Food: Just In Case

More and more people are scaling back and they are simplifying their lives. They are economizing their households by spending less and by reducing their personal debt.  People are buying less, too, taking care to use their money wisely. Of course, folks are also eating out less than they used to and in doing so, home-cooked meals have become more popular.

With smarter purchases and less money to spend, people are also learning to make more of their own repairs when they can. The DIY mindset has caught on — it’s actually a fad. And as people become do-it-yourselvers, they are learning that they might also grow some DIY food.

For those of us who already garden, we are certainly aware of the benefits of our homegrown foods. We often use our excess harvest to preserve the food as a means to enjoy the food at a later date. We also realize that it is both frugal and wise to put up some extra foods. And for the gardeners who grow organically, the foods that have better nutrient quality and are safer to eat can’t be matched by store-bought foods.

As gardeners, we all know as we grow it, we save and preserve it, too — if we have the harvest to do so. By preserving or storing our foods, we are adding to our food pantries, building our food supply to use later. Just in case — just in case we want it, or need it, at a later time.

For many of us, this comes naturally — we’re not hoarding, we’re saving and planning. We do this with money and our good clothing, too — admit it, we all save stuff to use later. With food, some people shop bargains and use coupons. They get food at reduced prices, maybe even buy extra, to save for later. Some folks preserve their extra garden produce and butcher their own meats to eat later. Some will freeze an extra meal or two, knowing they will enjoy having that meal already prepared for another time. These people have one thing in common: they are all saving food. They know there will be a day when that food will be turned into a meal.

Putting up extra food is actually an American tradition that had fallen out of use in many households. Putting up extra food was related to homegrown garden harvests and as gardening fell off in the US, we stopped putting up extra food. In past times, foods were stored in cellars, spring houses, pantries, and cupboards. Foods were cured, dried, chilled, and canned to use at a later time.

But the times are changing again and America is witnessing a resurgence of  home gardening and food preservation.  With our continued economic problems, preserving foods is a means to save and store today’s food for tomorrow.

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The past 2 years of gardening have brought more difficulties to gardeners than most years. Harvests were less than expected, crops were stressed or diseased, and many crops failed.

In 2009, cool weather and a high level of precipitation created problems in many US gardens. Most tomato crops suffered a tomato blight that meant the loss or low yield of tomatoes across the US. Other vegetables receiving a cooler and wetter summer played havoc on garden harvests and for many gardeners, the harvest was less. For those who preserve some of their harvest, preserving was less, too –with less food in jars for the pantry.

In 2010, hot weather and drought plagued many gardeners in the US.  Spring plants seemed to grow well enough with adequate yields, but summer plants received intense heat and little to no rain. The yield from summer crops were disappointing and minimal for many gardeners (if there was a yield at all).

So 2010 was the second year in a row that many home gardeners were disappointed. Many gardeners were faced with another year of  lower yields and the harvests left many people with a leaner kitchen pantry than they had planned on. Being thankful for any garden bounty is gracious, but graciousness doesn’t feed the family. Some families found themselves buying foods that they may not have budgeted for. Some families can afford to do this, others cannot.

And now, we are aware that the cost of food really IS rising. Food is getting more expensive, and the price of some foods is worse than others. The increased costs in foods are starting to appear on grocery store shelves.  The gimmicks of lesser food in the packaging isn’t fooling budget-minded people, either. When there are hungry people at home, shoppers aren’t laughing at this short sizing marketing ploy.

For those of us who have filled our food pantry and root cellars, we can count ourselves as fortunate because we are not facing the price increases in the same way as those who are completely dependent upon the food industry. People who do not have a pantry filled with home-grown foods in canning jars are forced to buy food, regardless of the price.

During the Winter, most of us don’t garden and we either rely on food from the grocery store or food from our own food pantry. As we eat up our stored foods from the root cellar and the pantry shelves, we sometimes wonder, “Do we have enough food to last?”  We are, of course, asking ourselves if we have enough preserved foods to hold us over until our next garden harvest. If we run out, we either do without or we buy it somewhere. Will we be able to afford to buy it somewhere in the future?

Many times, our food pantry contents are dependent upon the foods we harvested from our gardens. With last year’s gardens and the intense heat and drought conditions, many were unable to preserve enough foods to last through the Winter. Failed crops and low crop yields affected many home gardens and commercial farmers.

In light of the impending food crisis, what would happen if this year’s garden produced another year of dismal yields of crops we grow for our family? What would happen if 2011 was another year of intense or unpredictable weather or a major pest infestation occurred?

