Sooner or later as you learn more about long term storage of food you’ll run into the acronym SWYE and EWYS.
Yeah, I know. Alphabet soup. So before you get too frustrated, what it means is “Store What You Eat and Eat What You Store”, and it’s a very important principle in food storage.
Here’s the idea:
Your family is used to a certain way of eating. Think about breakfast. Over the last month, what has everyone had? Probably the same thing 90% of the time, huh? Oh, sure, you might get different types of cereal, but it’s still mostly cereal. Or eggs. Or pancakes. Or leftovers. Or oatmeal.
How do you think everyone would react if you suddenly threw out all the Cheerios and Raisin Bran? If they’re anything like my family, you’d have complete and utter rebellion. Teenagers would complain, little ones would cry and refuse to eat, your spouse would pick at what was on the plate in a valiant but unhappy effort to support you.
Now, say you’re storing just the Big 4 of food storage: wheat, milk, honey and salt. Sure, your family can survive on that, but they won’t be happy, and if they’re not used to eating whole grains they might even get sick from too rapid a change.
The way to overcome this problem is to make your food storage just an extension of your pantry. In other words, store the things you like to eat, but also eat the things that you’re storing.
For instance, every so often one of my local grocery stores has an excellent sale on cold cereal. I take advantage of the sale to stock up. Since cereal is so expensive, even on sale, I only keep about a two month supply on hand, but that’s enough to tide us over if we have a cash crunch and I have to cut back on our grocery bill.
We also store wheat. In fact, that’s the bulk of my food storage, comprising something over 1,000 pounds. That’s a lot of space to devote to something I’m not going to use, so it’s a good thing I do use it. Right now, I mostly grind it into flour to make whole wheat bread, but I’m learning how to use the wheat whole and cracked. This gets my family used to eating it, as well as doing good things for their health.
By making space in my food storage area for the foods we eat everyday, we’re able to save money by doing the bulk of our shopping when things are on sale. And by making sure I learn to use the basic food storage items I already have, I increase the variety and healthiness of our diet.