(no subject)
Feb. 25th, 2020 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: food, (fairly mild) apocalypse, (fairly mild) illness]
One thing I recommend for everyone who isn't broke and isn't living in a capsule, even if they're not into prepping at all, is rotated stockpiles.
It goes like this:
1. Make a list of all the non-perishables you use on a regular basis. Some common examples to get you started: peanut butter, hand soap, cereal, chocolates, shampoo. The list can be on paper, in your head, on your phone, whatever you're most comfortable with.
2. Note how much of each item you normally use in three months. If you don't know, keep track of your usage for one month and multiply by three.
3. For each item, the next time it goes on sale, buy a three-month supply.
4. When it goes on sale again, refill to a three-month supply, even if you still have a bunch left.
5. Make sure to use the oldest ones first. For things like shampoo, line them up on the shelf so that the ones you bought longest ago are at the front; for things with expiration dates, line them up by that. (Things you bought more recently don't always have dates further in the future, so whenever possible it's best to line them up by *actual* age rather than by how long you've had them.)
---
The great thing about rotated stockpiles is that they're helpful for almost *everything*.
Snowed in? Quarantined? You can stay fed (and clean)!
Evacuating? Throw a few of your granola-bar boxes in your bag!
Business as usual? All of your non-perishables are now bought at sale prices!
If you don't have enough money and/or space for stockpiling *everything* on your list, you might still be able to do *some*. And being poor makes the sale-prices-at-all-times aspect all the more beneficial.
---
Optional step 6: once you've gotten comfortable with this routine, consider expanding to frozen foods. You have to be more cautious with these: freezers can break, doors can get left open. Keep your freezers in heavily trafficked areas of your home whenever possible, so that people will notice more quickly if something is wrong. Weight your frozen stockpiles towards things that can handle spending a while at room temperature if they have to (like bread), and towards cheaper things for less risk (also bread). If you have multiple freezers, *some* of which are in heavily trafficked areas and others are not, aim to keep cheaper and more resilient foods in the out-of-the-way freezer(s), and expensive and fragile foods in the monitored freezer(s).
---
This post inspired by *Dad*, of all people, suggesting we do our grocery shopping this week with coronavirus preparation in mind.
Further, more quarantine-focused reading: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1576034.html
One thing I recommend for everyone who isn't broke and isn't living in a capsule, even if they're not into prepping at all, is rotated stockpiles.
It goes like this:
1. Make a list of all the non-perishables you use on a regular basis. Some common examples to get you started: peanut butter, hand soap, cereal, chocolates, shampoo. The list can be on paper, in your head, on your phone, whatever you're most comfortable with.
2. Note how much of each item you normally use in three months. If you don't know, keep track of your usage for one month and multiply by three.
3. For each item, the next time it goes on sale, buy a three-month supply.
4. When it goes on sale again, refill to a three-month supply, even if you still have a bunch left.
5. Make sure to use the oldest ones first. For things like shampoo, line them up on the shelf so that the ones you bought longest ago are at the front; for things with expiration dates, line them up by that. (Things you bought more recently don't always have dates further in the future, so whenever possible it's best to line them up by *actual* age rather than by how long you've had them.)
---
The great thing about rotated stockpiles is that they're helpful for almost *everything*.
Snowed in? Quarantined? You can stay fed (and clean)!
Evacuating? Throw a few of your granola-bar boxes in your bag!
Business as usual? All of your non-perishables are now bought at sale prices!
If you don't have enough money and/or space for stockpiling *everything* on your list, you might still be able to do *some*. And being poor makes the sale-prices-at-all-times aspect all the more beneficial.
---
Optional step 6: once you've gotten comfortable with this routine, consider expanding to frozen foods. You have to be more cautious with these: freezers can break, doors can get left open. Keep your freezers in heavily trafficked areas of your home whenever possible, so that people will notice more quickly if something is wrong. Weight your frozen stockpiles towards things that can handle spending a while at room temperature if they have to (like bread), and towards cheaper things for less risk (also bread). If you have multiple freezers, *some* of which are in heavily trafficked areas and others are not, aim to keep cheaper and more resilient foods in the out-of-the-way freezer(s), and expensive and fragile foods in the monitored freezer(s).
---
This post inspired by *Dad*, of all people, suggesting we do our grocery shopping this week with coronavirus preparation in mind.
Further, more quarantine-focused reading: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1576034.html
no subject
Date: 2020-02-26 11:01 am (UTC)(Unfortunately I currently lack important-seeming things to implement this: travel by means other than train for moving largish amount of sale-purchased goods, kitchen-allocated storage space that can store more volume than the bare essentials of the cooking I do (and I have the largest cupboard of my roommates), access to an effective sale-cycle to participate in for this (Norway is weird and not great about sale-cycles (in part I'm just totally untuned to them and everything is very very expensive), and also I'm living in large part off of First Price, the local minimum-cost unbranded brand, which is still cheaper than many other brands when they're on sale and even when I was back home, it was non-trivial trouble to get to stores on a regular basis so I ended up shopping very inefficiently and not being able to check for sales regularly), only spending another 9-10 months on this continent so I don't think I could get a sense for my long-term needs in time for them to be messed up changed again.(I value eating good food very highly, and making "eat good food" and "don't spend a fuck-ton of time and money on food" means dictating your cooking to local idiosyncrasies of food access to a substantial extent, to my feeling))
All that reasoning is super oriented towards the sales-pricing aspect most of all, which is most important to me, compared to emergency supplies (which is important but easy to ignore. I should work on it, though).
no subject
Date: 2020-02-26 03:14 pm (UTC)If you have non-kitchen storage space available, you might be able to fix that part. We reallocated a few bedroom shelves to pantry storage when we started doing more of this.
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>>only spending another 9-10 months on this continent<<
True. I think I focused a bit too much on *space* in the housing constraints and not enough on *stability*: if you're moving soon (especially to a place not reachable by land transport), you probably don't want to have to lug three months of food with you.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-27 01:28 am (UTC)(Although there are constraints on what's functionally non-perishable for my parents around this time of year in particular, since they'll need to throw out anything with the wrong ingredients when Pesach comes around.)
no subject
Date: 2020-02-27 03:57 am (UTC)---
>>they'll need to throw out anything with the wrong ingredients when Pesach comes around<<
FWIW, I hear some people sell their chametz to a Gentile friend and then buy it back at the end of the holiday.
(While we are *more* observant of Passover than most holidays, we are not observant enough to do that ourselves. We just rearrange the food cupboard so the Passover-friendly foods are on the top two shelves, and post a sign declaring the bottom shelves off-limits.)