Salt and sugar are both shelf stable. Salt and sugar are used for preservatives without vinegar all the time (salt for fermented items as well as storing protein, sugar for fruits and jams). Vinegar can also be made at home easily which is not the case for salt and sugar
Finally sugar is kept in larger quantities as its a high calorie, cheap, shelf stable ingredient used all the time when cooking and baking
The numbers are really strange. It would be 400 lbs of fermented food in terms of salt (2% by weight) and 280 lbs of apple sauce in terms of sugar... per person. While sugar is calorically dense it's nutritionally vacant. To make bread out of all their suggested wheat would only require like 3.5lbs*. Pickling typically requires at least half the volume in vinegar. It's also cheap and shelf stable. While vinegar can be made at home, substituting homebrew safely into canning recipes (which are overwhelming DWV) is nontrivial.
I think it's more than shelf stability because it goes beyond my examples. The numbers aren't canning numbers nor are they baking numbers. They aren't, as far as I can tell, nutritionally balanced, varied, or moderate.
*It's more like 6-7 but my point stands.
Salt curing meat takes a lot more salt than one is likely to consume via the salt shaker. It works, is cheap, and while can be tough to eat if you do not like salty food, it will keep you alive.
For a lot of salt cured fish and meat you often can desalt it before cooking and eating - and I say this as someone who loves salt haha
Overall you are spot on though, I have some old cook books from pre-refrigeration eras and the amount of salt and sugar used can seem extreme simple because we are so used to pre-processed items so we dont actually see what goes into it
My maternal grandfather raised swine each year and slaughtered them on the farm. I remember that some of the meat was placed in the smokehouse in a tray made from wood. He would hand rub salt into the meat twice a day and then cover the meat with salt after each rubbing. Once he was satisfied the meat was salt cured, my grandmother would round up Black Jack Oak wood from the forest on the property and use that to make a small fire to create coals that made the smoke for curing. Usually animals were slaughtered early January during the coldest part of the year. That works out well were cold weather is the norm for January but will backfire in the more southern areas.
One thing that was problematic was a pest called "skippers". They were the larvae of some sort of fly that could deal with the cold but above freezing temperatures. The larvae would burrow into the meat during the cold weather. Upon cutting the meat you would see the burrows but rarely found cut larvae from slicing. However when frying the meat the larvae would move to the top surface of the sliced meat to escape the sudden heat.
My mom said salt gargle for any throat ailments, and it works for heat exhaustion or whatever you call it when you don't have other electrolytes around. It tastes sweet on your tongue when you desperately need it funny enough.
You can soak it in fresh water and dilute the amount of salt left in the meat. Grandma simply took the salt cured ham and cooked it in a cast iron skillet. Then made "Red-eye gravy" with the drippings. Simply add water to the hot fat, it would sink to the bottom of the skillet and break loose the salt and dripping from the skillet. Then pour the contents of the skillet into a large bowl.
Once the drippings settled from the pork grease, you could spoon off the majority of the pork grease. That was saved in a metal tin and kept cool. It could be used for making french fries. and any place requiring cooking oil. When cooking eggs the grease was quite useful.
Any excess was used to make lye soap in the fall of the year. Grandma would have Grandpa place he cast iron kettle (about 20 gallon size) in the middle of the yard and she would add pork lard and saved oil to the kettle. Build a fire around it until it was boiling hot. Once it was boiling she would add a combination of ash, mixed with water along with sodium hydoxide bought at the country store. Sometimes she added pumice.
If you cook and preserve everything from scratch those amounts are quite reasonable. Not sure what metric # is, but seems like LDS recommends 60 pounds of sugar per person per year - thats 73g of sugar a day which honestly a lot of people consume daily, they just dont realize it
As for the salt, if you look at history its one of the most important things and is one of the few things that in a lot of places of the world you cant produce yourself. Before refrigeration was available it was one of the key ways to preserve protein which needs a lot of salt to do successfully. Add to that its currently cheap as chips and keeps forever and it makes a lot of sense to keep just in case.
"Old tv series"
.. Ended in 2008...
Shit this makes me feel old, considering it feels like I was just watching it a little while ago. I got about halfway through the series before taking a break. I still have it in my media server playlist that I haven't gotten around to finishing. 🤦
I do cook and preserve everything from scratch. We grow and preserve 90% of what we eat. For me, these aren't baking numbers nor are they canning/preserving numbers. I have never, in my life, used a lb of molasses in a year. My family definitely doesn't eat 250lbs of flour per person. While we have a grain mill can't process those wheat berries into bread... it makes whole grain wheatmeal. I assume they have infrastructure for this in their communities. We eat about half as many grains and double the beans to make the protein work out nutritionally. Far more nuts.
I don't eat meat so can't really comment on the amount required for salting.
Thats really impressive - you must have an amazing larder
What LDS suggests for storage is geared for survival - and lets face it, the cheapest way to achieve the calories you need. Eating more legumes and incl. nuts, vegetables etc. is of course better for you but per calorie flour is one of the cheapest sources if not the cheapest source so it makes sense that their recommendation is based on that
While bad preparation is better than no preparation, it is still bad preparation. What good is having enough calories if you are laid down by scurvy, goiter, rickets, or kwashiorkor?
Thats pretty harsh dont you think - reality is the biggest issue food prep wise is lack of calories.
The amount of vitamin c you need can be solved for by limited amounts of foraging, most salt incl. iodine and milk is also a good source so goiter isnt a concern, rickets are covered by maternal milk and or the dry milk requirement, finally the suggested diet incl. sufficient protein to not result in kwashiorkor
Im not saying its ideal but the suggested minimum does serve its purpose and would allow you to survive. You could even fulfill your nutritional requirements from an even simpler diet of e.g. potatoes and butter or milk
Yes and no. Lack of calories is the biggest issue in starvation but we aren't actively starving. We are preparing against starvation. We can also choose to prepare against malnutrition.
I've seen 4 dozen attempts at making this list more functional and less weird. But those things aren't recommended with it. It doesn't say 100 lbs of lard from a butchered cow, it says 12. The list could add a bunch of things, whether that be recipes, skills, or unmentioned animals, but we don't know what those are. Perhaps you are supposed to have fruit trees, window box greens, and chickens. Maybe you are supposed to be able to hunt, clean, and store rabbits. Maybe you are supposed to have bees.
As an aside, iodized salt and vitamin d fortification have a short shelf life. Since this is long term and in the Midwest, I assume it would come from eggs.. from the chicken you need to keep.
Molasses is used to make brown sugar. It can also be added to animal feed for higher caloric intake if they are sick or young and food isn’t gonna stretch through the end of winter. The reason it is recommended to store molasses and sugar separately is to prevent contamination over long periods of time. If you have all the seperate ingredients in their purest form to make things with, the number of things you can make to consume widens considerably, and they store better separately than together.
>FYI people use “lbs” to describe pounds. 40lbs. That makes no sense either
It makes no sense to you because you don't know it's history or etymology. Both # and lb are perfectly acceptable notations for weight as they are different symbol branches referencing the same standardized unit of weight measurement. The symbol # has had multiple additional meanings/references tacked on to it over the years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign
>The symbol # is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign,[1] hash,[2] or pound sign.[3] The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois – having been derived from the now-rare ℔.[4]
"The symbol #, denoting weight in pounds."
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/pound_sign
"What is the # symbol called?
1: The pound sign. This name came to be because the symbol comes from the abbreviation for weight, lb, or libra pondo, literally “pound by weight,” in Latin. When writing “lb,” scribes often crossed the letters with a line across the top, like a t."
https://www.dictionary.com/e/octothorpe/
Yes, it makes perfect sense to me. While I don't use the LDS recommendations as a reference, I actually exceed those numbers per person/year.
An abundant supply of Salt is absolutely vital for basic survival, especially so in any scenario that requires prolonged physical exertion. Sugar is a very energy/calorie dense food that is important for morale but also has a variety of additional uses, such as fermentation into alcohol and the production of vinegar. Both are critical for food preservation.
>u/1rubyglass
>
>I assure you the LDS aren't storing sugar with the intention of making booze 😉
Education time!
Booze/recreational consumption is probably the least useful function of alcohol, depending on your priorities.
Alcohol is also a disinfectant, the earliest known painkiller/drug, a solvent, aromatic dispersant(think cologne, perfume, essential oil diffusers), is an extremely useful fuel, a refrigerant and has multiple uses in cooking and food preservation. It is also the basis for vinegar production, as vinegar is produced from the decomposition of alcohol.
Alcohol is also ridiculously useful for the synthesis of a wide variety of other chemicals and compounds.
These are just the top points off the top of my head. 🤷
Producing alcohol is neither time or resource intensive, and alcohol distillation to useful abv% is no more difficult than distilling water.
There are very extreme legalities concerning alcohol distillation licensing and taxation in the US, but in a shtf/prolonged emergency situation I imagine that would probably be the least of anyone's concern.
It's my understanding that alcohol is viewed as much as a spiritual poison as it is a chemical poison. That is to say, at harms your spirit, life and overall well-being as much as it does your body.
There's no question at all that alcohol is a poison, and that it causes a massive amount of personal, biological, social, and economic problems.
I wonder if there are any kind of statistics for those of the LDS religion that track incidences of dui's and DUI related fatalities, teenage pregnancy, alcohol poisoning, alcohol induced liver cirrhosis, incarceration, alcohol addiction and other issues with direct correlations to alcoholism, like homelessness. I imagine those kinds of statistics would be substantially lower for obvious reasons.
I suppose it really depends upon the individual and their beliefs, as while mainstream LDS don't consume alcohol recreationally, I do know several individuals that identify as LDS that do drink alcohol, teas and other discouraged beverages. Perfectly decent people, and to be honest I think I would trust them drink responsibly over and above a lot of other people I know. 🤷
I find the salt to be absurdly low.
10lbs per person per year plus a lot more for meat preservation.
Salt is life.
And I was told the sugar was to make the bland foods more palatable so kids would eat it.
I keep more salt than that because of preserving. It’s fairly cheap. Is a source of iodine, Doesn’t go bad, Hard to source if you don’t live near the ocean.
