In case of nuclear attack. duh.

I'm slightly obsessive about my shopping habits, and hate to have too much food at any one time (even non-perishable stuff) so I rarely over-shop. I always have a shitload of tea though, although I wouldn't consider it "too much".

I hate over shopping, too- I tend to try to use up everything before going on a big trip. But somehow, the dried beans and Jello keeps piling up. I'm gonna eat up that Jello in the next few weeks. I had some for breakfast, in fact- it was yum. Raspberry Pineapple Orange.

JELLO SHOT PARTY AT PINKY'S!!!

big trip = big shopping trip. I went on one last night. I bought so much food I had to buy one of those old lady carts just to bring it home.

Hellllls yea, jello shots with delicious champagne. Jellosas!

I double-dog dare you to do dried bean jello shots.

Hellllls yea, jello shots with delicious champagne. Jellosas!

VODKA!

Orange juice and garbage bags.

Waaaay too much cereal!
Everything from Grape Nuts to Fruit Loops.
You name it, I got it.

I need rehab, yo.

I tend to buy too much Blue Dragon Won Ton Soup. I rarely eat canned, packaged or processed food, but this is soup to die for.

Waaaay too much cereal!
Everything from Grape Nuts to Fruit Loops.

You ever mix 'em together, like a breakfast mashup? Froot Loops and AppleJacks combine nicely.

I'm gonna get all stick-in-the-mud here and clamber up on a soapbox: Storing food is a good thing. Humankind has been doing it for ages and eons.

Unless you live in some kind of fictional utter paradise, chances are good there will come a time that you will have to survive at least a couple of days on stored food. The potential causes of this are nearly coutless. A bank run or collapse. Simple human panic before a nasty storm. Larger natural disasters. War. Riots. Getting laid off or sick. Getting injured and bedridden, etc.

Storing food is a civic, social and moral responsibility. If I store food, and you don't, what's going to happen when you get hungry during an "incident"? How long do you think you can go before your morals or ethics break down and you think about or plan to beg, borrow or steal my food? What happens if I'm armed? What happens if you're armed? I don't want to shoot you or be shot, but I don't want to starve to death, either.


Having a stock of nonperishables and such is awesome. Instead of trying to use it all before you go to the store, try and just use some of your oldest stuff. Then you replace it and cycle through it, rotating the stock.

Anyway, I'll stop. The last thing anyone should feel "guilty" about is stockpiling/collecting food, especially if you do it wisely and limit waste through rotation and menu planning and all that.

And even if you don't, the Western world doesn't have a food problem. It has a distribution problem. Something on the order of 1/4th of the food produced here goes into the landfill.

Throwing out the occasional storage item is hardly going to be a drop in the ocean, and storing helps mitigate our "distribution problem", as non-perishables can actually be donated to soup kitchens and food banks and the like if that pleases you.

Yeah, cereal! I buy it in those pool-sized bulk bags. It never lasts very long, unless I run out of milk.

loquacious: it's not guilt, it's limited storage space. I assure you that if we had it, I would have a large stock of non-perishable food.

Word. I have one cabinent for food. That's right, one.

I saved some leftover pizza from last night.

Unless you live in some kind of fictional utter paradise, chances are good there will come a time that you will have to survive at least a couple of days on stored food. The potential causes of this are nearly coutless. A bank run or collapse. Simple human panic before a nasty storm. Larger natural disasters. War. Riots.

Don't be silly. When that happens, I plan on hunting and eating the homeless. Preferably winos, since they're pre-marinated.

I always buy onions.

I'm in the store, and I think to myself, "Now, do I have any onions at home? I know I have at least one... and that half of one in the ziplock bag on the second shelf of the fridge. But what if I want to make potato leek soup? That takes a whole onion. Do I have leeks? No, but shut up, we're talking about onions. And what if I wanted to make fried potatoes and onions? Then I'd be out of onions! And they're so versatile, I'm always using them in stuff. Quesadillas, chicken soup, squash stew, tuna melts... Man, I'm hungry. So yeah, I'd better get a couple onions. Maybe a couple more. Yeah, four. Four is good."

And then I get home and put away the onions and discover I have at leat four perfectly good onions.

What Loquacious said.
The LDS / Mormon church has a tradition of keeping a year's food supply, and there are a number of how-to guides online for setting aside a little bit at a time. Setting aside my own opinions about the LDS, there is a great deal of wisdom in keeping a food cache. Think about Katrina; the veneer of civilization is 48 hours thick.

99% of my food is fresh or frozen fruit or vegetables. Fresh spring-mix salads and a couple dressings, though usually I just whip up my own olive oil/balsamic vinegar concoction. Plenty of dried herbs and spices but I buy fresh when it's available for a decent price.

