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Emergency Planning Do's and
Don't
The following list is not a guide to develop an emergency plan.
Our intent is to provide general information limited to emergency planning and
sourcing for food and some other basic essentials.
Emergency Planning -
Do
-
Balance the flavour and
variety of food you store. There must be a LOT of variety. There is much
to be
said for variety. It is important to avoid a monotonous diet.
-
Purchase these products at
regular sources:
-
flour - keep it dry and store it in
bags in plastic buckets (rotate your stock continually as flour has a shelf
life of about
a year if properly stored)
-
sugar - keep it dry and it will have a very long shelf life
(about 25 lb per adult per year)
-
salt - keep it dry;
our family uses 2 lb per person per year (we know of others with 5X the
requirement)
-
yeast and backing
powder and baking soda -keep it dry (can be stored approximately
2 years, rotate your stock)
-
cooking oils - don't
purchase in large containers (can be stored approximately 2 years, rotate
your stock)
-
lots of seeds for
growing in the garden and just for nutritious salad sprouts. Avoid GE
products for the garden
as they frequently do not produce viable seeds for following years. Make
sure the seeds are not "hybrid".
-
Purchase whole
grain wheat; hard white or hard red winter wheat (whole wheat will
store much longer than flour) -
this may be hard to believe but expect to require 200 lb per adult per year.
-
Rice stores well, is
easy to digest and adds variety (can be stored approximately 2 years, rotate
your stock)
-
Have vitamins on hand.
Those well-traveled and well-stored fruits and vegetables available on
grocery shelves
today will in all probably not be available during a disaster. The nitrogen
packed foods do not contain enough vitamin C so you will get scurvy
if you do not supplement.
-
Balance the starchy foods
above with a good balance of fruits and vegetables.
-
Practice! If you don't
know how to prepare the food your family won't eat it.
-
Check dates
to ensure that the food you are buying is not old before
you store it.
- The best way to start is small with what you
feel you can comfortably afford and get foods that produce a well balanced
diet.
The nice thing is you can always add on at your own financial comfort level.
-
Always keep in mind how many people you will be
storing food for and their ages and sex (ie an 18 year old son eats differently than an 80 year mother).
Emergency Planning -
Don't
-
Don't advertise that you've put
away one, two or three years of food supply! You won't have enough to
feed yourselves and those that come to your door in times of need.
-
Don't purchase pre-mixed
ingredient backing mixes in quantity- they will go rancid quickly and can
actually become toxic. In time the
raising agent will fail as well.
-
Purchase limited amounts Meals Ready to
Eat (MRE) as they have a relatively short storage life. Don't purchase these for long term
storage.
-
Don't be fooled by differences
in products and packaging. For example:
-
Don't believe that you can and
will eat anything when you're hungry. First, you'll already be malnourished if
you're that hungry. A fact learned by all the charitable organizations who
provide food to people in need is that healthy
but strange or 'foreign' food you or your children dislike or are not familiar
with, will not
keep you healthy in body and mind.
-
Don't think you can successfully
go foraging for food. We are an urban society and you will be competing with
hundreds of thousands of others, many not as courteous,
and most will be more desperate than you...
-
Don’t get a lot of just certain foods, thinking you will get other variety
later when you have some extra cash. Better to be properly nourished for a few
months then poorly nourished for a year because in this case you won’t last long enough to
eat it.
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