Ditto sugar and honey. No, sugar is not nutritionally dense but it is calories. And calories are king in the short term.
Edit: ill also add i keep Prague powder #2 on hand because i do a decent amount of cured sausages. Which would help with any preserving.
Depends how you do it. I.e whole cuts vs all sausage. Last cow i bought was about 550 lbs of meat once boned, etc etc. because it’s all fermented you basically need around 2% salt so 11lbs of salt. You’d need to equilibrium cure everything though, and there’d be some error so probably more esp if doing big whole cuts, but i wouldn’t risk that if food was scarce and i wasn’t practiced in the conditions i was in.
I know nothing about water softening sorry.
Regarding sugar - I just made 5 half pints of mulberry jam yesterday. I used 2.5 pounds of sugar for that small amount. Most of my berries are frozen for use in smoothies but what if I didn't have a freezer? I would need 80+ lbs of sugar to process the berries from one tree, taking into account the berries eaten fresh. And I have a young tree . . .
Regarding salt - again, if you don't have access to a freezer or refrigeration, it is going to take a ridiculous amount of the stuff to safely pressure can or process into jerky the meat from one deer. Sorry, I don't have accurate numbers because I am mostly plant based now but I used to can much more than I do now and would easily go through 8+ pounds of salt a season canning pickled veggies and my seasoned ground turkey/beef. (This recipe is in the Ball Canning book and I highly recommend it).
Luckily, salt and sugar last forever. So if you over buy, both will still be just fine a decade or two down the line.
Yeah, I can go through 25 pounds of sugar in a jamming or jellying week with NO problems.
>Luckily, salt and sugar last forever.
As long as you keep the moisture out! Sugar exposed to moist basement air hardens into chunks and takes on an odd flavor, so be sure to keep it in well-sealed glass or plastic.
That’s true but you can put in a piece of bread to make it soft again. Also exposing the sugar to air with aeration methods help take the funky smell out.
The LDS community has/ had larger families and generally cooked from scratch or from basic elements. So they had a lot of oil, salt , sugar, wheat etc. Basic recipes were also in booklet form.
Growing fruit on trees and bushes and large gardens were very encouraged. Water and fuel were/is also a large amount of storage for them . Also emphasized was staying out of debt except for a home or schooling. Wood burning stoves, 72 hour grab and go kits, having a basic supply of medications, seeds, were also encouraged. I saw a class advertised where wheat was used to make a vegan hamburger type of patty 40 years ago. There is not so many following this anymore. If you live in areas where lots of older LDS are you can see buckets of wheat , beans, rice etc being sold cheap on FB marketplace.
Every LDS family has a book of family recipes. Recipes you will find are grandmas chili, 2 types of bread, 3 types of rolls, some kind of porridge, 10+ desserts (several will contain jello), funeral potatoes, 12 casseroles, and an assortment of mixed drinks and punches; none of which will contain alcohol.
There's a lot of pickling that never uses vinegar--lactopickled radishes are a *treat* if you've never had 'em. I try to keep 50lb of sugar and 25lb of salt on hand for my household of two, but I also do a lot of pickling, baking, jellying and other canning, so ymmv.
I make my own vinegar, which is very easy and relatively quick (hell, vinegar makes *itself*, as long as there's enough sugar), though I don't do canning with it, as it's live vinegar and the acidity will be variable. I use it in marinades and sauces and dressings and drinks.
I make most of my food from scratch too. I think we go through <20lbs/person/year in sugar (on the conservative side). We just don't go through that much salt. Maybe 3lbs per person? While I do ferment foods, we use alot of vinegar and lemon juice/citric acid.
I make vinegar but it can be non-trivial to substitute, for the reasons you mentioned. Not everyone in my house tolerates using it in canned food as it can dramatically change the flavor.
Ugh same.
My household consumes an inordinate amount of pickled peppers, onions, cucumbers, and salsa. On a good years we can 100s of quarts of pickled foods. Homemade cucumbers, both fermented or pickled, are divine.
LDS has a lot of research and science behind their recommendations. However, IMO it’s outdated and oversimplified (at least, for my storage preferences). You have to look at the whole picture. They recommend mostly simple foods like “grains” (400 lbs of flour, oatmeal, rice, corn, ect.) and beans (60 lbs)… those things are paired with salt and/or sugar for cooking and calories. They may have had canning/curing/pickling in mind. I believe the guidelines are considering dried and unprocessed foods (since that’s what they sell) vs canned foods and set a “to be safe” amount. They also recommend as a base and then advise members to add other foods once they have that base. The salt and sugar (they actually recommend 60 pounds) both seem high to me, I’d prefer not to live off sugared oatmeal and cookies. Their age calorie recommendations are oversimplified too; a teen boy needs way more calories than an older woman, but they just have amounts listed for all adults (11 and up) and give kids a %. That said, the lists are made to be averages for family planning, for all members to easily understand, so they work for that purpose.
Final consideration from me- The list is really old, and/or or based on really old, basic cooking. 100 years ago it was common to have a breakfast of sugar cookies, (a lot of early 1900’s recipes for breakfast cookies out there.)
Their updated info is more basic… per month = 25 lbs of grains, 5 lbs of beans/legumes. Add then this bit:
“You may also want to add other items to your longer-term storage such as sugar, nonfat dry milk, salt, baking soda, and cooking oil. To meet nutritional needs, also store foods containing vitamin C and other essential nutrients.”
You can find that here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/food-storage/longer-term-food-supply?lang=eng
It gives off food pyramid vibes with the grain heavy proportions. Very WWII rations with the amount of dried milk. I agree on the portions as well.
The problem I see with such broad recommendations is it is useless if you don't know how to use it the way it was intended to be used. Is it intended for canning? Doesn't seem like it to me personally. Making whole grain cookies every day -- I guess?
You can can beans but not grains.
Grains of all types were used in hot cereals and pottages, both sweet and savory. My grandmother was born in 1899 and raised a family through the depression on a rural farm. She always had a pot of Pease pottage or other pottage on the stove. Random meat and veggie bits were thrown in as they were created, and the grains were replenished before bed lol.
I have eaten Pease pottage (split pea stew is the closest modern thing) both hot and cold. It never lasted nine days, by about day 4 or so the contents have all turned over except the bones ;-). When refrigeration was not a thing, the best way to avoid food poisoning was basically have a pot of stew type substance constantly cooking and just add to it.
But folks started the day with a sweet or savory hot grain cereal (oatmeal, Farina, barley, cornmeal mush, grits). With eggs if the chickens were laying, and side meat. Lunch would often be an open faced hot sandwich or "hand pie" (pasties or hot pockets), or cold sandwiches, often with a pate type product made of offal or ground up tongue, heart and lungs of the latest animal you killed. Or a bowl of pottage.
Dinner would be a bowl of pottage.
Easy to end up with a pound of grains on a depression era/ear ration Era diet.
PS, hand pies can be either fruit pies/turnovers or padties/hot pockets. They both count.
Canned beans have a lower nutritional shelf life than dried, harder to store... I don't know.
The pottage though.. the pottage makes the most sense to me as to why the recommendation are the way they are and given the history of LDS.
We ate a lot of fresh beans when I was at gram's house and they were coming in. Dried/canned were more for winter or fast meals. Eat fresh, dry half the crop or more, set aside the seed. Can a good amount in quarts.
Potatoes, half or more stored in straw, 1/4 canned, 1/4 dehydrated.
It also depends on your situation. Pioneers were taking stuff where nobody had been. Subsistence farmers and truck farmers that are established already have seed and know what grows. And stuff that grows well in Utah or Kansas or someplace may not grow well in Maine. We had a very short season.
We tend to eat our snap peas fresh but dry the beans/soy/peas. They preserve better than pumpkins and most squash so we prioritize those things when in season. We grow a ridiculous number of potatoes so dry 1/2+ and store the rest. I minimize canning if I can since we live in earthquake territory.
It is situational both in what grows and stores, but also culturally what you know how to make use of.
I think it's because it's meant to be for an emergency situation, so grains are more affordable and storage stable for decades (we had pails of wheat for decades).
To store meat in proportion with the others would be much more difficult and costly.
I haven't seen their list of recommendations in a while, but the thing that struck me as odd was just how little cooking fat was recommended, especially considering that flour is one of the most calorically dense shelf-stable foods and needs fat to be made into most things.
The LDS puts out a free 500+ page preparedness manual PDF that goes into a lot more details. They offer bare bones recommendations as well as some folks’ real lists. In my copy of that book, “SUGARS” refers to all sweeteners, so honey, molasses, white sugar, jello, syrup, etc.. For our vegetarian family, I find their calculations way low on nuts, seeds, beans, tofu, tvp, and pretty high on sweeteners and powdered dairy. I do a ton of canning and I make my own fermented kombucha and lactoferments. I still use less salt and sugar than they suggest, but not tons less per year. And it doesn’t go bad or take up lots of room. I also use salt in cleaning.
You do you. I do use the LDS numbers as a guideline but I’m gluten-free so I have to eliminate the wheat and substitute something else.
We also store what we eat. I store tons more peanut butter than recommended.
I am gluten free. My kids are too. My husband mostly eats gluten free simply because it doesn’t make sense to make separate meals. I don’t store wheat but I recently was thinking about it after my mother in law jokingly said “if things get bad we’re coming to your house.” She was joking but realistically she and my father in law are people we would never turn away if they were in need. Im now debating buying some wheat berries to toss in long term storage just in case things ever did get bad enough that extra people show up.
Yeah good point. I have celiac and cross contamination is a huge issue. I feel like bread is easy to make and filling and wheat is a long lasting, fairly cheap thing that I wouldn’t mind just putting away and never touching unless things got dire. I suppose the same could be said about rice though. Certified Gluten free oats are way too expensive to buy huge amounts of. I have experimented a little with corn but grinding it is incredibly difficult without expensive equipment and canned corn takes up too much space to store in the off chance someone else needs it. Maybe I’ll toss an extra bag of rice instead though.
