Emergency essentials by and far have the best food analyzer that you can input just about anything into and it tells you down to the vitamins if you are lacking anything. It's a sticky but just a reminder it's here - Emergency Essentials

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Retired Army livin debt free but still workin for the Fed. 21 acres, 3 ponds totaling 5 acres, welsh harlequin ducks, NZW rabbits and thousands of bass, bluegill, and catfish.

I just got to this thread and noticed when I read the article they have put (corrected) by many of the things so they must have listened?

For a general guideline I think the numbers (I guess now that they are corrected?) seem reasonable. I've not ground my own wheat yet but working on getting there but the rest I'm familiar with and generally agree. I think that on one hand some consume less than those amounts per year, however, we do consume more than we generally think.

It's a far sight better than what I have seen people consider ample storage...much like her example of the 365 cans of soup. I remember reading about a woman who thought a case of chocolate syrup and 85 cans of spam and two cases of 24ct. water bottles would somehow tide her over. I guess if you want to eat chocolate spam for a couple of weeks that would work.

To me, regardless of whether or not my recipies match the ones given or if I use as much of each ingredient is sort of besides the point. It's there if I need it, if you don't use it you just have more to use later. For myself, I hardly eat any bread or pancakes...I'm more likely to have tortillas. That'll make a lot of tortillas...but cookies on the other hand...

I like the Mormon calculator they linked to...that's pretty handy. Anyway thanks for posting the article, I enjoyed it.

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A coward is a man who awakens a woman's love with no intention of loving her. - Bob Marley

Guess my biggest eye opener was that amt. of food only means one meal a day for one person...or thereabouts. Doubt we'll be sitting at computers if times are rough and a bit of bread and some beans is not gonna satisfy me let alone the other 9 folks I know I'll be feeding. They all can eat, none of them fat now so they'll definitely need more calories when they are physically working hard to stay alive. I know I'm deficient in grains for sure.

Using that calc for what it would take for one person for a year, I did some figuring last night on what a few the items would amount to for a day.(these #'s are rounded)

50# pasta=1c cooked pasta daily
50# rice=2/3c cooked daily
25# oats=2/3c cooked daily
60# beans=1 1/4c cooked daily

This helped me to better visualize what the pounds of food amount to and where I would need to adjust.

2400-2500 calories may seem like a lot now, but its about half of what farm boys used to tuck away when more things involved hard manual labor.

Last year I read the "Little House on the Prairie" series to my kids - Farmer Boy goes into great detail about what was served at various meals and how much Almanzo ate. I was amazed at just how much food was consumed. I keep those amounts in the back of my head when planning preps.

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Wags Ranch Nigerians


"The Constitution says to promote the general welfare, not to provide welfare!" ~ Lt. Col Allen West

THAT is handy too lol. So far, for the last five years 25lbs of rice and 25lbs of pasta has lasted over a year. But then again, that's not counting for more laborious days. I do more labor than a lot of people but I'm sure not as much as it will be once my stead is up and running.

This is why I think the calculations are mighty handy. It's reminded me that once I get there, I should bulk up where I can a little.

Then too...larger people tend to burn/need more calories than smaller people, especially in warmer climates because, as I have been learning, larger bodied mammals utilize more calories to stay cool in the summer in hot places than smaller bodied mammals. Which is why I thought a grown arkansas doe was a fawn that just lost its spots.

In the summers here, I do not eat a lot...well to me I don't...and I do a fair amount of rugged outside work. But I know that once on the stead the workload will increase and the heat will increase...but I don't think I'm going to suddenly get shorter and everything LOL....

So...it all needs to be calculated in. The calorie thing vs. mass thing I had not started making that connection until today. I've some thinking to do now.

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A coward is a man who awakens a woman's love with no intention of loving her. - Bob Marley

Ow the calculator would give me 1 week before i die of dehydration. And im prety sure i would have to eat cold food the last few days.

Ill promise to stock up water and fuel so i get closer to the 2-4 weeks i prep for,

Henk

It's really hard to store a year's supply of water unless you have a natural source of water on your property. That's why most resources only recommend storing enough for a few weeks; it just takes too much room to store water in large quantities. For long-term water needs, you need access to a water source and an appropriate filtration system.

There was a study not too long ago in Indiana, if I remember correctly, and they figured the Amish ate over 5,000 calories a day on average. It's funny, on another site someone was blabbering that the reason the Amish don't get allergies is they don't eat sugar. They buy it 50 pounds at a time because they go through so much of it!

The LDS list is a good starting point, but I really think it's lacking in terms of fruits and vegetables. I don't know if they're assuming people will be growing gardens to cover that or not, but it would make a big difference in terms of nutrition and avoiding food fatigue.

I've been reading a lot lately about how taking a spoon full of LOCAL un-pasteurized honey every day will combat allergies. And after reading that article about the Amish kids not getting allergies, I am convinced it's because they have their own hives and use their own raw honey.

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Serving Children Since 1994.

I love variety in my diet, and the blandness and lack of variety of the food in the piece really gets to me. I really like the "eat what you store, store what you eat" philosophy. So while storing the items that she recommends is a very good idea, having a pantry filled with the foods you love, above and beyond what is recommended is much, much better!

And aside from having a garden, we're also trying to plant perennial items that produce food year after year. Things like fruit trees, bushes, grape vines, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes. When we move to the ranch full time, I'd like to get chickens again, turkeys, in a variety that won't have problems breeding, guinea fowl, maybe ducks and geese. And plenty of food for them too.

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I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.

Popeye

In case it has not been pointed out the food on the plate was adjusted to show what you would get 3 times a day. The plate was one of the three meals you would get a day. Which also covers her alleged inability to bake.

Food storage is easier than people make it. A pound of rice has 1600 calories a day. A pound of beans runs 1200-1400. One person needs 730,000 calories a year at 2K a day. Due the math for what you store and it becomes easy.

Chocolate

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If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

Good thread! When I first came across that LDS calculator I about had a heart attack! I would need 750 pounds of grains for my family for a year. Of course, I was thinking only in terms of sacks of wheat, not all the other forms of "grains" available. That in addition to ALL the other stuff needed and I sat down and cried. I thought there was no way I could even hope to put away enough. So after my pity party, I thought I'd really evaluate what we eat to get a better idea of what types of things I need. I found that it's nice to store up all kinds of stuff but the epiphany for me was "how to cook everything off-grid"!! I don't have a wood burning cook stove in my house, few people do, so simplicity became a HUGE issue for me in gathering things together. As an example, I have put away some instant oatmeal. Is it as nutritious as whole oats ground up in the Wondermill? Probably not, but it's practical. I only have to heat up a cup or so of water to provide a hot breakfast. Baking a cake, much less so. It would be nice to get a cook stove, but we simply can't afford it and, frankly the idea of firing up a cook stove in the house in the middle of a Midwest July doesn't appeal to me in the least. Nor does the idea of trecking outside during a Midwestern winter, but hey, at least cooking outdoors would keep you fairly warm. I have purchased cast iron products to be able to cook on an open fire or in an earth oven, which is on the building list this summer. Once I started looking as prep in terms of how to cook them, I think it lifted the burden of not fitting into the LDS model of preparedness.
Having said that, do I have enough? Absolutely not, lol

You can look into camp stoves. We've had to use them to cook inside several times after/during bad storms. We just made sure some windows were cracked for ventilation. There is even a oven made by Coleman that is made to be used on camp stoves and several independent models sold by Cabela's that run on the small propane bottles.

There are also the solar ovens but they are expensive.