What Are Your Ten Essential Foods?

If you were to make a list of the ten most essential foods for your family, what would be on that list?  What do you go to the store for?  On a normal day, what foods make you go shopping immediately when you run out?  When we had small children, running out of milk meant a quick trip to the store.  Of course, it was easier to just keep tabs on the supply and make sure we bought enough to last for the week.

What else is on your critical list?  Eggs?  By the lack of flour on the shelves and the difficulty in finding yeast for sale anywhere, it appears that bread is pretty essential for most of us.  This trifecta is surely a meme somewhere:  the panic to purchase milk, bread, and eggs in advance of a hurricane or blizzard means Americans eat French toast in a crisis.  (But it must be without syrup, because there's never any in the panic shopping carts.) 

Does running out of fresh produce prompt a run to the store?  What about cheese?  Lunchmeat?  Other dairy products?  Those are the items I would go to the store for.  The other items rounding out the top ten list for Americans are vegetables, chips, breakfast cereal, fruit, chicken, and beef.

Now what about the long-term storage counterparts to your essential foods?  Do you have them?  Do you know how to use or prepare them?
  
Milk is a hard one for most people.  Powdered milk has a certain reputation for not tasting good.  The more expensive milks taste better, but at the expense of good nutrition.  Learning how to make cheap powdered milk taste good is easy.

Eggs are best fresh from the hen.  If you can't keep chickens, or if your hens are in a molt, however, it's nice to have a backup.  Powdered eggs work extremely well in baking, and there are loads of other options that work with varying degrees of success depending on how they are being used.

Knowing how to make a good loaf of bread is a highly desirable skill even today.  It was shocking to hear how difficult it was to obtain bread, flour, and yeast in grocery stores.  Just this week my husband took a one-pound brick of yeast from our storage to our son and daughter-in-law in a small town four hours from here, because they still have not been able to locate yeast.

Cheese and other dairy products are favorites for a lot of us.  What are the best forms to store it in, and how much do we really want?

Vegetables and fruits are other hot items.  Canned goods sold out pretty quickly in advance of the COVID-19 pandemic isolation, as did frozen vegetables.  Produce became rather hit or miss with regards to finding it in stores.  Are you able to grow, can, and dehydrate vegetables you raise in your garden?  Do you know how to extend the growing season with hoop houses and starting seeds indoors?

Chicken and beef are foods that might become a bit scarce in a crisis.  Do you have canned, frozen, or freeze-dried options at home?

Chips are comfort foods for lots of us, and breakfast cereals are especially important to children.  What measures have you taken to store their favorites?  Do you know which breakfast cereals have the best shelf-life?  Which are the worst for storage?

Now, how does this list of foods align with the list of food that you are storing for your family?  What kind of adjustment will it be to transition from your normal daily diet to your food storage diet?  Will that change be small or radical?  How will your gastrointestinal tract handle it?  How will small children or the elderly in your life who are more sensitive to disruptions react to the new diet?

If your food storage involves primarily sustenance types of foods, you'll be covered for bread and milk and not a lot of variety beyond that.  If you've focused on complementary foods, you'll be missing out on the vitamins that come primarily from grains and beans.

A diversified diet is much healthier and helps maintain good morale in difficult situations.  Sustenance and complementary foods, long- and short-term food storage, emergency meals, and comfort foods all have their place in the prepared pantry.  Take inventory of what you have and start a list of what you need to provide well for your family in a crisis.  Make sure you have your essential foods in there, in whatever form you use them, to ensure the crisis in the outside world doesn't become a crisis in your family.

Do this before the projected second-wave of the virus begins.

Links to related posts:
In-Depth Discussion of Powdered Milk
Wheat Bread
Breakfast Cereal Shelf Life
Comfort Foods
Pressure Canning Chicken
Pressure Canning Beef
Canning Butter and Cheese (Don't!)

 18 june 2020