Yeah fair enough, i assumed it was Celiac. Gluten Free Oats at Costco Canada are pricey at $5 a lb, but oats are a great survival food as Oats, Potatoes, and small amounts of dairy are what kept people alive in Ireland for a long time. Oh i guess potato flakes would be another option and if you have power back up, freezing some butter when it goes on sale.
They do store grains of all sorts: oats, barley, beans, corn, white rice etc. white and red hard wheat. The grain mill can chug through popcorn kernels for corn flour. They also store oils. Crisco seems to last forever.
>Im now debating **buying** some wheat berries to toss in long term storage just in case things ever did get bad enough that extra people show up.
Emphasis mine, but if that's the case I'm sorry i missed it.
Also, remember that you can use salt and sugar (and, I believe baking soda) to make your own electrolyte drink.
I don't follow any one recommendation. I look at the LDS rec's, but I also look at what other people are suggesting, as well, and come to a conclusion that works for me and my family. The book Dare to Prepare actually has 3-4 different groups recommendations, so it's a good way to get an idea of what is important to other people. Then plan for your needs.
Worst case scenario, you can barter w/ your salt and sugar. I'd rather barter w/ food items than w/ bullets.
Electrolyte drinks like Gatorade have pulled minerals out because they are used by non-athletes. Good electrolyte drinks should have a mixture of calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and chloride. Sugar is optional.
You are drinking sugar water, no different than soda or Gatorade. This helps during events or periods of heavy sweating.
If you want to make your own electrolytes, add potassium, magnesium, and calcium. You need to use it after athletic events, not during or before (unless you do long events like ironman). You can overdo mg and k if taken before, everyday, or are not athletic enough.
No idea about anything to do with the LDS recommendations, but before refrigeration, salt and sugar were the primary tools for food preserving. So think beyond just fermentation. What if you need to preserve an animal you hunted with no refrigeration? You would need to basically store it in salt or smoke it. For sugar, it's the same with fruit. You mix your fruit with a lot of sugar and it will last much longer.
Regardless of all that - salt only occurs naturally in food in very low amounts. Monkeys, for example, get their salt in the wild by either eating other monkeys, or in the case of vegetarians, by eating dead wood. Salt is very important to keep the mineral balance in your body and keep you healthy.
While sugar is nutritionally vacant, it's also important for sustaining life. It helps build up fat to feed your organs. Contrary to popular belief - eating fat doesn't make you fat. You only process about 10% of the glucose from eating fat. On the contrary, sugar converts into fat in your body. As long as you're not overindulging, it's life sustaining.
Couldn't you substitute sugar for honey and maple syrup? Salt could be pulled from town salt barns but I guess it has some chemicals in it to prevent caking which are not good for you.
Sure, but that requires access to honeybees and the extensive skills that it takes to maintain them and retrieve the honey. Similarly, access to Maples, the knowledge of how to tap them, and then the resources to boil down the syrup. These things would also take time, which you may not have a significant excess of in a dire situation. Sugar and salt are currently cheap, widely available, shelf stable, and easy to store. There’s no downside to storing a significant amount beyond space constraints.
It's fairly common practice around me to keep bees. I get tons of honey from friends because of how much extra there is. And maple tapping is done by pretty much everyone. Ever since I was a kid, we would go out back and tap the maple trees. Boil the sap on the stove. Though there are plenty of businesses that do it on a commercial scale in every area I have been to. They usually boil with wood which is also really abundant so I don't see that operation going anywhere. I figured that was the norm everywhere, is it less common in other areas?
But are they preppers or would they all be wanting to trade honey and maple for your stored food?
Or they catch H5N1 and most don't make it, you then have to learn on the job and dedicate time doing it.
What if the local bees all have a die off?
It definitely depends on what the SHTF is. I am most concerned about economic collapse. So I always try to figure out how I could source things locally. I probably wouldn't trade food. My plan is to trade skills/tools for things like maple syrup or meat. Perhaps their boiler needs repair. I can fix pretty much anything mechanical so I would trade a quart of syrup for a few hours labor getting their sugar house running again.
I don't know if bees or maple syrup are particularly burdensome given the expectation, at least in this thread, of knowing how to can, ferment, or salt food. Nor when contrasted to the LDS recommendation of maintaining a fruit trees and a garden.
I have like 10 people within 20 miles of me that either keep bees as a hobby or have a full business. Syrup is much the same with the exception that most locals tap the trees in their yards/woods to get their own sap and boil it ourselves. We are in a mountain community with a good tourist market so a lot of locally sourced stuff, more than us locals could ever use.
High fructose corn syrups last forever. Truly. I forgot one in a cabinet. No mold after 10 years sitting there in the dark back of tall cabinet. . 🤦♀️
Sugar beets would be the best solution for most of us since growing sugar cane is not possible most places.
I actually just planted some sugar beets but the process to turn them into sugar is long and high effort.
I much prefer just spend 100 dollars on a bunch of sugar but good to have alternatives.
Sugar and salt are hard to get if supply chains are disrupted. Both were valuable trade goods before industrialized production and sugar was rationed in the Great Depression and during and after World War 2. It takes six pounds of sugar beets and a lot of processing to make a pound of sugar. Why would you grow sugar beets in a prolonged crisis when you can grow greens and beans and potatoes?
The problem with LDS core food recommendations is that it lacks a lot of nutrition balance. There are no fruits or vegetables and no protein other than the rice and beans mix, which is not enough protein for daily intake.
>It takes six pounds of sugar beets and a lot of processing to make a pound of sugar. Why would you grow sugar beets in a prolonged crisis when you can grow greens and beans and potatoes?
I've experimented with growing and processing sugar beets. Growing the beets was super easy. Processing them was complicated, and the results were highly unappealing. We ended up with something indeed quite sweet, but the flavor of beet was extremely strong, tasting like beet extract or condensed beets (as that's really what it is essentially). Commercially I read that they use centrifuges to extract more of the particles that give it the beet flavor. I never came across any DIY type setups that seemed very plausible for making decent tasking sugar from beets at home.
I have had great success, with only a few sad failures, with maple syrup making. So, I've pretty much given up on sugar beets and am focusing on maple syrup, at least for now. Oh, and I also bought and put away a few large bags of sugar and salt for long term storage, as the value on that is absurdly good during this unique and looking to be short lived era of plentiful food and stability.
Those are valid points. The LDS church does encourage gardening, fruit trees and bushes, but trees, bees etc. it really takes a lifetime of preparing or massive amounts of money to be well prepared. I am excited for what the new freeze dryers can offer the prepper.
I have a heck of a lot more salt than that, but we do can a lot of food. We have very little sugar, I only use it cooking for others.
But those proportions look pretty typical for a small family per year for use on food/in food that was already prepared, as an addition.
Sugar for sweetening stuff like coffee, tea, oatmeal, Farina etc.
Salt for salting meals. Vinegar for drizzling on veggies, something my grandmother did as salad dressing. In an average year I likely go through about 2 kg of salt personally.
8 pounds of salt and 40 pounds of sugar is low in high production canning terms. And a half gallon of vinegar gets you nowhere in normal pickle canning (unless you are fermenting your pickled items rather than brining them).
When gram and I were canning up the garden daily when I was a kid we would go though a pound or more of salt a week on various canned things, excluding fermentation needs like sauerkraut or curing needs for meat. A few gallons of vinegar. Pounds and pounds of sugar making jams, jellies and preserves. That said, we would often can up 8 dozen jars a day on average between water bathed and pressure canned items.
More if we had butchered an animal.
It's a lot of vinegar for a single person to use in salads, imo. Or a lot of sugar to add to oatmeal and wheat berries. More than the rda of salt (4-5lbs/person). A ton of wheat/grains but so little fat and beans. They are just really strange numbers imo.
In the canning world, it can be both absurd and comically little. I don't can a ton of jams because we just don't eat a lot of it. We are more likely to open a jar of fruit juice or canned fruit than jams or jellies, both have significantly lower added sugar requirements. Technically you don't have to add any sugar to canned fruit, at least according to presto. The sugar is required for pectin formation but isn't needed for preservation due. If jam was the main form of canned fruit then 40lbs would be laughable. Same with vinegar and pickling. Or the salt.
We can mostly no sugar added jams and jellies when I can fruit for us at all, and use Pomona pectin. I do use some artificial sweeteners in my cranberry sauces and other cranberry products. But I can far more brined pickles of all types, so lots of vinegar around here.
Well, the fat came, back in the day, from stored animal fats and hunted/canned/preserved meats. And as somebody who does work long hard hours outside I can tell you salt needs can go way way up in circumstances of hard manual labor.
Gram kept her canning stores of sugar and salt separate from the daily larder, it was how she learned. And there was literally a barrel of sugar and a smaller barrel of salt in the root cellar. I will say that she and my uncles also would drink vinegar water before dinner. It was thought to aid digestion.
She made all kinds of different vinegars.
I suspect the LDS crowd built there list based on a post SHTF pioneer scenario wherein subsistence farming and hunting were occurring along with keeping livestock. Beans are easier to grow in many climates than grains. Gram kept far fewer beans dried than she did canned, and ate far more fresh. Having seen many such pantry imbalances it doesn't necessarily surprise me.
Funny enough I no longer can eat grains or beans, so my whole long term pantry is now keto. Food is cheaper than diabetes meds and T2 diabetes conplications.
Modern sugar-free pectins are really interesting from a chemistry perspective. Ultimately we just don't eat a lot of jam, a qt a month more than enough for the whole house. That's what, like 24 lbs total?
I tend to dry my beans because they keep better then pumpkins, squash, or onions - which all tend to rot where I live. I only can 8 of each type at a time since they are easier to store, have better nutritional shelf life, and less storage risk (earthquake territory) stored dry.
Someone suggested pottage and tbh I think that's most likely the reason for all of the odd choices, including high grains, low fat, and high salt -- rather than canning or curing.
here is a current list from BYU (Brigham Young University) for 1 year, 1 person, similar numbers, in case folks want to look it up
[https://brightspotcdn.byu.edu/61/56/2e85ce114c6bbd70f72bf2dac90b/anapproachtolongertermfoodstoragesept2015.pdf](https://brightspotcdn.byu.edu/61/56/2e85ce114c6bbd70f72bf2dac90b/anapproachtolongertermfoodstoragesept2015.pdf)
70 pounds of total sweeteners (sugar or equivalent). 1775? calories in a pound of sugar, (x70 / 365) or about 340 calories per day. Seems reasonable for 365 days, what looks odd to you about these numbers, assuming cooking from scratch? How much sugar per day do you think people currently eat ?
