02291 Home Food Storage

It wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark.

Food storage is an important persistence (ability to resist damage) and resilience (ability to recover after damage) issue for urban food systems. The modern commercial food system is strictly a just-in-time operation. If something stops the incoming deliveries, the grocery stores empty out fast. The general consensus seems to be that big cities have about a week’s worth of food in their stores and maybe a month if there are regional food warehouses in the area. Other than that, it’s what’s in people’s homes and could be brought in from the city’s nearby foodshed.

The brittleness of commercial food systems is one of the reasons why there are three essential urban food system adaptions that constitute a “food security triangle:

1. Growing food in cities, in both gardens and using edible landscape techniques.
2. Encouraging food production in the city’s nearby foodshed by buying foods from local farmers.
3. The third leg of that urban food security pyramid is home food storage.

The basic rule of food storage is simple: Store what you eat and eat what you store.

If you wander around the internet, and look at commercial food storage sites, you will see a lot of stuff about storage beans and rice and wheat. This is fine advice, as long as you use beans and rice and wheat in your daily diet. If you don’t use these foods, don’t store them. An emergency is not a time to start a new diet. You want to store familiar, comfortable foods that you understand how to prepare and that your family and household like to eat.

If you eat a steady diet of fast food, we obviously have a problem, since it isn’t likely that you will be able to store adequate amounts of commercial fast food. There are interesting urban legends, however, about various national fast food burgers which seem to resist decay. I wouldn’t bet on that for my food storage. Besides, do you really want to eat something like that? So fast-food-aholics need to work on their diet and adapt a food storage program to their new and improved eating plan.

If you know how much food you eat in a month, that gives you some clue as to how much food you want to keep on hand.

The Latter-day Saints practice food storage as a religious discipline. They say to store a year’s worth of food. Many of us would be hard-pressed to do this in one big shopping spree. That’s where clever design comes in. In other words, don’t go out and buy everything all at once. Instead, build up your household inventory gradually.

Think of this as keeping some of your household’s savings in the form of food.

The list of issues with home food storage includes:

• Storage,
• Storage,
• Storage.

Given the smaller sizes of urban apartments and houses, the “where” of storage is always an issue. Here is where it pays to be clever.

Repurpose food storage as furniture. Boxes of food storage, draped with attractive fabrics, can be serve as coffee tables, end tables, and ottomans.

Many of us use space in closets poorly. Invest a bit of time and effort in reorganizing your closets in order to free up space that can be used for food storage. Shelves in closets are great places to store food.

Look for wasted spaces, such as underneath beds. You can elevate a bed and create even more room underneath it. There are lots of storage solutions for putting things under beds, starting with the simple and ecologically-not-bad-choice of bottles in corrugated cardboard.

Make a wall of shelves and hang curtains in front of it.

Here is an interesting video about a sofa that conceals a food storage area capable of holding 500 cans. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCnXfO7YMfk

Make some seating cubes. These are 18" cubes with hinged lids. Put casters on the bottom, padded seating on top. This will hold about 4 cases of commercial cans, or a similar amount of home canned jars.

See what you can do with five shelves at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv1uDkLQCIM.

Use a neighborhood service center as a place to store food. It would be located convenient for access by a neighborhood. It provides services to the area. These could include a processing kitchen for food preservation projects, freezer space, food storage space, and clothes washers.

Label everything you bring in or produce at home for food storage. You need to rotate your food supplies and to do that you need dates on everything.

Keep an inventory with storage locations so you know where things are.

One fun site for food storage beginners is Food Storage Made Easy — http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/ — run by two young moms who can help you get up to speed with this important aspect of urban sustainability.

Don’t be intimidated by the thought of storing food, especially if you have a small apartment. You can do what you can within your present resources, which include storage.

Food storage provides an important short-term hedge against both systemic issues and personal crises. There were times in my life, when I would not have had food to eat if I had not had some food storage. While food storage is important and has several functions stacked on it, it’s not possible to store our way through the future. Everyone needs to be involved with creating sustainable urban food distribution systems.