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Home Food Storage for the Short Term, Medium Term and Long Term

There're many reasons to pay attention to home food storage.

Start with the unthinkable -- the shelves of your local supermarket are empty, stripped of everything by mobs of looters. Or, maybe, less dramatically. They just sell out because they can't replace what they are selling.

It could happen. The US dollar keeps sliding downhill. Nobody knows where its bottom will be. The British pound is going down even more than the US dollar. If you use the euro you may be gloating now, but your governments are taking on far too much debt also. Japan has been in an economic slough for twenty years and still owes too much money.

Only commodity-backed currencies, the Canadian and Australian dollars, the Norwegian kroner and the Swiss franc are doing well.

And yet the people of those countries need food and fuel. Okay, Canada has both -- and if the world is warming up maybe it will even have a civilized climate. But if the world is actually cooling to a new ice age they may find glaciers overrunning their wheat fields. (OK, so that's a few years away)

The point is, the economic problems of the past look insignificant compared to the trillions of dollars of debt in the world today. And the physical problems caused by storms, drought in some places and too much rain in others.

Nobody in the developed world can count on the current system lasting forever.

And few of us live in a place safe from short term disasters -- according to TIME, 91% of Americans live in an area threatened by wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods or terrorism. The other 9% probably live in the wilderness areas of Alaska or Montana and can be cut off from a supermarket by blizzards.

For short term survival, you should at the very least keep on hand 72 hour emergency kits. One for every member of your family who wants to eat. If you ever experience a severe storm or flood or a simply power blackout, you'll be glad you did this.

After that, prepared for a medium term disaster. Put up frozen, canned and dehydrated foods -- enough for thirty to sixty days for each member of your family. You should assume you won't have electricity, so only a few days worth of this food should be frozen. You can eat that as it thaws out. Then you must switch to canned and dehydrated emergency supplies.

For the long term of up to a year or so, you can keep freeze dried foods such as those sold by Mountain House and Alpine Aire. They sell complete meals packed in #10 steel cans coated with enamel and flushed with nitrogen. They have a shelf life of up to thirty years if kept in a cool place. Have at least a year's supply for each member of your family.

After that, you're in a new world. Drums of dry wheat berries, dry milk, wheat grinder -- and plenty of seeds, because at some point you have to stop eating stored food and begin growing your own.

Home food storage is for immediate or one year survival. If the system collapses and isn't rebuilt within a year, you're probably on your own. Good luck to all of us.