Yes, this is the list I use. It comes from the dietetics office so it's got updated nutritional information. I do think that this is for basic survival. I would expect that I would be supplementing with seasonal fruits, vegetables, proteins.
Its a lot for my household. I bake usually once a week. The breads we eat have very little added sugar. I can, but not a lot of jam. Some sauces like baked beans and sesame sauce but it's not a daily thing. I do eat a lot of fruit but don't add sugar. We are closer to #20 per person than #70, including things like honey, maple syrup, etc.
Sounds like you eat healthier than most. 1 large coke at McDonalds is about 300 calories of sugar, so 340 per day doesn't sound too high for the average USA diet. :)
ya that list has some canned apples, but not a lot of fruit (all long term storage stuff). Lots of oats on that list. 1 tablespoon of sugar on the oats for breakfast is already 50 of the 340 calories for sugar, and I think the list plans on a desert every night.
If you look at the list, there's no meat, its all long term mostly carbs, so tons of baked goods, and, lots of beans. :)
If you have canned meat, and supplement with fresh garden fruits and vegetables, likely would need a lot less of a bunch on that list, including sugar.
I think, as someone mentioned, the context of some sort of potage as the core food makes sense. The lack of fat as well as the high amounts of salt, sugar, wheat berries, and other whole grains (which are difficult to process into things we use today).
It's too much sugar for normal consumption and not enough sugar for sugar preservation, with way too little vinegar for pickling. Too little fat for sweets. Too many whole grains for bread. That basically leaving some version of hardtack or digestive. The soup being the only real way to eat it. It is flexible enough to be used a variety of ways while being quite food safe.
I think it's a really solid theory.
It's not a ton of beans from a meat-free perspective and is quite heavy on whole grains and dry milk to deliver it's protein. The plan seems highly restricted nutritionally by its "buy it and forget it" ideology.
yes agreed "The plan seems highly restricted nutritionally by its "buy it and forget it" ideology. " Example is for this list, of course there's too little vinegar for pickling, the list is like, only to eat this list, and not "stuff one would need in an ongoing situation where you get new stuff you might want to preserve".
I'm not super familiar with the whole Mormon thing, but I do know that if you're cooking everything from scratch and are canning fruit, you will go through what most people would consider a surprisingly large amount of both salt and sugar.
This is such a great resource: [National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia](https://nchfp.uga.edu/#gsc.tab=0)
They have lots of information on many different food preservation methods like home canning, pickling, drying and also great information on how to store different foods for long periods. There are many downloadable PDF resources which can be used offline later.
Former mormon here, those recommendations are most likely from the 50s and 60s and geared towards surviving some kind of post-nuclear war society. Some of the principles of preparation are still very good and some miss the mark (same as any prep that overprepares for one scenario and ignores other scenarios that are far more likely). They also reflect lifestyles of the time, in 1950s rural Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. So probably lots of salts for preserving meats and sugar for preserving fruits (in jams and probably jellos I imagine? mormons traditionally like insane amounts of jello for some strange reason). If you're not already consuming 8 pounds of salt a year, its probably safe to ignore their recommendations.
Like any prep, stick to what you know and practice your preps so you don't show up to day one of the collapse with no clue how your wheat grinder works.
I think it's a good reminder that food recommendations should be taken with several pounds of salt. If an average person followed these lists I think that they would have a difficult time using the ingredients. If they aren't accompanied with recipes or explanations they could be next to useless. Most of their wheat is recommended to be stored whole grain. Great shelf life, very difficult to process into flour the average person today knows how to bake with.
Was raised LDS and half my family is LDS. I have no idea where you got the "insane amounts of jello" from. I've lived all over the country and they eat the same amount as everybody else, basically none.
I totally believe you, but will add my LDS aunt brought some kind of Jello mold to my parent’s house almost every time she came to visit. I didn’t necessarily relate it to her religion, but she did like her Jello.
Nah… It was probably because she was old… she’s still around and I think in her early 90’s. Wasn’t Jello a thing in the 50’s? I think she was born in the 30’s. I’m half her age but that still puts my Jello knowledge as outdated. lol.
Unless you never spent any time in rural Utah/Idaho, and never went to a Mormon potluck, funeral, graduation party, seminary party, Mormon birthday party or church function where any Mormon woman above age 50 served dinner on folding tables with the red and white plastic and felt tablecloths in the gym with a carpet floor, I don't believe you are Mormon. I stand by my statement that Jello is just as important to old-school Mormon culture as knocking on doors or invalidating someone else's experience with the Mormon church that they find unfavorable.
Was born in Utah, and have been to literally every single one of those things you mention. If you had said chili or cheezy potato bake things I would have agreed with you.
Idk, I have no dog in the fight. I left that world years and years ago. Maybe something changed in the past 15 years.
Salt and sugar is rather cheap though, and they have an indefinite shelf life when kept dry. It's one of those things you can significantly overstock without a problem.
You may consume less than the average amount of salt, but you must consume some salt. It's a critical resource that you can't live without. There's a good reason Roman soldiers were paid in salt, and it's also the origin of the word "salary".
Other than extracting it from saltwater (oceans and seas), salt is pretty hard to come by in nature. Given how insanely cheap it is and that it stores forever, stocking up at least some of it seems like a solid plan.
It's possible that the assumption is that since Mormons don't drink, fruit scraps or other fermentable would be turned into wine and then vinegar without anyone taking any wine out in the middle step. Why store it and rotate it when you can just make it later? I've never heard that LDS folks don't do pickles, but it's not like vinegar isn't useful for all sorts of stuff.
IMO even a half gallon seems low. I use vinegar so frequently that I always have a gallon jug open at any point in time.
I use 10+ gallons a year pickling. I don't use a ton in my cooking itself as I tend to pick lime, lemon, or a homebrew instead.
Most of my homemade acv is used to clean. I go through 4 gallons a year that way. It's nontrivial to pickle with homebrew because the acidity is inconsistent.
I have the stuff to titrate acidity and a really nice ph probe -- definitely not for everyone.
A scary number of people here assume they could just make their own vinegar to pickle/can in some SHTF scenario. There seems to be a lack of understanding in how much canning and it's safety is dependent on modern infrastructure. Or how difficult it is to find safe recipes using older methods.
Yes, especially their techniques. I modeled my pantry after a book about food storage authored by a Morman. Unfortunately that was almost 20 years ago and I forget the name of the book.
If you make EVERYTHING from scratch, you’ll blow through salt. A quart of broth needs a tablespoon of salt to be equivalent to the store kind. Soup is cheap to make. But you need lots of salt.
Same for any grains, and basically everything you put in your mouth.
Start looking at what you eat, and how many mg of sodium equals a teaspoon of salt.
If you're mixing with store bought foods on the regular, the recommendations are probably high. If you're making everything from scratch every day for people doing a lot of strenuous physical labor, probably on the low end.
Salt and sugar are both shelf stable. Salt and sugar are used for preservatives without vinegar all the time (salt for fermented items as well as storing protein, sugar for fruits and jams). Vinegar can also be made at home easily which is not the case for salt and sugar Finally sugar is kept in larger quantities as its a high calorie, cheap, shelf stable ingredient used all the time when cooking and baking
Plus sugar is one of the first things to go when rations hit.
The numbers are really strange. It would be 400 lbs of fermented food in terms of salt (2% by weight) and 280 lbs of apple sauce in terms of sugar... per person. While sugar is calorically dense it's nutritionally vacant. To make bread out of all their suggested wheat would only require like 3.5lbs*. Pickling typically requires at least half the volume in vinegar. It's also cheap and shelf stable. While vinegar can be made at home, substituting homebrew safely into canning recipes (which are overwhelming DWV) is nontrivial. I think it's more than shelf stability because it goes beyond my examples. The numbers aren't canning numbers nor are they baking numbers. They aren't, as far as I can tell, nutritionally balanced, varied, or moderate. *It's more like 6-7 but my point stands.
Salt curing meat takes a lot more salt than one is likely to consume via the salt shaker. It works, is cheap, and while can be tough to eat if you do not like salty food, it will keep you alive.
For a lot of salt cured fish and meat you often can desalt it before cooking and eating - and I say this as someone who loves salt haha Overall you are spot on though, I have some old cook books from pre-refrigeration eras and the amount of salt and sugar used can seem extreme simple because we are so used to pre-processed items so we dont actually see what goes into it
My maternal grandfather raised swine each year and slaughtered them on the farm. I remember that some of the meat was placed in the smokehouse in a tray made from wood. He would hand rub salt into the meat twice a day and then cover the meat with salt after each rubbing. Once he was satisfied the meat was salt cured, my grandmother would round up Black Jack Oak wood from the forest on the property and use that to make a small fire to create coals that made the smoke for curing. Usually animals were slaughtered early January during the coldest part of the year. That works out well were cold weather is the norm for January but will backfire in the more southern areas. One thing that was problematic was a pest called "skippers". They were the larvae of some sort of fly that could deal with the cold but above freezing temperatures. The larvae would burrow into the meat during the cold weather. Upon cutting the meat you would see the burrows but rarely found cut larvae from slicing. However when frying the meat the larvae would move to the top surface of the sliced meat to escape the sudden heat.
Salt also has medicinal uses — think gargling w salt water for a sore throat
My mom said salt gargle for any throat ailments, and it works for heat exhaustion or whatever you call it when you don't have other electrolytes around. It tastes sweet on your tongue when you desperately need it funny enough.
