Building your food pantry $5 at a time

I received an email the other day that boasted having a system to build an affordable food pantry, $5 a week at a time. The concept in itself is great: purchase an additional five dollars of food items each week and after 12 months (or a mere $260) you will have enough food to hold you and your significant other over in times of crisis, lay-offs or other equally disastrous times. The article then showed the list of items to purchase: salt, sugar, cans of cream of chicken, mushroom and tomato soup, macaroni, wheat, yeast, tuna, powdered milk, mac&cheese, peanut butter, honey, shortening, aspirin and vitamins. Great list if you like and eat all those products.....but if I were to subsist on cream of mushroom soup, tuna and peanut butter, something else would be in crisis too: I would!

I was floored when I read that list: it read like a random shopping list instead of a well-planned pantry. What's the purpose of buying wheat unless you have a mill (and how are you going to power it?) to grind it and make flour to bake bread or biscuits with. I get the mac&cheese, but what am I doing with the macaroni itself? Boil it in tomato soup? Ewwwwwwwww.........and where are the veggies, where's the fruit? In times of crisis, you need comfort food to keep you going, something sweet, something familiar. The last thing you want to do, when all heck breaks loose, is learning how to feed your family on storage food that you don't use in your day-to-day cooking. You will be hard-pressed to find any canned cream soups in my pantry, or mac&cheese. It is not something I normally eat or use so I don't store it either.

Learn how to make your bread, cream soups and other dishes from scratch, so that you can focus on pantry staples instead of processed foods. Basic items like flour, sugar, salt, yeast, dehydrated milk, oils, pasta, rice, beans, dehydrated or canned fruits and vegetables......there's a myriad of dishes you can prepare with it and it will be a lot cheaper as most of these can be purchased in bulk.

Keep a check on what items you purchase the most, what have become staples on your shopping list? Those are the ones you want to stash away for later use and those will be a comfort when everything around you changes. When you buy, or when these staples are on sale, buy two additional cans, or an extra bag or another pound and put it in your food pantry. As these items are used frequently, you will have no trouble rotating them and using them up before they spoil. By adding on an extra $5 a week, when you have it, can quickly add to the security of knowing that you have enough to keep your head above water.