You say food storage, I feel helpless. We’ve done a lot to forward our storage. My husband has buckets of grains stored in our shed, and I’ve been working on collecting various odds and ends and I even have put them into some sort of menu and I made a chart with all their expiration dates. That sounds pretty good, but I know I have so much further to go. Fuel, light, extra shoes—whenever I start to think about all that remains to be done, I want to cry.
But now I have a guide to step me through it. “Preparedness Principles” by the Queen of Preparedness, Barbara Salsbury, came into my life at a very fortuitous time. I’d been reading a book about the last days and wanted to know what I could do to better prepare myself and my family. Ask and ye shall receive!
“Preparedness Principles” starts at the very beginning of what we need to do and walks us through it, step by step. Barbara points out that we don’t need to spend all our time canning and gardening—if we know how to do it, we can put it into use when the time comes. We should make sure that our food storage contains food we will eat and not foods that we may be allergic to or have no idea how to use. In addition to food, we should have some money saved away. Money will not take the place of preparedness in a crisis, but they do work hand in hand. The book tells us ways to budget and eliminate debt to better prepare ourselves financially for the future.
Barbara gives us great ideas for how to create mini-pantries in our homes by looking around for unused space. We can reorganize our shelves to create an extra corner here and there. We can put food under the bed, on top of the fridge, and a number of other odd places. We can build shelves and stack boxes. Even if we live in tight quarters, we can make it work.
The book also contains great ideas for water and fuel storage, ways to keep warm, and has a checklist for food safety. Barbara even tells us how to guard against mealy worms and weevils.
Reading this book really helped me to feel that I had given tools to succeed. I no longer have to wander around with a bewildered look on my face, chanting, “Wheat, wheat, where to put the wheat?” Barbara’s friendly, approachable demeanor made it seem like it wasn’t such an impossible task, and (dare I say it?) I might actually be looking forward to taking on the next phase of preparedness.
(This book was published in 2006 by Horizon.)
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