Ward Goal: July begin 90 day food storage plan

One year of food storage sounds like an awful lot most of the time, and can be overwhelming to think about. Sometimes its so overwhelming that people think about it and then decide to do nothing thinking its too hard. But what I have learned about doing things the hard way is to eat the elephant one bite at a time so to speak.

This is where the church's request that we work on a 90 day supply of foods that our families eat everyday. 90 days is a lot easier to come by and to work on, and when your done, you will have 3 months out of your 1 year supply already finished.

Here is a website www.3steps.org that has an easy to follow storage plan for getting your 90 day supply together along with shelf stable meal ideas. It is important to store things your family will eat for your 90 day supply. If your children won't eat it it won't do them any good and they can end up starving to death in emergency situations if they refuse to eat.

First make a plan. Choose 18 meals, and write out the ingredient list for each meal. Multiply all ingredients listed by 5. If you buy enough for 5 of each meal, you will have 90 days of dinners. Make a budget. Look over your finances and see where you can cut a little to put to food storage, or decide how much money a week/month you want to donate to food storage and then begin to purchase meals. If you can spare it choose one meal a week and purchase all 5 of the meal ingredients you will need. to make those 5 meals. Try and look for cans with dates that are 2-3 years out. Also be mindful of food types that are fatty or have oil (nuts, brown rice, flax etc.) only have a shelf life of 6 months unless vacuum packed. So when planning meals be aware of that fact and either do without those items, vacuum pack them or pull them out to rotate them every 6 months.

After having purchased all 90 meals you should start rotating them out by eating one storage meal a week. Be sure when putting your cans in to write the dates in marker on the top so you can easily see the dates, so you can use up the meals before they expire.Continue to purchase food to replace the stuff your eating, just be sure and use up all the old meals before you start to dig into the new ones.