My kids moved into their new house this weekend so Karen and I decided to enjoy our rediscovered freedom and combine a doctor’s appointment with some thrift store shopping and a stop at the market to stock up on a few essentials. The thrift store was a productive stop. I came home with a thermos for Phoebe (something I feared I would need to purchase new as she really needed one), a book I had long wanted, a pocket book to replace my summer bag and the sweetest little glass pie plate, just right for a singe serving. I also got the perfect necklace to go with Phoebe’s Halloween costume and a waffle iron to replace the one I just burned out. The trip to the market was far less successful.
I think prices creep up on when you go every week and you don’t notice as much. When you seldom go they hit you like a slap. I found the one brand of chicken I’m willing to plop down money for has gone up to $19.00 for a single small roaster. It would have fed the four of us with maybe enough left for a thin soup. Needless to say, we will be waiting on chicken until my layers get to the butcher next week. Butter and spices were also far more expensive than just a few weeks ago. I looked at the price of poultry seasoning, a staple for thanksgiving stuffing and decided I coud make a pretty good approximation from what’s growing in my herb garden. I did buy the sale butter because the organic brand I prefer was just too much for my budget.
I think this illustrates an important point. People have to make choices and they are hard ones. Do you buy food or fuel? Will you pay the electric bill or get Jenny new shoes? For me, the choice was between getting the ethical brand, the cheaper product or going without? I generally chose option one or three. Today I went with two and I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since I made it home. I do realize that having the choice is a luxury. Americans spend far less on food as a percent of their income than most other people do. Buying the good butter would not have meant my children didn’t get shoes or have access to health care if they got sick. For much of the world and increasingly here in the US, that is not the case. Ethical, clean food is not even on the radar. When prices go up, it naturally hits the ones who can least afford it the hardest. Which leads me to the next part of my shopping trip.
I heard a rumor and I wanted to check it out. I had been told that Wal-Mart was carrying survival food. I knew this was true in other parts of the country but I had never seen it around here. I went in to see and sure enough, there it was. $63.00 and change for a six gallon sealed bucket. The label said that the bucket held 208 servings of food. It listed oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar, chilli and potato soup mix among other things. I believe I saw powdered milk too. I was so annoyed I could have spit.
Now I’m the last person to complain about a family preparing for an emergency with some stored food. I have a couple of number 10 cans myself but a kit like this is about the worst bang for your food buck I can imagine. I highly doubt that the 208 servings is accurate. I expect the serivngs would be mighty small and I’ll also bet the food is full of sodium. Freeze-dried food isn’t some weird thing that you can only find in a survival store. We eat it all the time. Macaroni and cheese is just dried food. You can buy dried soups and chilli right off the shelf. Why the heck would you need to spend money for oatmeal in a pouch? Regular oatmeal is cheap. Add some dried fruit and powdered milk and you have yourself a “just-add-water” meal. I hope you don’t fall for a gimic like this. I know that food preservation equipment is an huge investment. I know your hours are stretched and it’s hard to imagine just where the resources for some stored food will come from. This is where a community comes in. Can you purchase a pressure canner with friends? The shared labor will lighten everyone’s burden. Did you know that you can buy vegetables in a one pound bag and then dry them in a dehydrator? A one pound bag fis one tray of the Excalibur perfectly. I rinse the veges under warm water to thaw them a bit, leave them in the dehydrator over night and in the morning I have 12 pounds of vegetabes ready to seal up in a jar. When I need them I can rehydrate them in hot water for an hour and then add them to the evening meal.
I don’t mean to sound cavelier about this. It has taken me years to amass all the equipment I use for preserving food. I just wish we could make it easier on families. In a perfect world there would be a canning kitchen in every neighborhood. We invest so much in wars and entertainment and in new and better technology. I guess dried apples just can’t compete.
