The other night Robert asked me to imagine a scenario where we would be stranded at our house, like in a snow storm or some other kind of natural disaster. We wouldn’t be able to get out even to walk to the store or anything, but we would still have power. His question was, how long could we last? How much food do we have around here? How well could we eat? I have to admit that I really like thinking about this. I like to think of how I could best use the food I have, what I would run out of first, and how I could still make tasty and interesting meals without going to the store. Here is what would happen at my house.
If we had power to keep the refrigerator and freezer working we would be in good shape for quite a while. We have meat enough to support us for many weeks thanks to buying part of a grass fed cow last winter and the fact that I can’t pass up a sale on pork roast or whole chickens. So we are good there.
Vegetables would get to be a problem pretty quick. I don’t tend to keep many frozen vegetables on hand, maybe a couple packages of frozen peas or corn. I have all those artichokes that I roasted and froze, they would be a treat. I would run out of onions and garlic pretty quick and that would make it hard to cook a good meal. At the moment I have a lot of canned tomatoes, but after a week or so that would be the only vegetable matter we would have.
I don’t feel like I have a lot of starches and grains on hand, but after looking a little bit I discovered that I have more than I thought. I have full jars of rice and polenta, at least five packages of pasta, and lots of flour, though most of it is white and not whole wheat. I’ve also got a little of this and that, quinoa, cornmeal, farro, oatmeal, etc. I could make that work.
When Robert posed this question on Sunday night I was in desperate need of a trip to Costco, mainly because our fat supply was low. I always buy my olive oil and butter there. I went a couple of days ago though and I am up to my normal levels (thank God we didn’t get stranded here before that, it would have been awful!) I now have a gallon of olive oil and two and a half pounds of butter in the house. I worry a little about the butter. It would be one of the first things I run out of. I used to keep way more butter around, I would buy it four pounds at a time and always had at least that much socked away. But I have been trying to do less baking (actually I have been trying to do less eating and it helps if I do less baking) so I haven’t been going through butter at the same rate. I also try to only buy organic butter now and it gets pricey to buy that much all at once. So if we are stranded there will be butter rationing.
Great news! Even though we don’t have a lot of vegetables, we won’t get scurvy! You know that I’m a berry glutton, right? I have 17 gallon bags of frozen berries that I picked or bought over the summer. That stockpile is my pride and joy. That and the jam I made. Wow, do we ever have jam! I’m going to digress for a moment here to tell you about it. On my pantry shelf I have over 70 jars that I made this year. Most of those are little half cup jars, but still I have over three gallons all together. I made seven kinds this year, peach, strawberry, bing cherry, rainier cherry, golden raspberry, gooseberry, and dewberry. I also made pear butter and two kinds of conserves (apricot and Italian plum). I don’t even eat that much jam, but I love to make it and give it away at Christmas. Robert has learned that even though we have 70 jars he had better think long and hard before opening one. I like to save the special jam, and what jam is special depends on a number of things, how many jars we have, how long it took me to pick or deal with the fruit, how much I like the jam, how many scratches or other injuries I sustained in the jam making process… It is a big decision for him, one not to be made without major consideration. OK, now back to surviving the disaster.
Sugar. I wouldn’t have bought the ten pound bag at Costco the other day if I hadn’t been thinking about this. But I realized that I only had a couple of pounds and if we are going to be stranded here we are going to need sugar! The brown sugar is a little low too, but we can get by with white.
If we could make it to the chicken house then we could get eggs, but if this disaster is so bad that we are stuck here for weeks the chickens might not be laying very well. I better not count on having many eggs.
Hmmm. I just started to think about things like salt, baking powder and spices. Interesting. The baking powder wouldn’t last all that long, but neither would the butter, so I might not need it. I have sour dough starter that I could use to leaven bread. I should buy salt before it gets too low. I’m good on spices.
I don’t have the most exciting selection of cheese on hand right now, but it could be worse. I have a bunch of shredded mozzarella in the freezer, a big log of cheddar, some Parmesan, and a little hunk of Point Reyes blue cheese. Also quite a bit of ricotta. I can work with that.
As far as drinks go, we have quite a bit of tea. Since we would run out of milk in a few days we wouldn’t be drinking nearly as much black tea, and we have lots of herb tea. Lola could drink Emergen-C, we have some of that. We would have to ration the wine, along with the butter. We have maybe fifteen bottles or so, but if we are going to be stuck here wine will be important. Maybe I should stock up.
So, in conclusion, here at our house the disaster would look like this: Lots of tomatoey beef dishes. Pot roast. Lasagna. Chicken and rice. Pasta with roasted artichokes. Pork roast with cheesey polenta. White bread with jam but no butter. Frozen berries. Tea with no milk. Berry crisps and cobblers. Homemade ravioli. Not enough wine. My guess is that we could go for a month or so before things got really dismal. Maybe longer.
If you made it all the way through this post you deserve an award. I am realizing that probably not many people out there are very interested in what food stores I have at my house. My fascination with surviving without help from the outside world probably comes partly from the connection to Little House on the Prairie that I wrote about a while ago. And a fear of being hungry. If you were able to stay interested through this long post (without even any pictures) then you must be as food obsessed as I am. So what about you?
What will you be eating when disaster (but not power outage) strikes?
Oh.. A post after my natural-disaster-fascination heart
I think about this a lot too. Not in the same food loving way, but in a more extremist way. If disaster strikes, I won’t make any stylish dinners, but we will survive on the masses of food that I hoard. I don’t know how it happens, but I always have like 20 cans of beans, which could keep us all alive for like three days, right? I have shelves and shelves of dried goods…rice, pasta, allergy-free granola bars and cookies and crackers…bags of turkey jerky, meat in the freezer in the basement…etc. I could feed the whole block for a week
. We actually are pretty low on meat and sugar at the moment, but do have a lots of everything else…including wine and liquor! Plus, I’m producing milk myself…so plenty of black tea for us 
I could go on and on and on. Fun stuff!
