Food Storage Suggestion

At church today we had a wonderful pair of speakers on the topics of temporal and spiritual preparedness. It reminded me of the $4.25 gas days of summer with reports of people stocking up on rice, wheat, flour, sugar and other necessities in fear of a teamster's strike. I too, in spite of our limited resources, "stocked up" on some bare necessities that have since gone the way of the rest of our groceries.

Actually making meaningful and permanent progress in a food storage program has proven to be a slippery task. But today, while listening to our speaker's wonderful discourse, I felt a flash of inspiration regarding how to make gradual but significant headway in our family storage plan:

Rather than trying to buy "a little bit more than you need" each month, eventually building up a 3-month and then larger supply, try selecting one item you use regularly each month and buy 3-months' worth on top of your regular monthly/weekly allotment.

The first thing that came to my mind was how often we integrate fabulous Wal-Mart green beans into our dinner menu. Next month, rather than buying our regular monthly allotment of 8 cans, we will buy 32 cans (Our regular 8 which we'll use that month and 24 [8 cans x 3 months] more to put into storage). The following month we will continue to buy our regular 8 can allotment and will rotate our 8 of our cans from the storage portion and put in the new cans. In addition, we'll buy 3 months worth of something else that we need to add to our growing storage.

Brilliant!

Anyway, I think it's brilliant. I hope some of you find it helpful.

***UPDATE: I was so excited about this idea that I made Mitzi go with me to Wal-Mart today during lunch so that we could buy up our 3-month supply of green beans. It only cost $18 for 36 cans (good ol' Wal-Mart beans were $0.50 per can compared to the $1.00+ per can of some other brands)! Now we have our 3-month supply of green beans and will be adding something else to it next month. Hurrah!