Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I don’t pretend to understand exactly whats going on in the economy. I understand that the value of the dollar declines and foreign goods become, to us, more expensive. I understand that fuel prices increase and prices of other good increase accordingly to reflect the higher shipping. But, really, much of this is abstract. Its just something you read about. What drives it home for me is that as I putter around town I see more and more businesses closing up and buildings going vacant. In some areas its like a ghost town. That seems much more ‘real’ to me. It’s a bit disturbing…I see new businesses come in and a few months they’re gone. Someone’s dream of prosperity and success chucked into moving truck and the rest into a dumpster. The ‘For Lease’ sign goes back up and its someone elses turn. I suppose it’s a form of economic Darwinism, but its still a bit gloomy to see all these empty commercial spaces and Going Out Of Business signs. It does absolutely nothing to diminish my pessimistic outlook and my desire to play it safe.

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Ground up some wheat in the superblender the other day. I tell ya, that VitaMix is living up to its hype around here. Since I have a good bit of wheat tucked away I figured I’d try some cooking with it. In this case, I was interested in a breakfast cereal-type grind. So…dump in a cup of wheat and grind it up to about the consistency of pretzel salt. Recipe calls for 3:1 water:wheat with a little salt. It was interesting. It took about 15 minutes to cook and the result was a chewy, extremely filling cereal. I added a bit of brown sugar and it was quite good. Very satisfying. I figure if I throw in some dehydrated fruit it would make an excellent breakfast. In terms of economics its about…mmmmm…about a dime….for the rather large serving I wound up with. (I used 1/3 cup wheat and 1 cup water and had plenty of cereal..plenty…) Next up will be grinding a much finer grind and mixing it with dehydrated eggs to make pasta dough. After that, we’ll move on to the baking portion of the program.

The local Mormon cannery offers wheat in #10 cans, 5# Mylar bags or in 25# sacks. I have mine in 15-gallon blue barrels but I think next trip I’m going to see if I can get at least a dozen or so cans. I may also pick up another couple blue barrels and load them up as well. Couple hundred pounds oughtta do the trick.

At this point in time, Im fairly content with the amount of food I’ve got squirreled away. It may get boring at times, but I’d say at the very least we’ve got nine months of food put back and, in reality, probably closer to 12-15 months depending on the menu planning. It aint all rice and beans either…theres a goodly amount of rice, to be sure, but theres also pasta, meat, eggs, canned vegetables, MREs, potatoes, etc, etc. Just from a mathematical standpoint the wheat I have on hand right now could, at the rate mentioned in the earlier paragraph, provide breakfast for about a year. Shake it up a little with scrambled eggs, fruit compote, hash, and a few other traditional breakfast foods and I’d say we’ve got The Most Important Meal Of The Day covered for about 14-18 months.

I want to point out that this sort of thing isn’t exclusively an End Of The World stockpile. Very often if theres a product we eat that has a good shelf life and winds up going on sale at a very good price we’ll pick up a rather large quantity of it and rotate it through. The advantage there is that it saves a lot of money and, if things get weird, we have that stockpile sitting here. Its sort of a buffer… Lets say you like canned chili. You use one can a week and its normally $2.79. One day theres a sale..dollar each. You pick up four cases. You now have 96 cans of the stuff. When you want your weekly dose you pull one can from your stash and then replace it with a new one on your next shopping trip. Each week one old can gets used, and one new one gets added. If things turn bad, you’ve got those 96 in reserve.

Of course, this sort of thing only works with stuff that has a decent shelf life but you’d be surprised whats stuffed into a can or retort pouch these days. (Esp. meat…check the canned meats section at your local megamart sometime. Theres some amazing stuff that’s getting put away into room-temperature packaging…shrimp, chicken, turkey, beef, pork…the whole gamut of animal flesh.)

Unfortunately, when you have a mountain of food sitting around its not as simple as just letting it sit there and forgetting about it until you need it. How do you store all this stuff? More on that later….