I enjoyed reading your post! In Hawaii, we are in hurricane season, so part of being prepared is to have enough food/water to last for a week or so when there is no clean water and/or electricity. So we have a cabinet full of canned soups, beans, fruits, bottled water, pasta, and other non-perishables. We also have a gas grill and extra propane so we can heat up our food. In the past few years we have had to dip into our supply kit due to an earthquake (no power for 24+ hours) and other storms that knocked out power. It’s good to be prepared, but after reading your post, I need to rethink my food supplies and get something better than beans and soup!
We wouldn’t last long so we’d have to find a way to come to your house.
We have plenty of cherrios but no milk (I need to run to the store for both Rice and Cow milk). We have no olive oil left or dairy-free butter but we have a lot of refried beans and frozen broccoli.
Oh and we have a ton of jarred baby foods. So I guess we wouldn’t be eating heathfully but maybe we wouldn’t care when starvation sets in.
And I like Julia am lactating so that would be helpful for 2 of the four of us. Although I admit I don’t know what she’s talking about regarding: black tea.
INterestingly, a blog friend of mine caseyoc.info tried to live off what was in her pantry for at least a week.
Interesting experiment
This post motivated me to look through my cupboards. I intend have 14 cans of beans (kidney, cannellini, garbanzo, refried, black, …). And I found three cans of tuna fish that said “best by January 2008″ that I chucked. I have at least 20 cans of soup…many that are probably three years old based on the fact that they contain dairy and egg ingredients that I haven’t been able to eat in that long…
I should definitely try to live off our food for a couple of weeks…only buying fresh milks, veggies and fruit. It would be fun to start over with replenishing my cabinets.
Actually, with the snow storm scenario, even if you lacked power, you could still put all the meat and refrigerated things outside so they’d stay edible. Of course, that makes cooking problematic. We’d end up outside on our gas grill a lot (not that I so adore grilled food, but it has a burner, so I could make stew and saute onions and such).
Today we’d be in OK shape if a disaster that kept us home for a week or more, but things would go downhill fairly quickly. We’re in need of a Costco run this weekend (we have olive oil, but butter is running low). Also, our freezer is filled mostly with meat. I have a quarter chest, but it’s full (of what?!? Note to self: need to clean out the big freezer) and our “regular” freezer is part of a side-by-side model, which means it’s too narrow to hold a cookie sheet on which are all the berries I didn’t pick this year to be frozen and stored. The only way I could have frozen the berries (that I didn’t pick) would be to have put the pans in the chest freezer (which is full–of what?!?!). Although I did make several large bags of tomato sauce with my abundance of tomatoes this year, so we’d have that.
If the disaster were to strike today, we could probably fend off disease with some of the tomatoes and carrots that we still have from the garden. I just need to figure out what to do with something like 15lbs of green tomatoes (some sauce tomatoes, some beefsteak). We also have a really BIG butternut squash that I bought.
In the pantry we have quite the collection of soups, canned beans, pasta, polenta, and rice. Not a ton (and I just realized I’m out of long grain rice–we have things like basmati, though) but enough to last awhile. And of course, the significant collection of canned tomatoes of all preparations.
We’d do pretty well with spices and other flavorings, I think. I’m sometimes bad about checking to see what we’re out of before I blindly buy more of what I’m told we need for a certain recipe (“We need cumin.” “Are you sure we don’t have any?” “I didn’t see it…” We have three jars of cumin, they just had their labels turned backwards when he looked!)
We’d be stuck for eggs–I have no chickens. Baking powder we’d be fine on–I make my own in quantity, and I recently bought a big box of kosher salt. However, we’d run out of flour pretty fast (I think I’m down to 1 10lb bag + whatever is in the canister right now).
We’re so-so on cheese. Lots of bits and ends of things, plus a couple of big pieces I bought at Costco (Parmesan, mostly, and some Roquefort). We have half a bag of shredded cheddar, and a big block of Monterey Jack that I noticed needs trimming (mold).
So we’d be having lots of roast chicken, steaks, pork roast (I bought a whole loin and cut it up), and I even have some frozen pork belly (if I could find a way to smoke it on the grill, we could have bacon). When we hit rock bottom, I could dig out the strange dribs of things I have and do something with those–buckwheat flour (I could make soba), semolina flour (I could make pasta), various nut meals (I’m sure I could fashion some kind of a flourless cake with those). But when it came to vegetables and fruit, we’d be out of luck pretty quickly.
I’m tempted to go stock up on evaporated milk so that when we ran out of “real” milk I could still make milk-based things. And I might have to think about stocking up on wine. We have probably 20-25 bottles, but I’m not sure I really want to drink the remains of my father’s impressive collection from the mid-80s (1972 Chateau Margaux anyone?) to sustain myself during a crisis. Although if the crisis were bad enough, maybe that IS what we want to do!
Alex is going to be upset because I just know that this post is going to subconsciously influence my grocery shopping this weekend and I’ll end up buying a ton of “crisis food”!
Now I am curious to know how much do people spend on food? Mark is very much a buy-what-you-need-that-week sort of guy making it difficult to “plan” for disaster survival.
I think living through a disaster is harder if one is requiring a special diet as we are with food allergies. But it’s good to know that Rice milk lasts forever.
It looks like we’d be living off pasta and Halloween candy.
Can we get snowed in at someone eles’ house?