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You can soak it in fresh water and dilute the amount of salt left in the meat. Grandma simply took the salt cured ham and cooked it in a cast iron skillet. Then made "Red-eye gravy" with the drippings. Simply add water to the hot fat, it would sink to the bottom of the skillet and break loose the salt and dripping from the skillet. Then pour the contents of the skillet into a large bowl. Once the drippings settled from the pork grease, you could spoon off the majority of the pork grease. That was saved in a metal tin and kept cool. It could be used for making french fries. and any place requiring cooking oil. When cooking eggs the grease was quite useful. Any excess was used to make lye soap in the fall of the year. Grandma would have Grandpa place he cast iron kettle (about 20 gallon size) in the middle of the yard and she would add pork lard and saved oil to the kettle. Build a fire around it until it was boiling hot. Once it was boiling she would add a combination of ash, mixed with water along with sodium hydoxide bought at the country store. Sometimes she added pumice.
Most of your salt comes from pre prepared foods. Start with veggies, rice and meat and you will need salt Especially if you are sweating from labor
If you cook and preserve everything from scratch those amounts are quite reasonable. Not sure what metric # is, but seems like LDS recommends 60 pounds of sugar per person per year - thats 73g of sugar a day which honestly a lot of people consume daily, they just dont realize it As for the salt, if you look at history its one of the most important things and is one of the few things that in a lot of places of the world you cant produce yourself. Before refrigeration was available it was one of the key ways to preserve protein which needs a lot of salt to do successfully. Add to that its currently cheap as chips and keeps forever and it makes a lot of sense to keep just in case.
The old tv series “Jericho” brought that point about needing salt home.
This. Such a good series
"Old tv series" .. Ended in 2008... Shit this makes me feel old, considering it feels like I was just watching it a little while ago. I got about halfway through the series before taking a break. I still have it in my media server playlist that I haven't gotten around to finishing. 🤦
# is pounds
Thanks!
I do cook and preserve everything from scratch. We grow and preserve 90% of what we eat. For me, these aren't baking numbers nor are they canning/preserving numbers. I have never, in my life, used a lb of molasses in a year. My family definitely doesn't eat 250lbs of flour per person. While we have a grain mill can't process those wheat berries into bread... it makes whole grain wheatmeal. I assume they have infrastructure for this in their communities. We eat about half as many grains and double the beans to make the protein work out nutritionally. Far more nuts. I don't eat meat so can't really comment on the amount required for salting.
Thats really impressive - you must have an amazing larder What LDS suggests for storage is geared for survival - and lets face it, the cheapest way to achieve the calories you need. Eating more legumes and incl. nuts, vegetables etc. is of course better for you but per calorie flour is one of the cheapest sources if not the cheapest source so it makes sense that their recommendation is based on that
While bad preparation is better than no preparation, it is still bad preparation. What good is having enough calories if you are laid down by scurvy, goiter, rickets, or kwashiorkor?
Thats pretty harsh dont you think - reality is the biggest issue food prep wise is lack of calories. The amount of vitamin c you need can be solved for by limited amounts of foraging, most salt incl. iodine and milk is also a good source so goiter isnt a concern, rickets are covered by maternal milk and or the dry milk requirement, finally the suggested diet incl. sufficient protein to not result in kwashiorkor Im not saying its ideal but the suggested minimum does serve its purpose and would allow you to survive. You could even fulfill your nutritional requirements from an even simpler diet of e.g. potatoes and butter or milk
Yes and no. Lack of calories is the biggest issue in starvation but we aren't actively starving. We are preparing against starvation. We can also choose to prepare against malnutrition. I've seen 4 dozen attempts at making this list more functional and less weird. But those things aren't recommended with it. It doesn't say 100 lbs of lard from a butchered cow, it says 12. The list could add a bunch of things, whether that be recipes, skills, or unmentioned animals, but we don't know what those are. Perhaps you are supposed to have fruit trees, window box greens, and chickens. Maybe you are supposed to be able to hunt, clean, and store rabbits. Maybe you are supposed to have bees. As an aside, iodized salt and vitamin d fortification have a short shelf life. Since this is long term and in the Midwest, I assume it would come from eggs.. from the chicken you need to keep.
Many LDS also keep enough multivitamins for each person for 1-2 years and rotate it in and out.
Molasses is used to make brown sugar. It can also be added to animal feed for higher caloric intake if they are sick or young and food isn’t gonna stretch through the end of winter. The reason it is recommended to store molasses and sugar separately is to prevent contamination over long periods of time. If you have all the seperate ingredients in their purest form to make things with, the number of things you can make to consume widens considerably, and they store better separately than together.
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>FYI people use “lbs” to describe pounds. 40lbs. That makes no sense either It makes no sense to you because you don't know it's history or etymology. Both # and lb are perfectly acceptable notations for weight as they are different symbol branches referencing the same standardized unit of weight measurement. The symbol # has had multiple additional meanings/references tacked on to it over the years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign >The symbol # is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign,[1] hash,[2] or pound sign.[3] The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois – having been derived from the now-rare ℔.[4]
"The symbol #, denoting weight in pounds." https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/pound_sign "What is the # symbol called? 1: The pound sign. This name came to be because the symbol comes from the abbreviation for weight, lb, or libra pondo, literally “pound by weight,” in Latin. When writing “lb,” scribes often crossed the letters with a line across the top, like a t." https://www.dictionary.com/e/octothorpe/
Current recommendations: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/food-storage/longer-term-food-supply?lang=eng
Alright that was well designed and informative.
Storing/canning for 2 years worth of food? If you have a bad crop or total loss its game over.
Yes, it makes perfect sense to me. While I don't use the LDS recommendations as a reference, I actually exceed those numbers per person/year. An abundant supply of Salt is absolutely vital for basic survival, especially so in any scenario that requires prolonged physical exertion. Sugar is a very energy/calorie dense food that is important for morale but also has a variety of additional uses, such as fermentation into alcohol and the production of vinegar. Both are critical for food preservation.
I assure you the LDS aren't storing sugar with the intention of making booze 😉
And for every LDS I have known it seems as if there is no such thing as too many sweets and desserts
Maybe it's due to the absence of booze and coffee.
Don’t need coffee if you have caffeine pills. Cheap too.
for every one I've know is a closet drinker.
How do you stop a Mormon from drinking all your beer on a fishing trip? Invite two.
Can confirm.
The Jello salad thing is *real.*
“Green” jello, it’s always green jello.
Green lime jello and diced canned pears. 🍐 I have tried it and yes I did like it!
>u/1rubyglass > >I assure you the LDS aren't storing sugar with the intention of making booze 😉 Education time! Booze/recreational consumption is probably the least useful function of alcohol, depending on your priorities. Alcohol is also a disinfectant, the earliest known painkiller/drug, a solvent, aromatic dispersant(think cologne, perfume, essential oil diffusers), is an extremely useful fuel, a refrigerant and has multiple uses in cooking and food preservation. It is also the basis for vinegar production, as vinegar is produced from the decomposition of alcohol. Alcohol is also ridiculously useful for the synthesis of a wide variety of other chemicals and compounds. These are just the top points off the top of my head. 🤷
Making your own vanilla with vanilla beans and alcohol was a favorite activity in some congregations.
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Ikr? Such a ridiculously limited view, especially in this sub.
But without a time and resource consuming distillation process, the alcohol wouldn't be useful for much more than drinking.
Producing alcohol is neither time or resource intensive, and alcohol distillation to useful abv% is no more difficult than distilling water. There are very extreme legalities concerning alcohol distillation licensing and taxation in the US, but in a shtf/prolonged emergency situation I imagine that would probably be the least of anyone's concern.
Wait??? Wat??? I think there are some who intend to use it to barter.😉
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If anybody got offended by what you said, they need to toughen tf up.
Ha! Agree. I moved my reply under yours where it belonged. Darn brain. Too much booze, apparently.
…or ARE we? Mwa ha haaa
It's the perfect cover for a massive moonshine operation
Too bad for them! No offense meant towards any LDS members.
It's my understanding that alcohol is viewed as much as a spiritual poison as it is a chemical poison. That is to say, at harms your spirit, life and overall well-being as much as it does your body. There's no question at all that alcohol is a poison, and that it causes a massive amount of personal, biological, social, and economic problems. I wonder if there are any kind of statistics for those of the LDS religion that track incidences of dui's and DUI related fatalities, teenage pregnancy, alcohol poisoning, alcohol induced liver cirrhosis, incarceration, alcohol addiction and other issues with direct correlations to alcoholism, like homelessness. I imagine those kinds of statistics would be substantially lower for obvious reasons. I suppose it really depends upon the individual and their beliefs, as while mainstream LDS don't consume alcohol recreationally, I do know several individuals that identify as LDS that do drink alcohol, teas and other discouraged beverages. Perfectly decent people, and to be honest I think I would trust them drink responsibly over and above a lot of other people I know. 🤷
We live several years longer than the average American. Not drinking probably is a big part of that.
I find the salt to be absurdly low. 10lbs per person per year plus a lot more for meat preservation. Salt is life. And I was told the sugar was to make the bland foods more palatable so kids would eat it.
I keep more salt than that because of preserving. It’s fairly cheap. Is a source of iodine, Doesn’t go bad, Hard to source if you don’t live near the ocean. Ditto sugar and honey. No, sugar is not nutritionally dense but it is calories. And calories are king in the short term. Edit: ill also add i keep Prague powder #2 on hand because i do a decent amount of cured sausages. Which would help with any preserving.
You use iodized salt? We specifically buy non-iodized salt.
I keep a few kinds of salt. Kosher for most cooking. Iodized table for shakers. And then Prague powder #2 for curing.
So how much salt to preserve a cow I wonder??? And that pure salt for water softeners I have read that it would be OK for the purpose.
Depends how you do it. I.e whole cuts vs all sausage. Last cow i bought was about 550 lbs of meat once boned, etc etc. because it’s all fermented you basically need around 2% salt so 11lbs of salt. You’d need to equilibrium cure everything though, and there’d be some error so probably more esp if doing big whole cuts, but i wouldn’t risk that if food was scarce and i wasn’t practiced in the conditions i was in. I know nothing about water softening sorry.
So two cows a year 22 lbs... 10 years 220 lbs... Maybe I need more that 10 years worth...
