strategy. Not saying right or wrong but these are two different methods with two different playouts on when you use your pantry

Mule

 

I don't follow the three meals a day notion now tend to skip to exercise a little discipline and keep winter weight in check. shtf I tend to think of one pot going a day rice/pasta or beans to stretch any canned or grown foraged stuff out.certainly not detailed meal plans i.e. bkfast : tang packet, 3 soda crackers,oatmeal,1pop tart
lunch : meat spread sandwich 1cookie, chiclets,
dinner: chicken romanov, rice pudding and garden greens
snack two ritz crackers
made some simple civilwar hardtack the other day 2cups flour 2tbs salt2tbs sugar 1/2cup water rollit out.25" bake@350 30minutes I ate it,wouldn't force it on my wife or kids,but over all not all too bad(next batch useless salt,more sugar) hard enough to usea as a weapon... or a digging tool

 

Good point, as none will know when or if any relief can be expected.
uphere We've gotta shoot for 8mos October through the following May; though food may be grown farther south of us....long winters are a negative on an area with alot of positives, few target cities,fewlarge populations lots of fresh water, dairyfarms, game, timber...cheese...beer... rather large women.( warm in the winter and shade in the summertime!)lol
simple green house gets built next spring

 

Now that thur's a goodly question!
I have absolutley NO idea...
I suppose it will depnd on 2 things:
1) how many of us survive long enough to eat any of the stored foods....
(or show up at any rate!)
2) How much food is available, "off the land" so to speak...
At either or, it scares me!
I know I'll never have enough food stored for a really desperate scenario!
Bill

 

I would like to have a TEN year supply, but that would be a stretch, my main problem would be where would I store all that food without the possibilites of theft, confinscation or the elements of nature getting to it. I look at about a single years supply for each person in your family/group being the most realistic. OPSEC being the most important part.

One question that I would like to ask. If the SHTF and the masses are literally starving, how would you feign starvation if you had no choice but to go back to the real world for a short time? How would look like you are starving if you are a few pounds +- your optimal weight? It would be a hard time trying to blend in with everone else.

 

all good questions . Zombie makeup?I don't think it'd be possible to eat fat and happy while the town was decimated,after a while word would spread( bodies of curious "burglars" piled by the curb for collection?).

Is it feasible to store that much food without owning a grain silo? And would it keep for more than 5 years???Maybe on the hoof with plenty of pasture ??(A guinea pig ranch or "rabbitry" in the basement. I find it overwhelming to think in decades of supplies...

 

pee yourself..rub an onion on your shirt, nobody will take you too seriously. Or want to talk long...

 

I guess it might have been more clear if mentioned that our stored food/pantry is only a stop gap for us. We try to always have enouph to at least keep from starving with absolutely NO resupply for at LEAST 3-5 months between the freezers and pantry. Then we also live on a small farm so I could go out most any day with no problem and shoot a couple of squirles to toss in a stew with some roots from the cattails that grow out back or in the neighboring properties pond (owner is friendly and lives several miles away), a bit of the fuzz to thicken, some wild garlic (if season is such I can find that part) and maybe some burdock and what ever else I can scrounge to make a stew, dig up a bit of chickoree from the yard to brew into coffee to drink with it and have with it. In the summer we also raise a garden. We have a few rabbits and normaly goats (barber pole worm infestation wiped out the herd last summer) and if we get hungry enouph we have a goliath donkey in the pasture. Several neighbors run cattle and if times are bad the market may be hard and we might be able to barter for some cattle.

So to put it simply, our pantry is for convenience and comfort more than survival. If its survival mode then the land, wild life, streams, livestock and so on will be providing most of the meals and we do at least some of that now to be accustomed to it. The pantry simply covers the everyday SHTF situations life throws at us like loss of income and such and makes it easier on us if we have to totaly leave stores behind to get used to it and carry us through bad times of those sorts as well.

So based on our plans, the food dosent get depleted, it simply creates a transition to our other sources. That was the only real anwser I could come up with to realisticly be prepaired for what ever might come since theres no way to know how long it would last so I have to work on the assumption it could last for ever. Not being indepently wealthy (or in any other monitary way), even if the stuff had enouph shelf life to last that long, it would be nearly impossible to store ALL the food a family would need for say 10-20 years let alone that I may well live another 40 years or so. So it becomes a matter of figureing out how its going to get replenished without stores and little or no barter.

Oh and while I find them unapealing on a full belly so havent tried them, I do know in my head that opposum isnt bad eating though its fatty and so an even better survival food and on a belly thats been empty for a couple days Im sure they would become quite apetizing. I got tired of them eating all the cat food a couple weeks ago so over the coarse of a couple days shot 5 of them from the pourch and havent dented their population, only made them leery of the pourch. So eating shouldnt be hard for us and each of them would have averaged around 5-7 pounds of meat and some fur if hungry.

 

sounds like a plan...
Don't eat the poor azz...he/she maybe useful