Emergency Food Storage, Vegan(MoFo) Style

Are you guys freaked about the impending apocalypse? Not the religious one, I'm not feeling that one. No, I'm talking more like peak oil stuff, or even just really bad weather. I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but it's hard to sit down and organize my thoughts about this.

So let me just say that I'm a big fan of science fiction. BIG NERD, right here. I've been to (two) conventions and everything - it's true. You know what my favorite subgenre is? I'll tell you: it's utopia/dystopia stories, or stories with a post-apocalyptic setting. And if they're feminist, all the better. The scariest book in the universe, in my opinion, was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It's just too damn realistic. You know how it it goes, society is in decline, some uber-conservative whack-job gets elected to office, people live in walled communities to try to remain safe but violent crime is rampant, etc. The narrator is a young woman who sees where this is going and starts to make preparations, even while her family and friends think she is a little out there for doing so. And what do you know, she was right to do it, the shit hits the fan, and more stuff happens, but you're just going to have to read the book. It's good, I promise. And scary!

So anyway, what the fuck does this have to do with being vegan and food? So I try to temper my paranoid tendencies with strong doses of reality. But when the stock markets start to crash and burn, it makes me think that you know, it probably wouldn't be too bad of an idea to have enough food in the house to sustain my family. For at least a month. And with no power available.

You might be thinking, geez, where is her partner in all this and doesn't he think she's crazy? Oh, no no no no no. If anything, he is more paranoid. I won't go into it here, but trust me, he's more paranoid.

So what are we doing right now? We're following this plan. That's right, we're going to stockpile approxiamately 40 lbs of oats, 90 cans of beans, 90 cans of fruit and 90 cans of tomato products. Oh and multivitamins. And lots of water. For my family of three, this is approximately what it would take to sustain us for one month, with no power. The trick is that you can eat all of these things without a heating source and none need to be refrigerated, although of course most would be improved with heating. But you don't have to. You can eat raw oats as muesli, beans and fruit and tomatoes straight out of the can. And you would, if you were hungry.

The trick is, we eat these foods already, all the time. So I'll be using my stockpile constantly, and replacing it as needed. We'll have a system where the oldest gets used first and the replacement food gets put to the back of the shelf. It's just a nice little insurance policy that lets me sleep better at night.

Luckily, we have many quarts of peaches already canned, and lots of tomatoes already (thank you Costco, for carrying organic tomatoes). We stocked up on 20 cans of organic beans from Trader Joe's this weekend (at $0.99 a can, it seemed like the thing to do!). We're hoping to stock up a little more each weekend.

Now if I could just figure out where the hell to buy 40 lbs of oats in Seattle....

Anyway, what about you? Are you storing food? Do you think you should? How are you prepared for an emergency, long or short-term?