Normal People Preparing for TEOTWAWKI – Food Systems

While we can only live for three days without water, we can live as long as 3 weeks without food.  But it would be three miserable weeks, which would ultimately end in death, if we had nothing to eat.  So we need to get food systems in place NOW to feed our entire families.

Remember in TEOTWAWKI, we are planning to shelter in place as LONG as possible.  This will actually be a HUGE benefit to you as the food that you store now or have stored in the past will be able to be used!  WOOHOO!  I can’t emphasize enough how helpful that really is.

So what types of food systems do we have to put into place now to survive TEOTWAWKI?  Let’s look at them one at a time below.

Food Systems to Put Into Place

Short-term Food Storage

If you’re living through TEOTWAWKI, you NEED a short-term food storage menu in place that can support your family for AT LEAST 3 months.  Why 3 months?  Because it takes most foods a minimum of 3 months to grow.

So how do we go about creating 3 months worth of short-term food storage?

Start by creating a menu for an entire week using only your food storage.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner for seven days.  Yes – only using food storage foods.  These don’t need to be foods that you have already, instead they can be a combination of foods that you already have and ones that you can easily acquire in the short-term.

Once you have that, then you’ll replicate that menu 13 times to get have three full months worth of food.

Now that you’re moving in the right direction, you can start determining how much of each ingredient you need.  Your next step will be to stock up on the items that you don’t have.

That’s the basics of how to set up a short-term food storage menu, but if you’d like a step by step walk-through (who doesn’t need a little help?) and want tips and tricks to make it so much easier (of course you do!), you’ll want to check out both my book – A Year Without the Grocery Store and the Companion Workbook to A Year Without the Grocery Store. The first one walks you through the process with tips and tricks using manageable bite-size chunks.  The workbook helps by giving you every single worksheet that you could ever want or imagine (over 100 pages of printables! Woohoo!) to help move your food storage efforts up several notches.  How cool is that?

Gardening as one of our food systems 

Please, please start gardening NOW.  Let me speak from experience.  We’ve tried to garden in buckets from 4 years ago until 2 years ago.  It was just nice to see something green coming out of the dirt.  Did we ever get a harvest?  Well, during those years we got maybe 2 cherry tomatoes and 5-6 strawberries.  I’m not kidding.  That’s really about all we got.

This year we put in three raised beds.  We planted tomatoes, peppers, lettuces, a bunch of herbs, carrots, strawberries, corn, potatoes, Delicata squash, cucumbers, lavender, watermelon, sunflowers, and other things that I can’t remember at the moment.  This is year one for us with a more ‘regular’ garden.  So far we’ve gotten 4 cherry tomatoes and a bunch of lettuce.  We’ve lost all the Delicata squash, corn, cucumbers, sunflowers, strawberries, carrots, watermelon, and sunflowers.

BUT we’ve learned a ton!  We have a LOT of critters which like to eat our food, so we need to fence the garden in.  Our raised bed soil is too compact.  We need to remove about 1/4 of the dirt and replace it with compost.

So if we do those things, next year’s garden is bound to be so much better than this year’s garden.  But even next year’s improved garden won’t be as good as the person who’s been gardening for YEARS.  But we can do the same thing the next year.  If we take some time and learn from our mistakes, we can tweak our garden again.   Each year through this procedure, our garden should continue to improve.

The problem is though, that we need to learn to garden NOW.  Please don’t wait.  Even if you’ve successfully gardened before, if you’re in a new location, or it’s been several years, soil can be different, pests can be different, seeds could flop.  We never know what’s going to happen, so practice, practice, practice NOW.

Seed Saving

Even if you have enough garden seeds for two or three years, the seeds could potentially degrade over time if not stored properly.  So if you can’t just store garden seeds that you purchase for years to come, how will you provide a yearly garden with seeds?

Learn to save your own seeds!  Seed saving can be a bit difficult, so again, please start learning how to save seeds NOW.  There’s a wonderful book that I fully recommend called Seed to Seed.  It walks you through the entire process of saving seeds with many different varieties of seeds.

Canning

There will come a point in your garden where you won’t be able to use all the produce that you’re growing before it goes bad.  That’s when you need to learn about canning.

Overview of the basics – there are two types of canning (1) Waterbath canning and (2) Pressure canning.  Waterbath canning is used for high acidic foods like most fruits.  Pressure canning is used for meats and most vegetables.  Each type of canning has rules specific to itself.

It’s important for you to understand that, just like everything else, canning is EASY!  You just need to know how to do it.  Fortunately, I have someone who I’ve been following for a long time.  Her name is Melissa K. Norris, and she teaches pressure canning.  I’ve worked through her course and loved it.  It was only after I took the class that I felt comfortable with my pressure canner.  I would highly recommend her course.

Cooking from Scratch

Once you have a garden going strong, you will have food to eat.  If we’re going to put an effective food system into place, the problem is again, most people don’t know how to cook from scratch.  Have you made something simple like pancakes – or do you always buy frozen ones.  What about making home-made spaghetti sauce.  Is that something you know how to do?  Do you know how to cook pumpkin to use in pumpkin bread?  Do you know how to make pickles?

What about other things which don’t include items from your garden.  Do you know how to make something as simple as noodles or dumplings?  They are both SO simple, but they can feel overwhelming if you’ve never made them before.  Have you ever baked homemade bread?  It’s really NOT hard!  I promise.  I used to bake 4 loaves every other week.  It takes time, but it’s not hard.

Second verse, same as the first…………I’ve said it twice already in this fairly short article.  You need to learn to do these things NOW.  Don’t wait until everything has fallen apart and you need to feed your family.  Learn these things NOW.   Do you need someone to walk you through the basics of cooking one item at a time?  This is how I REALLY learned to cook from scratch more than a decade ago.  I walked through two classes – Fundamentals of Traditional Cooking I and II.  These two classes taught me so much about what is called “Traditional Cooking” which is another way to say ‘cooking from scratch.’  I made noodles, stock and broth, kefir, spreadable cheese, sourdough bread and so much more.

Long-term food storage systems 

So where does long-term food storage come into all this?  I mean we have short-term, gardening, cooking from scratch, saving seeds, canning.  What about long-term food storage systems?

Your long-term food storage is what you’re going to use to fill in the gaps and make your garden and short-term food storage shine.  Long-term food storage contains make-it-from-scratch ingredients like wheat berries, flour, sugar, salt, oils, powdered milk, powdered eggs, spices, etc.  This is what you’re going use to make your bread, noodles, jams, jellies, sauces and so much more with.  Your long-term food storage is going to be huge in making life run much more smoothly.

I recently watched a wonderful show called Pioneer Quest.  Talk about a TEOTWAWKI lifestyle?  These two families in this show LIVED it!  The difference is that even though they were cooking from scratch, they got a weekly shipment that they had to “buy” in 1879 equivalent “dollars.”  What were the types of things that they bought?  It wasn’t chicken.  They butchered their own.  It wasn’t veggies, they grew their own.  It wasn’t milk.  They milked their own cow. They purchased ingredients like salt, sugar, flour, and lard.  Those are the types of long-term food storage items that you need to be storing NOW.

So What About You?

What food storage systems do you already have in place to beat TEOTWAWKI?  Do you garden and have any tips to share?  Is your short-term food storage is up to snuff and you have suggestions for us?  Do you know how to save seeds and there’s one trick that would help us all?  I’d love to hear from you below in the comments!  Please share with us so that we can all be more prepared.

Together let’s Love, Learn, Practice, and Overcome

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