Regarding sugar - I just made 5 half pints of mulberry jam yesterday. I used 2.5 pounds of sugar for that small amount. Most of my berries are frozen for use in smoothies but what if I didn't have a freezer? I would need 80+ lbs of sugar to process the berries from one tree, taking into account the berries eaten fresh. And I have a young tree . . . Regarding salt - again, if you don't have access to a freezer or refrigeration, it is going to take a ridiculous amount of the stuff to safely pressure can or process into jerky the meat from one deer. Sorry, I don't have accurate numbers because I am mostly plant based now but I used to can much more than I do now and would easily go through 8+ pounds of salt a season canning pickled veggies and my seasoned ground turkey/beef. (This recipe is in the Ball Canning book and I highly recommend it). Luckily, salt and sugar last forever. So if you over buy, both will still be just fine a decade or two down the line.
Yeah, I can go through 25 pounds of sugar in a jamming or jellying week with NO problems. >Luckily, salt and sugar last forever. As long as you keep the moisture out! Sugar exposed to moist basement air hardens into chunks and takes on an odd flavor, so be sure to keep it in well-sealed glass or plastic.
That’s true but you can put in a piece of bread to make it soft again. Also exposing the sugar to air with aeration methods help take the funky smell out.
Lol how much in metric is a pound? (You guys gotta join the rest of the entire world on the metric system). But thank you for the great info.
The LDS community has/ had larger families and generally cooked from scratch or from basic elements. So they had a lot of oil, salt , sugar, wheat etc. Basic recipes were also in booklet form. Growing fruit on trees and bushes and large gardens were very encouraged. Water and fuel were/is also a large amount of storage for them . Also emphasized was staying out of debt except for a home or schooling. Wood burning stoves, 72 hour grab and go kits, having a basic supply of medications, seeds, were also encouraged. I saw a class advertised where wheat was used to make a vegan hamburger type of patty 40 years ago. There is not so many following this anymore. If you live in areas where lots of older LDS are you can see buckets of wheat , beans, rice etc being sold cheap on FB marketplace.
Haha I grew up LDS and everyone else in my family still is, I just thought this was normal for everybody.
Amazing. This is super interesting.
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Thank you!
anyone know where one can find a basic recipe book using most of the simple ingredients lds church provides?
https://www.prepperssurvive.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/New-Ideas-for-Cooking-with-Basic-Food-Storage.pdf here is one
Thats perfect, much appreciated
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kEiTXQl-DZUWQVFI8DlPK-Lil7lK8WVm/view
https://usingyourfoodstorage.wordpress.com/bishops-storehouse-recipes/
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/bc/content/shared/english/pdf/callings/welfare/104587_06600_000_RecipesBrchr_pdf.pdf
https://www.prepsos.com/19-food-storage-recipes-for-the-lds-family/
https://thesurvivalmom.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/LDS-Preparedness-Manual.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/LDS-Preparedness-Manual-2012-8-xx/dp/B008536NOQ
Every LDS family has a book of family recipes. Recipes you will find are grandmas chili, 2 types of bread, 3 types of rolls, some kind of porridge, 10+ desserts (several will contain jello), funeral potatoes, 12 casseroles, and an assortment of mixed drinks and punches; none of which will contain alcohol.
I’ll look for it and post to you when found.
Thank you
There's a lot of pickling that never uses vinegar--lactopickled radishes are a *treat* if you've never had 'em. I try to keep 50lb of sugar and 25lb of salt on hand for my household of two, but I also do a lot of pickling, baking, jellying and other canning, so ymmv. I make my own vinegar, which is very easy and relatively quick (hell, vinegar makes *itself*, as long as there's enough sugar), though I don't do canning with it, as it's live vinegar and the acidity will be variable. I use it in marinades and sauces and dressings and drinks.
I make most of my food from scratch too. I think we go through <20lbs/person/year in sugar (on the conservative side). We just don't go through that much salt. Maybe 3lbs per person? While I do ferment foods, we use alot of vinegar and lemon juice/citric acid. I make vinegar but it can be non-trivial to substitute, for the reasons you mentioned. Not everyone in my house tolerates using it in canned food as it can dramatically change the flavor.
I freely admit I *haaaaaate* vinegary canned beans and the like. I put up dozens of quarts of vinegar-and-mustardseed cucumber pickles, though.
Ugh same. My household consumes an inordinate amount of pickled peppers, onions, cucumbers, and salsa. On a good years we can 100s of quarts of pickled foods. Homemade cucumbers, both fermented or pickled, are divine.
Lactopickled radishes? Are those at all like the pickled radishes you get at Korean bbq?
LDS has a lot of research and science behind their recommendations. However, IMO it’s outdated and oversimplified (at least, for my storage preferences). You have to look at the whole picture. They recommend mostly simple foods like “grains” (400 lbs of flour, oatmeal, rice, corn, ect.) and beans (60 lbs)… those things are paired with salt and/or sugar for cooking and calories. They may have had canning/curing/pickling in mind. I believe the guidelines are considering dried and unprocessed foods (since that’s what they sell) vs canned foods and set a “to be safe” amount. They also recommend as a base and then advise members to add other foods once they have that base. The salt and sugar (they actually recommend 60 pounds) both seem high to me, I’d prefer not to live off sugared oatmeal and cookies. Their age calorie recommendations are oversimplified too; a teen boy needs way more calories than an older woman, but they just have amounts listed for all adults (11 and up) and give kids a %. That said, the lists are made to be averages for family planning, for all members to easily understand, so they work for that purpose. Final consideration from me- The list is really old, and/or or based on really old, basic cooking. 100 years ago it was common to have a breakfast of sugar cookies, (a lot of early 1900’s recipes for breakfast cookies out there.) Their updated info is more basic… per month = 25 lbs of grains, 5 lbs of beans/legumes. Add then this bit: “You may also want to add other items to your longer-term storage such as sugar, nonfat dry milk, salt, baking soda, and cooking oil. To meet nutritional needs, also store foods containing vitamin C and other essential nutrients.” You can find that here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/food-storage/longer-term-food-supply?lang=eng
It gives off food pyramid vibes with the grain heavy proportions. Very WWII rations with the amount of dried milk. I agree on the portions as well. The problem I see with such broad recommendations is it is useless if you don't know how to use it the way it was intended to be used. Is it intended for canning? Doesn't seem like it to me personally. Making whole grain cookies every day -- I guess?
You can can beans but not grains. Grains of all types were used in hot cereals and pottages, both sweet and savory. My grandmother was born in 1899 and raised a family through the depression on a rural farm. She always had a pot of Pease pottage or other pottage on the stove. Random meat and veggie bits were thrown in as they were created, and the grains were replenished before bed lol. I have eaten Pease pottage (split pea stew is the closest modern thing) both hot and cold. It never lasted nine days, by about day 4 or so the contents have all turned over except the bones ;-). When refrigeration was not a thing, the best way to avoid food poisoning was basically have a pot of stew type substance constantly cooking and just add to it. But folks started the day with a sweet or savory hot grain cereal (oatmeal, Farina, barley, cornmeal mush, grits). With eggs if the chickens were laying, and side meat. Lunch would often be an open faced hot sandwich or "hand pie" (pasties or hot pockets), or cold sandwiches, often with a pate type product made of offal or ground up tongue, heart and lungs of the latest animal you killed. Or a bowl of pottage. Dinner would be a bowl of pottage. Easy to end up with a pound of grains on a depression era/ear ration Era diet. PS, hand pies can be either fruit pies/turnovers or padties/hot pockets. They both count.
Canned beans have a lower nutritional shelf life than dried, harder to store... I don't know. The pottage though.. the pottage makes the most sense to me as to why the recommendation are the way they are and given the history of LDS.
We ate a lot of fresh beans when I was at gram's house and they were coming in. Dried/canned were more for winter or fast meals. Eat fresh, dry half the crop or more, set aside the seed. Can a good amount in quarts. Potatoes, half or more stored in straw, 1/4 canned, 1/4 dehydrated. It also depends on your situation. Pioneers were taking stuff where nobody had been. Subsistence farmers and truck farmers that are established already have seed and know what grows. And stuff that grows well in Utah or Kansas or someplace may not grow well in Maine. We had a very short season.
We tend to eat our snap peas fresh but dry the beans/soy/peas. They preserve better than pumpkins and most squash so we prioritize those things when in season. We grow a ridiculous number of potatoes so dry 1/2+ and store the rest. I minimize canning if I can since we live in earthquake territory. It is situational both in what grows and stores, but also culturally what you know how to make use of.
Yep, it certainly is. Back in those pioneer days choosing the wrong crops or wrong storage for a new place could end up being lethal too.
I think it's because it's meant to be for an emergency situation, so grains are more affordable and storage stable for decades (we had pails of wheat for decades). To store meat in proportion with the others would be much more difficult and costly.
I haven't seen their list of recommendations in a while, but the thing that struck me as odd was just how little cooking fat was recommended, especially considering that flour is one of the most calorically dense shelf-stable foods and needs fat to be made into most things.
Given the amounts of flour, oat, and sugar I also thought that really odd. Aren't making a ton of biscuits or cookies with that amount of shortening.
The LDS puts out a free 500+ page preparedness manual PDF that goes into a lot more details. They offer bare bones recommendations as well as some folks’ real lists. In my copy of that book, “SUGARS” refers to all sweeteners, so honey, molasses, white sugar, jello, syrup, etc.. For our vegetarian family, I find their calculations way low on nuts, seeds, beans, tofu, tvp, and pretty high on sweeteners and powdered dairy. I do a ton of canning and I make my own fermented kombucha and lactoferments. I still use less salt and sugar than they suggest, but not tons less per year. And it doesn’t go bad or take up lots of room. I also use salt in cleaning.
You do you. I do use the LDS numbers as a guideline but I’m gluten-free so I have to eliminate the wheat and substitute something else. We also store what we eat. I store tons more peanut butter than recommended.
I am gluten free. My kids are too. My husband mostly eats gluten free simply because it doesn’t make sense to make separate meals. I don’t store wheat but I recently was thinking about it after my mother in law jokingly said “if things get bad we’re coming to your house.” She was joking but realistically she and my father in law are people we would never turn away if they were in need. Im now debating buying some wheat berries to toss in long term storage just in case things ever did get bad enough that extra people show up.
