by St. Funogas, Survival Blog:
(Continued from Part 3.)
Flour – 150 lbs
Flour has 1,520 calories per pound. For just-in-time food prepping, whole wheat kernels (wheat berries) are impractical for most people. They require grinding before making flour and most people don’t have a wheat grinder on hand. For a JIT shopping list, flour is the best way to go.
When stored properly, store-bought refined white flour can last 10+ years. I can personally vouch for 5+ years in a gasketed food-storage bucket without oxygen absorbers. I now add white flour to my food storage instead of adding more wheat.
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Flour isn’t just about calories, it also makes us feel fuller due to the air pockets in things like bread and pancakes. With a little practice anyone can learn to bake bread, rolls, and cakes etc.
In the Butterick Cookbook index there’s whole page of bread recipes and another index page with enough cake recipes to put Betty Crocker to shame.
Since many flour recipes require eggs, do an online search for some of the many eggless recipes for things like pancakes and cornbread. Eggless recipes is another good reason to have some vegetarian/vegan cookbooks in our library.
Though I haven’t tried them yet, powdered eggs are also an option to use in baking recipes
Corn – 25 lbs
Corn is one food many preppers don’t bother to store. At 15 cents per pound it’s the least expensive food-storage item you can buy. Where can you get corn that cheaply? At the farm store! And yes, feed corn is safe to eat. At $7.00 for a 50 lb bag at my local farm store, the price can’t be beat.
At $7.00, it wouldn’t be impractical to buy several hundred pounds in 50 lb bags as an inexpensive food to hand out to neighbors one pound at a time.
Feed corn can also be used to plant in the garden to keep producing more corn year after year. It’s easy to grow and is such a large plant it can outgrow most weeds. In my garden, feed corn is the only corn the raccoons leave alone. This year each corn stalk produced a little over 8 ounces of kernels. There aren’t too many crops which are that productive. In a grid-down situation, field corn is much denser and better choice than sweet corn for both calories per acre and eating versatility.
If you can’t think of any uses for corn, The Butterick Cookbook has 25 different recipes.
The easiest way to eat corn is as a whole grain, cooked the same way as dry beans: soaked, rinsed, then boiled or pressure cooked. After that, it can be eaten like hominy, used in the same recipes as rice and beans, or creamed in a food processor to fry as a thick flatbread, eaten like hummus, and many other ways if you do an online search.
Corn can be cracked in a meat grinder and used in many recipes as grits.
Those with a grain mill can make coarse meal for cornbread and fine flour for baking. I can vouch for its sweeter flavor in waffles.
If corn from the farm store cost way more than $7-$10 for a 50 lb bag then it may be planting corn which has been chemically treated. Be sure to ask a sales assistant if you’re not sure.
Feed corn comes in a paper bag so it’s more susceptible to weevils than any food on this JIT list. As mentioned, weevils are edible and are easy enough to sift out before using the corn. If freezer bags of corn are frozen after filling, any weevils present will die. In mylar, the oxygen absorber will do the trick. If several hundred pounds are bought in 50 lb bags to feed the neighbors, the corn wouldn’t even need to be repackaged, just tell them to sift the weevils out.
Whole Oats – 30 lbs (12 boxes)
Oats provide 1,700 calories per pound. A standard-sized container of rolled oats costs $3.98 and weighs 40 oz, or 2.5 lbs. Whole oats make an inexpensive breakfast food and can be eaten regularly by many of us without tiring of them. Since a standard 40-ounce container has 30 servings, each one will make 30 breakfasts.
Aside from breakfasts, oats can be used in cooking and baking as well. Oats can be used to stretch meat when making a meatloaf for example. Oatmeal pie is a poor man’s version of pecan pie and looks and tastes about the same. Quakeroats.com has 253 recipes using oats and corn grits.
Rice, Flour, Beans, Corn, and Oats. If these five items were all you had in your food storage, all bought at the last minute when it looked like Crunch Time was almost here, you could survive off just these for a year. It wouldn’t be the most exciting diet but you’d survive just fine. Using things already in your kitchen cupboards such as baking powder, spices, and salt will make these all more edible.
For those on a budget, these five beans and grains are an inexpensive way to go for a JIT feed-the-neighbors program. If these were all you bought for handouts to your neighbors, they’d be in very good shape.
If you want to do more than just survive, let’s add a few more items.
For any of these that you already use, again, you’re not spending money on a what-if scenario, just moving up the purchase date. If instead of mass chaos it turns out there’s peace on earth and good will toward everyone everywhere, and you won’t end up needing any emergency supplies, you’ll still use them sooner or later.
White Sugar – 50 lbs
Sugar is on my list for baking and canning among other things. At 1,750 calories per pound sugar has slightly more calories than flour.
If we have various fruits either from the garden or growing wild, sugar helps in home-canned jams, pie fillings, or canning the fruit by itself. As long as we’re in survival mode, we may as well be eating some “luxury” foods which can be made with the supplies we’ve purchased at the last minute. Using sugar for canning helps to spread these summertime foods over the whole year. For example, green tomatoes at the end of the season are typically fried but I spread them out over a longer period by canning them as an apple-tasting pie filling for cobbler. I also make green tomato chutney which can be used to add flavor to foods.