What about a fungal or viral disease that struck one, two, or three crops?  What if something caused the grain, tomato, and/or potato crops to fail in the US? Large commercial fields or small backyard gardens could suffer or could fail. And what if we faced crop failures?

Just examining wheat as a staple crop, we see problems on the horizon. Russia’s heat wave and drought of 2010 resulted in a wheat shortage for the country. Australia’s excessive rains and then recent flooding have affected their wheat crops, too, as the wheat crop has either failed or been downgraded due to poor quality.

Low yields or crop failures on a large scale translates to food shortages. Also, the increasing demand for foods from highly populated nations like China are now affecting the grain supplies.

And on a small scale, poor garden harvests for the homestead or backyard gardener means shelves in the family food pantry would not be filled with homegrown foods. With little or no food in the family food pantry, home gardeners would be forced to buy foods to eat.

Some of these situations may seem dire but in the face of food inflation and the impending food crisis we are now learning about, it might be important to think through such a problem.

Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, is one of the first to forecast the present global food situation. He warns that “the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos. We are so close to the edge that politically destabilizing food prices could come at any time.” Whether this new warning is legitimate or is another tactic to politicize a new agenda is unclear. However, we do see results of our weak economy and know the food supply is tenuous.

As gardeners, we can guard ourselves against some of the stresses of weather. We might even endure a major pest infestation, spending hours each day hand-plucking bugs off of leaves. But could we protect a crop or two from a fungal disease or the wind-swept contamination of GMO pollen?

But what about those foods most of us don’t grow — like wheat or sugar? What can we do to guard against the possibility of crop failures or shortages?  What protection might we expect from a national food shortage or a catastrophic event rendering our national food supply weaker? The harsh reality is that we can only protect ourselves and our gardens (and our seeds) so much.

With the past 2 gardening years being so extreme and with the inflationary pressures now affecting the cost of foods, are you feeling the effects? At our homestead, we have been increasing our own food pantry and our food supply. With the many factors that are affecting our own food supply, we decided to prepare ourselves — just in case.

Considering the extreme weather conditions and catastrophic weather-related disasters around the globe, we decided that we needed to build up some of our own safeguards to protect ourselves just in case there is another harsh year of gardening.

We aren’t clairvoyant, we are realists. We can’t predict that anything might create weather-related problems. We can’t predict garden failures or a garden disaster. We can’t predict a national or international food crisis, either, but we see a number of factors that indicate the future may be problematic.

What we realized that we could do was guard ourselves against the pitfalls of food inflation, the food supply, low garden yields, and even our own garden failures. We realized that we needed to address the facts: (1) our gardens are not guaranteed to produce all that we need to eat each year, (2) our homesteading practices are not 100% guaranteed, and (3) the cost of food grown elsewhere is rising.  So, we chose to prepare ourselves just in case — just in case we have a ‘system failure’ that we cannot control.

What we began in 2009, we continued through 2010. We started small and by 2010 we had met our first goal, then increased that goal. We began stockpiling foods.

We have continued and now we are buying some additional foods in cans and jars — just in case. We buy 2 or 4 cans when we go to the store. We are not buying cases of food, we are making small and sensible purchases. We decided that it would be wise to prepare ourselves by adding extra vegetables and fruits to our pantry just in case our gardens failed us this year in 2011.

So we have been making purchases of additional foods just in case the growing season isn’t productive. Making some food purchases now, we are paying with today’s money instead of tomorrow’s money. This means we’re making food an investment, using our purchases today as a hedge against tomorrow’s food inflationary prices. If we need to buy foods to replace those we would normally have preserved, we would rather buy the foods today than in 6 months at a more expensive price.

So what are we buying? We’re only buying foods that we would normally eat.  The only drawback is that many of these foods are in cans and we’re really not fond of the metal cans. Since we don’t like soggy vegetables in metal cans, we have limited our selection to organic corn, diced tomatoes, whole tomatoes, peaches, etc. We are also purchasing tuna (in water). With a 1-2 year shelf life for each of these foods, we plan to use these foods within that time.

I can’t say that I know of any gardeners who have bought garden foods ahead of the gardening season. I don’t know anyone making purchases just in case their 2011 garden failed to produce an adequate harvest for their food preservation. What about you? Have you given any thought to buying foods you would normally grow just to guard against garden failure and food inflation?

Photo of canned foods:

Unidentified stacks of home-canned food, created between 1941 and 1945, CALL NUMBER LC-USW36-949, United States Library of Congress.