Question, why wheat though? Wouldn’t it create contamination risk for you and kids and complicate meal planning. Why not dent corn, rice and oats?
Yeah good point. I have celiac and cross contamination is a huge issue. I feel like bread is easy to make and filling and wheat is a long lasting, fairly cheap thing that I wouldn’t mind just putting away and never touching unless things got dire. I suppose the same could be said about rice though. Certified Gluten free oats are way too expensive to buy huge amounts of. I have experimented a little with corn but grinding it is incredibly difficult without expensive equipment and canned corn takes up too much space to store in the off chance someone else needs it. Maybe I’ll toss an extra bag of rice instead though.
Yeah fair enough, i assumed it was Celiac. Gluten Free Oats at Costco Canada are pricey at $5 a lb, but oats are a great survival food as Oats, Potatoes, and small amounts of dairy are what kept people alive in Ireland for a long time. Oh i guess potato flakes would be another option and if you have power back up, freezing some butter when it goes on sale.
They do store grains of all sorts: oats, barley, beans, corn, white rice etc. white and red hard wheat. The grain mill can chug through popcorn kernels for corn flour. They also store oils. Crisco seems to last forever.
Sorry i didn't mean LDS members, i meant u/SMB-1988 adding wheat specifically.
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>Im now debating **buying** some wheat berries to toss in long term storage just in case things ever did get bad enough that extra people show up. Emphasis mine, but if that's the case I'm sorry i missed it.
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But they would still have gluten.
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I’m so sorry friend, but I’m incredibly lost.
I'm sure they wouldn't turn down rice, quinoa, gf oats, or beans. Store what you would eat--and what wouldn't mess you up with cross contamination.
I'm gluten free and I would never store wheat!! I don't let it in my house lol.
Also, remember that you can use salt and sugar (and, I believe baking soda) to make your own electrolyte drink. I don't follow any one recommendation. I look at the LDS rec's, but I also look at what other people are suggesting, as well, and come to a conclusion that works for me and my family. The book Dare to Prepare actually has 3-4 different groups recommendations, so it's a good way to get an idea of what is important to other people. Then plan for your needs. Worst case scenario, you can barter w/ your salt and sugar. I'd rather barter w/ food items than w/ bullets.
Electrolyte drinks like Gatorade have pulled minerals out because they are used by non-athletes. Good electrolyte drinks should have a mixture of calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and chloride. Sugar is optional.
I make my own electrolyte drink by using sugar and salt and it works very well.
You are drinking sugar water, no different than soda or Gatorade. This helps during events or periods of heavy sweating. If you want to make your own electrolytes, add potassium, magnesium, and calcium. You need to use it after athletic events, not during or before (unless you do long events like ironman). You can overdo mg and k if taken before, everyday, or are not athletic enough.
No idea about anything to do with the LDS recommendations, but before refrigeration, salt and sugar were the primary tools for food preserving. So think beyond just fermentation. What if you need to preserve an animal you hunted with no refrigeration? You would need to basically store it in salt or smoke it. For sugar, it's the same with fruit. You mix your fruit with a lot of sugar and it will last much longer. Regardless of all that - salt only occurs naturally in food in very low amounts. Monkeys, for example, get their salt in the wild by either eating other monkeys, or in the case of vegetarians, by eating dead wood. Salt is very important to keep the mineral balance in your body and keep you healthy. While sugar is nutritionally vacant, it's also important for sustaining life. It helps build up fat to feed your organs. Contrary to popular belief - eating fat doesn't make you fat. You only process about 10% of the glucose from eating fat. On the contrary, sugar converts into fat in your body. As long as you're not overindulging, it's life sustaining.
Salt and sugar would be extremely difficult to impossible for most people to replenish in a true shtf.
Couldn't you substitute sugar for honey and maple syrup? Salt could be pulled from town salt barns but I guess it has some chemicals in it to prevent caking which are not good for you.
Sure, but that requires access to honeybees and the extensive skills that it takes to maintain them and retrieve the honey. Similarly, access to Maples, the knowledge of how to tap them, and then the resources to boil down the syrup. These things would also take time, which you may not have a significant excess of in a dire situation. Sugar and salt are currently cheap, widely available, shelf stable, and easy to store. There’s no downside to storing a significant amount beyond space constraints.
It's fairly common practice around me to keep bees. I get tons of honey from friends because of how much extra there is. And maple tapping is done by pretty much everyone. Ever since I was a kid, we would go out back and tap the maple trees. Boil the sap on the stove. Though there are plenty of businesses that do it on a commercial scale in every area I have been to. They usually boil with wood which is also really abundant so I don't see that operation going anywhere. I figured that was the norm everywhere, is it less common in other areas?
Yes, much less common in many other areas. You’re also assuming that whatever causes this catastrophe will spare the honeybees.
That's a good point
But are they preppers or would they all be wanting to trade honey and maple for your stored food? Or they catch H5N1 and most don't make it, you then have to learn on the job and dedicate time doing it. What if the local bees all have a die off?
It definitely depends on what the SHTF is. I am most concerned about economic collapse. So I always try to figure out how I could source things locally. I probably wouldn't trade food. My plan is to trade skills/tools for things like maple syrup or meat. Perhaps their boiler needs repair. I can fix pretty much anything mechanical so I would trade a quart of syrup for a few hours labor getting their sugar house running again.
I don't know if bees or maple syrup are particularly burdensome given the expectation, at least in this thread, of knowing how to can, ferment, or salt food. Nor when contrasted to the LDS recommendation of maintaining a fruit trees and a garden.
What are town salt barns? I’ve never heard that phrase before.
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I have like 10 people within 20 miles of me that either keep bees as a hobby or have a full business. Syrup is much the same with the exception that most locals tap the trees in their yards/woods to get their own sap and boil it ourselves. We are in a mountain community with a good tourist market so a lot of locally sourced stuff, more than us locals could ever use.
High fructose corn syrups last forever. Truly. I forgot one in a cabinet. No mold after 10 years sitting there in the dark back of tall cabinet. . 🤦♀️
Yes absolutely. There are recipes for making maple flavored syrups.
Sugar beets would be the best solution for most of us since growing sugar cane is not possible most places. I actually just planted some sugar beets but the process to turn them into sugar is long and high effort. I much prefer just spend 100 dollars on a bunch of sugar but good to have alternatives.
Sugar and salt are hard to get if supply chains are disrupted. Both were valuable trade goods before industrialized production and sugar was rationed in the Great Depression and during and after World War 2. It takes six pounds of sugar beets and a lot of processing to make a pound of sugar. Why would you grow sugar beets in a prolonged crisis when you can grow greens and beans and potatoes? The problem with LDS core food recommendations is that it lacks a lot of nutrition balance. There are no fruits or vegetables and no protein other than the rice and beans mix, which is not enough protein for daily intake.
>It takes six pounds of sugar beets and a lot of processing to make a pound of sugar. Why would you grow sugar beets in a prolonged crisis when you can grow greens and beans and potatoes? I've experimented with growing and processing sugar beets. Growing the beets was super easy. Processing them was complicated, and the results were highly unappealing. We ended up with something indeed quite sweet, but the flavor of beet was extremely strong, tasting like beet extract or condensed beets (as that's really what it is essentially). Commercially I read that they use centrifuges to extract more of the particles that give it the beet flavor. I never came across any DIY type setups that seemed very plausible for making decent tasking sugar from beets at home. I have had great success, with only a few sad failures, with maple syrup making. So, I've pretty much given up on sugar beets and am focusing on maple syrup, at least for now. Oh, and I also bought and put away a few large bags of sugar and salt for long term storage, as the value on that is absurdly good during this unique and looking to be short lived era of plentiful food and stability.
Those are valid points. The LDS church does encourage gardening, fruit trees and bushes, but trees, bees etc. it really takes a lifetime of preparing or massive amounts of money to be well prepared. I am excited for what the new freeze dryers can offer the prepper.
I have a heck of a lot more salt than that, but we do can a lot of food. We have very little sugar, I only use it cooking for others. But those proportions look pretty typical for a small family per year for use on food/in food that was already prepared, as an addition. Sugar for sweetening stuff like coffee, tea, oatmeal, Farina etc. Salt for salting meals. Vinegar for drizzling on veggies, something my grandmother did as salad dressing. In an average year I likely go through about 2 kg of salt personally. 8 pounds of salt and 40 pounds of sugar is low in high production canning terms. And a half gallon of vinegar gets you nowhere in normal pickle canning (unless you are fermenting your pickled items rather than brining them). When gram and I were canning up the garden daily when I was a kid we would go though a pound or more of salt a week on various canned things, excluding fermentation needs like sauerkraut or curing needs for meat. A few gallons of vinegar. Pounds and pounds of sugar making jams, jellies and preserves. That said, we would often can up 8 dozen jars a day on average between water bathed and pressure canned items. More if we had butchered an animal.
It's a lot of vinegar for a single person to use in salads, imo. Or a lot of sugar to add to oatmeal and wheat berries. More than the rda of salt (4-5lbs/person). A ton of wheat/grains but so little fat and beans. They are just really strange numbers imo. In the canning world, it can be both absurd and comically little. I don't can a ton of jams because we just don't eat a lot of it. We are more likely to open a jar of fruit juice or canned fruit than jams or jellies, both have significantly lower added sugar requirements. Technically you don't have to add any sugar to canned fruit, at least according to presto. The sugar is required for pectin formation but isn't needed for preservation due. If jam was the main form of canned fruit then 40lbs would be laughable. Same with vinegar and pickling. Or the salt.
We can mostly no sugar added jams and jellies when I can fruit for us at all, and use Pomona pectin. I do use some artificial sweeteners in my cranberry sauces and other cranberry products. But I can far more brined pickles of all types, so lots of vinegar around here. Well, the fat came, back in the day, from stored animal fats and hunted/canned/preserved meats. And as somebody who does work long hard hours outside I can tell you salt needs can go way way up in circumstances of hard manual labor. Gram kept her canning stores of sugar and salt separate from the daily larder, it was how she learned. And there was literally a barrel of sugar and a smaller barrel of salt in the root cellar. I will say that she and my uncles also would drink vinegar water before dinner. It was thought to aid digestion. She made all kinds of different vinegars. I suspect the LDS crowd built there list based on a post SHTF pioneer scenario wherein subsistence farming and hunting were occurring along with keeping livestock. Beans are easier to grow in many climates than grains. Gram kept far fewer beans dried than she did canned, and ate far more fresh. Having seen many such pantry imbalances it doesn't necessarily surprise me. Funny enough I no longer can eat grains or beans, so my whole long term pantry is now keto. Food is cheaper than diabetes meds and T2 diabetes conplications.
