Do you have food storage?

I had to work myself up to canning. I would casually mention it to friends or people I met for about a year, and everyone had a tidbit of advice. Then at the thrift stores I picked up a couple of those '60's canning books, and found the supplies at yardsales, and we love to can! (well... I love eating the fruit in the middle of long winters, more than the actual canning, honestly! )

We have lots of food storage. We have some under our bed (those 50 lb bags of oats and soybeans). Then we have a chest freezer for meats, juices, etc. Then DH made me a HUGE shelf in our extra room from floor to ceiling for storing everything else. Bathroom (shampoos, etc.) and misc. have the top shelf. Then there's a baking shelf (flour - although not nearly all of it fits there, we buy a year's supply, so some goes under the bed, too), choc. chips, sugars, other baking stuff). There's also a canned shelf (applesauce, pears, and other glass jars - this is also a high shelf!). Then on the floor is all my canning jars and canning pots, etc. And all the random stuff just gets shoved in there somehow :LOL

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Thank you all for the replies. EFmom, I'm starting where you are -- just stocking up the pantry. Then maybe I can expand beyond that. But money in a bank won't always be safe, necessarily. (If you have a personal financial emergency it will be there, but it won't necessarily be there if we have a societal financial emergency.) Think of the Great Depression when the banks closed suddenly and people lost all of their life savings. Also, inflation could cause you to lose the value of your dollar.

I'm also thinking of a possible scenario in which there is some "bottleneck" of getting goods to the markets-- so what if there just isn't food to buy for awhile?

I'm certainly not criticizing you; you probably have more "food storage" than I do at this point. But I was just commenting on the stocked food vs. money issue.

Sorry for butting in : .....but I've heard that if you freeze your grains prior to storing, you won't get any pests in them.

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You're not butting in.....you're adding to the conversation! Do you know how long the grains have to be stored in the freezer? Does this work for flour, as well?

I've only ever heard of buggies in flour. We don't get them, though. The eggs are already in the flour when you buy it. So freezing does kill the eggs. You should freeze for 48 hours to kill them

Yes I do!

I have a FoodSaver system (Christmas present one year) and I vaccuum seal things like cornmeal or bread mixes, bisquick, etc. to last longer. I also vaccuum seal corn on the cob in the summers when I'm canning.

I put up sweet corn, tomatoes (chopped, juiced, salsa, and sauce), and whatever else happens to come out of the garden. This year we'll be having bumper crops of zucchini and red potatoes. The zucchini I shred and freeze - it goes in pasta or anything else I can "hide" it in to get it down the kiddos ... but especially dh! ;-)

I bought two huge wooden storage shelf type units at Lowe's for about $35 apiece. I put them in my laundry/utility room and store all my baking stuff, large pans/stockpots, "free-stock" of coupon'd items (like tp, toothpaste, etc.), canned goods, dried goods. The canned items go on the little shelf space at the top of my cabinets between them and the ceiling. That helps me to see what I'm running low on, since I just replace the full jar's space with the empty one once I've used something.

Jams/jellies - as I make a batch of those, I store the jars in the box I bought the empty jars in (I think I've had the same box for about 5 years now! LOL) and then stack the boxes together somewhere. I'm down to one so it'll fit in that itsy tiny cabinet above the fridge nicely.

I got a huge chest freezer for free from one of our friends who didn't have room for it and used it for... of all things... a tool chest! LOL! I cleaned it, bleached the crap out of it, got some baskets to sit in it, and filled it with stuff. Meats I buy in bulk and vaccuum seal, frozen sweet corn, deer meat when my brothers go hunting in the winters, and pork since my family raises pigs. In an emergency, we could probably live out of the pantry/freezer for at the very least a week, at most maybe three.