Do you have a Self Sustaining Pantry?



Foodtown – Middletown, New Jersey – Sunday, Oct. 28, 2012 (viaTwitter

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Do you have a self sustaining Pantry?

How long could you survive in your home without any outside help or, all the store shelves are empty. FEMA and the government will not always be there to help. Hurricane Sandy has left a lot of people without power and access to food and FEMA and the government can not help everyone. Do you really want to have to rely on the government.

Reports show that most people only have 3 days or less of food in there homes. In the event of a disaster natural or manmade would you be able to feed your family? How would you feel watching your family going hungry just because you didn’t take the time and effort to have a self sufficient pantry. A self sufficient pantry is more then just food and water it is everything that you need to survive a disaster or even a job loss. In this economy wouldn’t it feel great to know you had the things you need to survive

disaster or economic hard times.
 

Now if you are like most people you can not just go out and stock up your pantry with everything you need to last for 3 months or more. But there are things you can do to make it a little easier.

I am going to try and do a weekly overview of the things that I have done that week towards self sufficient pantry on a tight budget and hopfully this will be of a help towards your own self sufficient pantry.

A good place to start toward a self sustaining pantry is to make a menu of the meals you normally cook and do a rough estimate of what ingredients and how much you use in a month. Then try to figure how much hygiene and paper products you use in a month. After you have done this, do not get discouraged it will look a little over whelming but there are a lot of ways to shorten the list.

Some of the things that I do is a lot of canning and preserving my own food, cook everything from scratch. And make as much as I can myself. Although there are some things that have to bought so the things I have to buy I try to buy only on sale and then I buy several cases, this way I don’t have to pay full price, and buy in bulk when possible ( as always check the prices because occasionally it is not cheaper.).

You can also look at my frugal tips  here to get an idea of where to save a little money so you have a little extra to use on the things you need to buy.

I found this photo here