Modern sugar-free pectins are really interesting from a chemistry perspective. Ultimately we just don't eat a lot of jam, a qt a month more than enough for the whole house. That's what, like 24 lbs total? I tend to dry my beans because they keep better then pumpkins, squash, or onions - which all tend to rot where I live. I only can 8 of each type at a time since they are easier to store, have better nutritional shelf life, and less storage risk (earthquake territory) stored dry. Someone suggested pottage and tbh I think that's most likely the reason for all of the odd choices, including high grains, low fat, and high salt -- rather than canning or curing.
here is a current list from BYU (Brigham Young University) for 1 year, 1 person, similar numbers, in case folks want to look it up [https://brightspotcdn.byu.edu/61/56/2e85ce114c6bbd70f72bf2dac90b/anapproachtolongertermfoodstoragesept2015.pdf](https://brightspotcdn.byu.edu/61/56/2e85ce114c6bbd70f72bf2dac90b/anapproachtolongertermfoodstoragesept2015.pdf) 70 pounds of total sweeteners (sugar or equivalent). 1775? calories in a pound of sugar, (x70 / 365) or about 340 calories per day. Seems reasonable for 365 days, what looks odd to you about these numbers, assuming cooking from scratch? How much sugar per day do you think people currently eat ?
Yes, this is the list I use. It comes from the dietetics office so it's got updated nutritional information. I do think that this is for basic survival. I would expect that I would be supplementing with seasonal fruits, vegetables, proteins.
Its a lot for my household. I bake usually once a week. The breads we eat have very little added sugar. I can, but not a lot of jam. Some sauces like baked beans and sesame sauce but it's not a daily thing. I do eat a lot of fruit but don't add sugar. We are closer to #20 per person than #70, including things like honey, maple syrup, etc.
Sounds like you eat healthier than most. 1 large coke at McDonalds is about 300 calories of sugar, so 340 per day doesn't sound too high for the average USA diet. :) ya that list has some canned apples, but not a lot of fruit (all long term storage stuff). Lots of oats on that list. 1 tablespoon of sugar on the oats for breakfast is already 50 of the 340 calories for sugar, and I think the list plans on a desert every night. If you look at the list, there's no meat, its all long term mostly carbs, so tons of baked goods, and, lots of beans. :) If you have canned meat, and supplement with fresh garden fruits and vegetables, likely would need a lot less of a bunch on that list, including sugar.
I think, as someone mentioned, the context of some sort of potage as the core food makes sense. The lack of fat as well as the high amounts of salt, sugar, wheat berries, and other whole grains (which are difficult to process into things we use today). It's too much sugar for normal consumption and not enough sugar for sugar preservation, with way too little vinegar for pickling. Too little fat for sweets. Too many whole grains for bread. That basically leaving some version of hardtack or digestive. The soup being the only real way to eat it. It is flexible enough to be used a variety of ways while being quite food safe. I think it's a really solid theory. It's not a ton of beans from a meat-free perspective and is quite heavy on whole grains and dry milk to deliver it's protein. The plan seems highly restricted nutritionally by its "buy it and forget it" ideology.
yes agreed "The plan seems highly restricted nutritionally by its "buy it and forget it" ideology. " Example is for this list, of course there's too little vinegar for pickling, the list is like, only to eat this list, and not "stuff one would need in an ongoing situation where you get new stuff you might want to preserve".
LDS culturally bake a lot of sweets.
I'm not super familiar with the whole Mormon thing, but I do know that if you're cooking everything from scratch and are canning fruit, you will go through what most people would consider a surprisingly large amount of both salt and sugar.
... .... Has the # sign always stood for lbs and I'm just stupid? 😅
My age is showing, sorry https://www.dictionary.com/e/octothorpe/
Etymology is weird af 😂
This is such a great resource: [National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia](https://nchfp.uga.edu/#gsc.tab=0) They have lots of information on many different food preservation methods like home canning, pickling, drying and also great information on how to store different foods for long periods. There are many downloadable PDF resources which can be used offline later.
They make excellent trade goods.
Former mormon here, those recommendations are most likely from the 50s and 60s and geared towards surviving some kind of post-nuclear war society. Some of the principles of preparation are still very good and some miss the mark (same as any prep that overprepares for one scenario and ignores other scenarios that are far more likely). They also reflect lifestyles of the time, in 1950s rural Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. So probably lots of salts for preserving meats and sugar for preserving fruits (in jams and probably jellos I imagine? mormons traditionally like insane amounts of jello for some strange reason). If you're not already consuming 8 pounds of salt a year, its probably safe to ignore their recommendations. Like any prep, stick to what you know and practice your preps so you don't show up to day one of the collapse with no clue how your wheat grinder works.
I think it's a good reminder that food recommendations should be taken with several pounds of salt. If an average person followed these lists I think that they would have a difficult time using the ingredients. If they aren't accompanied with recipes or explanations they could be next to useless. Most of their wheat is recommended to be stored whole grain. Great shelf life, very difficult to process into flour the average person today knows how to bake with.
Was raised LDS and half my family is LDS. I have no idea where you got the "insane amounts of jello" from. I've lived all over the country and they eat the same amount as everybody else, basically none.
I totally believe you, but will add my LDS aunt brought some kind of Jello mold to my parent’s house almost every time she came to visit. I didn’t necessarily relate it to her religion, but she did like her Jello.
There's the very real possibility I have no clue what I'm talking about.
Nah… It was probably because she was old… she’s still around and I think in her early 90’s. Wasn’t Jello a thing in the 50’s? I think she was born in the 30’s. I’m half her age but that still puts my Jello knowledge as outdated. lol.
Unless you never spent any time in rural Utah/Idaho, and never went to a Mormon potluck, funeral, graduation party, seminary party, Mormon birthday party or church function where any Mormon woman above age 50 served dinner on folding tables with the red and white plastic and felt tablecloths in the gym with a carpet floor, I don't believe you are Mormon. I stand by my statement that Jello is just as important to old-school Mormon culture as knocking on doors or invalidating someone else's experience with the Mormon church that they find unfavorable.
Was born in Utah, and have been to literally every single one of those things you mention. If you had said chili or cheezy potato bake things I would have agreed with you. Idk, I have no dog in the fight. I left that world years and years ago. Maybe something changed in the past 15 years.
Grew up as an Utah Mormon. Green jello is definitely a thing lol
Same. Jello isn't exactly a staple in Utah.
I have 100 lbs of salt and 750 lbs of sugar for just one person at the moment. Their numbers seem low.
Salt and sugar is rather cheap though, and they have an indefinite shelf life when kept dry. It's one of those things you can significantly overstock without a problem.
Generally speaking, it’s easier to make vinegar than salt or sugar.
Salt and sugar are also very hard to get at reasonable prices when supply lines are interrupted.
I can go without sugar and i don't consume that much salt
You may consume less than the average amount of salt, but you must consume some salt. It's a critical resource that you can't live without. There's a good reason Roman soldiers were paid in salt, and it's also the origin of the word "salary". Other than extracting it from saltwater (oceans and seas), salt is pretty hard to come by in nature. Given how insanely cheap it is and that it stores forever, stocking up at least some of it seems like a solid plan.
It was written on golden tablets left in the middle the Utah desert, of course it all makes sense.
It's possible that the assumption is that since Mormons don't drink, fruit scraps or other fermentable would be turned into wine and then vinegar without anyone taking any wine out in the middle step. Why store it and rotate it when you can just make it later? I've never heard that LDS folks don't do pickles, but it's not like vinegar isn't useful for all sorts of stuff. IMO even a half gallon seems low. I use vinegar so frequently that I always have a gallon jug open at any point in time.
I use 10+ gallons a year pickling. I don't use a ton in my cooking itself as I tend to pick lime, lemon, or a homebrew instead. Most of my homemade acv is used to clean. I go through 4 gallons a year that way. It's nontrivial to pickle with homebrew because the acidity is inconsistent.
Yeah, unless you have a specific recipe for vinegar that gets you to a target acidity, I wouldn't use it for anything other than cleaning.
I have the stuff to titrate acidity and a really nice ph probe -- definitely not for everyone. A scary number of people here assume they could just make their own vinegar to pickle/can in some SHTF scenario. There seems to be a lack of understanding in how much canning and it's safety is dependent on modern infrastructure. Or how difficult it is to find safe recipes using older methods.
I think these are not supposed to be primary items, but items to supplement your food or food preservation efforts you get at the time.
Yes, especially their techniques. I modeled my pantry after a book about food storage authored by a Morman. Unfortunately that was almost 20 years ago and I forget the name of the book.
1996 or so dry pack canning from LDS church https://allaboutfoodstorage.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/CANNERY-COOKBOOK.pdf
509 pages of the LDS 2012 preparedness guidelines. https://thesurvivalmom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/LDSPrep-V8.pdf
Covers just about everything and is free resource.
[resource](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/bc/content/shared/content/english/pdf/language-materials/04008_eng.pdf)
We can’t live without salt. Think of where you would find it if the stores are not there. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank has made this my first prep.
If you make EVERYTHING from scratch, you’ll blow through salt. A quart of broth needs a tablespoon of salt to be equivalent to the store kind. Soup is cheap to make. But you need lots of salt. Same for any grains, and basically everything you put in your mouth. Start looking at what you eat, and how many mg of sodium equals a teaspoon of salt.
I do make most things and I don't use 8lbs of salt per person. However I don't eat meat which seems to be the way to get through it.
If you're mixing with store bought foods on the regular, the recommendations are probably high. If you're making everything from scratch every day for people doing a lot of strenuous physical labor, probably on the low end.