Putting it All Together – Food For One Adult for One Year

Today, I took 3 of my 7 children on an adventure to the grocery store. My goal was to purchase 1 year’s worth of food to feed 1 adult using the LDS food storage calculator as my guide. The rest of the gang was at choir and after driving across the city, I had exactly 1 hour to do my shopping.

Not long ago, my friend and fellow prepper was visibly impressed with how much food I have in my pantry. I replied that with my large family, I thought the pantry might be able to feed us for about two months. The pantry is really only a small part of my food store -I also have two big chest freezers, a couple hundred jars of fruit, veggies and meat tucked away on shelves in the basement, a few dozen 5 gallon pails in the garage with wheat, beans and rice, garden veggies in the root cellar and laying hens and the milk cow in the barn. Still, her comment got me thinking about my perception versus the reality of my preparedness.

Did I really have enough food on my farm to sustain the equivalent of 10 adults, 5 horses, 2 cows, 24 chickens, sheep, llama, 2 dogs, 3 cats and the aquaponic fish for at least a year?

I decided to break my question into manageable chunks and look first at what just one adult would need for a year. Not long ago, MD posted information about the LDS food calculator. In the past few years, I have not only calculated the storage needs for my family using an LDS site, but also used the Canada Food Guide to determine the optimum number of servings of healthy nutritious foods to keep us all going in times of stress. I was shocked to see that for my family, I “should” make available 50+ servings of vegetables a day. WOW, that was an eye opener.

Last night, I went back to an “LDS food storage calculator” site and looked at what is recommended for basic survival. I normally buy almost everything on the list so I felt comfortable doing a targeted shopping trip for research purposes. I decided to buy for just 1 adult today…

Usually, I have all 7 children with me and we have to travel an hour and a half to get to the city so going from store to store looking for the best price is akin to insanity. My favourite place to go is a discount wholesale place – I describe it as “poor man’s Costco”. Lots of no name products, less choice but the basics are usually there and no one blinks an eye when I show up with the gang.

As I unloaded the cart at the check-out counter, I wondered if the cashier had ever seen an identical order go through. Who knows how many people have decided to shop the whole list all at once.

I know that I absolutely did not get the best prices but I bought the brands that we normally use. Considering I was shopping with a 3 preschoolers in tow, and had a list with 33 items and an hour to complete the task, I’d say things went as well as could be expected. Because I had to use a flatbed cart and there was no socially acceptable way to tie down the rather excitable 3 year old, our final moments in the store were rather stressful. I actually thought we were going to make it out without major incident until he hurled a bag of dried mangoes at the cashier catching her in the left kidney area.

I packed the 3 little ones and groceries into the van, drove across town, picked up the rest of the kids and arrived home by 10 pm. Now the kids are all asleep and I need to finish my post and put everything away before I can go to bed.

Here’s what I have learned. 1 year supply of food for an adult doesn’t actually take up much room or cost a terrific amount of money. I would like to carefully assess the preps that I do have and systemically add to them so that I am sure we are well prepared. MD’s list of nasty diseases in one of his Miscellany News Brief has got me thinking about how we would handle a long term quarantine situation.

• I didn’t actually buy wheat or milk powder at the grocery store today as they don’t stock the organic hard red wheat that I like to use in my grain mill and I buy milk that is made locally.
• Also, I couldn’t bring myself to purchase things like a tiny container of molasses or small box of baking soda.
• My family loves peas and lentils but I have to hide beans – so I re-arranged the amounts according to what my family is most likely to eat
• It wasn’t always possible to find packages with the exact weight that matched my list so I took some liberty here also.