About the only processed food I have is oatmeal, peanut butter, some rice and a couple handfuls of egg noodles.

Most of my at-home meals are salads and smoothies. When I want meat, we go out.

I love to cook and I am very good at it, but I dislike cleaning up the mess. Also, I tend to buy the very best ingredients, so a meal I cook can cost about the same as a restaurant meal.

I know how to cook cheap though, and many times I have baffled friends with meals from their fridge and pantries that they claimed were empty.

About the only processed food I have is oatmeal, peanut butter, some rice and a couple handfuls of egg noodles.

My gastrointestinal system is unable to digest food that hasn't been processed at least once.

I want to get invited to dinner at your house, mischief! I love fresh stuff and that's pretty much all I eat. Smoothies and salads sounds fantastic.

My husband does the food shopping though, so we always have a pantry-busting excess of Ken's Creamy Caesar Dressing. For emergencies.

And then I get home and put away the onions and discover I have at leat four perfectly good onions.

Same here. Also carrots and limes. (And I never even get around to using the limes, so not only do I end up with too many of them, but some of them are always hard and brown.)

Storing food is a civic, social and moral responsibility.

A friend of mine recently threw this line at me, along with why he has a gun in the house. I'm not buying it. The converse is true: Knowing that some people will not store food, your storing food makes you a far more attractive target for attack and harm.

My friend was positing a situation of total social breakdown and could not fathom what I'd do when my supplies ran out (which they would, quickly). I referred him to the concept of social capital, of which I thankfully have plenty. The fact that he has very little may play into his decision to hole up in his house with his 8-gallon water jugs, canned beans, and gun. When that runs out, I'm really not sure what his plan is or if it's any better than mine.

Storing backup food is nice. But it's not reasonable to suggest that it is a responsibility -- as someone who has at some times met various definitions of poverty and even at this time has higher financial priorities than keeping $50 worth of SPAM around, I assure you that it's a luxury.

Still, nothing makes me happier than having a pantry full of canned tomatoes, beans, pasta, rice, and such. But that's more 'cause I like to cook, can't go shopping every day and also like to have a lot of options about what to cook.

All I'm sayin' -- you can't really prepare for disaster. We like to pretend you can because it makes the risks of living feel more manageable. But in the event of total social breakdown, things suck for the haves and the have-nots. They just suck in different ways. I guess I'd rather have it suck from being hungry, but working cooperatively with a group to find ways to meet our needs, than have it suck by shooting to death a member of that group who's coming in my back door to get my boxes of oatmeal.

Specklet, I'm that way with canned black beans and tomato paste/sauce/puree. There's actually a note on our refrigerator-mounted dry-erase board reminding us that we don't need any more damned canned tomato products.

loquacious, after Katrina, the MrsMoonPie and I got very serious about having emergency supplies. We live in DC, so we probably should have done it before, anyway, but seeing starving kids on highway overpasses really drove it home for me--even in a short-term disaster, we can't count on the government or the Red Cross to take care of us. Our house is barely 1000 square feet, but we found a way to store a week's worth of food and water, plus various other supplies. We even have emergency rations in the car.

It's prety much a rule in our house that we have to have a rotting eggplant in the refrigerator at all times.

Ugh, everytime I shop, I think, "I need eggs for dinner tonight. Do I have any eggs? I'll just get a carton." Then, I go home and discover the half-used cartons from the last two times I went shopping. I sometimes have this problem with butter.

Condiments. I am the condiment queen, I tells ya. I have half a fridge worth of hot sauce, curry paste, chutney, jam, mustard, and various spice pastes. When society collapses, I won't be able to make anything nutritious, but you'll be coming to me when you're sick of plain beans and such. Mark my words.

I don't generally overbuy, if only because I'm carrying my groceries in sacks for several blocks, so I keep it pretty lean and mean... but somehow during the last few months I've begun buying too many cucumbers that end up turning rubbery and embarrassing in the fridge.

cans of soup. I buy them to eat at work for lunch but then I wind up not eating them and they collect in the cabinet. Good soup too, like broccoli and stilton, they often get eaten for dinner when we can't be arsed to cook.

Bush's canned beans. All kinds, and there are so many kinds. I love 'em, and my brother loves 'em, and with a couple of hotdogs, a little brown mustard and cracked pepper, and 2 minutes in the nuke cabinet, they are the perfect half awake midnight snack.

And avocados. Here in Florida, we have these big ol' sweet green avocados, and I always buy a couple, regardless. I eat way too much avocado, and that leads me to cheese...

Meat. The mister loves to buy meat when it's on sale. We have seven pounds of frozen hamburger at the moment. Seven pounds! It's a good thing we've traded up to a bigger freezer.

Cheese. Definitely cheese.