October 22, 2012 at 6:59 pm
I belong to a canning group that has gotten about 3500-4000 new members in the past 12 months. Canning jars are now hard to find in stores and almost never in thrift stores! This year is the first time I had a hard time finding canning stuff that I needed. There is some new surge in survivalism and prepping that normally I would applaud, but I am really afraid that this sudden interest is going to just create unsafe canned goods and a lot of sick people in the near future, not to mention families losing everything because it was more important to buy a $450 water purifier than pay the rent. I have always found your blog to be not just informative but also you stress that it takes time and commitment to achieve a safe quantity of emergency supplies. I also appreciate that you buy used and repurpose things rather than cave to the industry that seems to be exploiting and increasing the fear that the economy is failing and oil is disappearing. So, this is a long post to say Thank you for being a calm voice of wisdom rather than the “circus caller” defrauding those who have very little to spare.
October 22, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Did I read this correctly that a small roasting chicken was $19.00? Surely not.
However as I make my infrequent shopping trips I too find that everything is costing more, a lot more! I have been canning for years and have quite a bit put ahead for hard times and they are coming. Faster than we think. I do also have the Excalibur dehydrator and use it a lot. Something to share with you. In my part of the country we have an abundance of the large Japanese persimmons. I don’t care for them at all! However, I discovered that thinly sliced and dehydrated they make a wonderful snack. Drying changes the taste completely. So I am taking all that I can round up and am drying them. In the coming days when fruit is so expensive that we won’t be able to buy it, I will have lots of dried fruit. I have dried apples, oranges, pears, pineapple and now the persimmons. I don’t know what people are going to do. I have shopped thrift shops for years. Bought a wonderful winter coat recently for $7.00 and it will be put to good use. In the meantime, we are storing up all that we can afford to. Medical supplies, fabric and sewing items, survival athings.
October 23, 2012 at 12:06 am
I have hefted those buckets of prepackaged “servings” and come to the same conclusion as you did! My family is all quite tall…no way we’re doing well on 1200 calories per day. I’ve stocked some FD foods and also some “regular” foods in our pantry. We’ll make good use of all that we can. Helps that our daughter is vegetarian and we all eat that way for the majority of our meals. My deck is a great place to grow veggies to combine with my beans and stored cheese and seasonings.
October 23, 2012 at 8:52 am
I too, have found a huge increase in pricing by not going weekly. It kind of hits you in the pit of your stomach! I checked out the “emergecy od” pak and laughed. It IS full of sodium, way to much to ake eating it pleasant. I can make a similar pac for much less money and much more healthy. Ah wel, hopefully it will at least get some thinking about preparedness.
My daughter finds wonderful thrift store bargains, but I rarely ever do! Glad you were able to make the trip productie that way.
October 23, 2012 at 9:37 am
Other than costing $63 for 209 meals, the ingredients and additives are poison. Also, the taste sucks. I remember having to eat freeze dried meals during my backpacking days and swore off it for good. We can and freeze much of our garden output. My best estimate is we save close to $5000 a year by not buying this food from the grocery store. BTW, I now have 75 pounds of whole organic free range turkeys in my freezer. They cost me about $2 a pound for organic feed. I will be harvesting the 30 and 35 pounder this week and making sausage out of them.
October 23, 2012 at 9:41 am
I would love to know how to do the turkey sausage. I have 17 turkeys ready to go what Jenna Wogonrich calls freezer camp. The first batch of old layers go on Sunday.
October 23, 2012 at 5:24 pm
I went to the Amish Flea market and farmer’s market several weeks ago and bought a used meat grinder for $75. A slightly smaller one sells for $319 at Lehmans.
Instead of plucking the turkeys, I skin and bone them. The meat is cut into small chunks which will be ground. Add spices, stuff into the casing using my handy dandy Kitchenaide attachment and then into the freezer.
October 24, 2012 at 3:46 pm
I used to shop once a month, but recently our budget has tightened (and prices have increased) so that we can only afford enough food for a week or so at a time (and I do have some things in food storage like rice, flour, canned tomatoes/sauce and beans) and several times I have had to let the car insurance go late for a week or two just so that we could eat meat. I let most of my garden go over the summer and have not replanted yet (I live in Florida and can grow some things year round). I plan to get some chickens soon, and hopefully add goats and talk my husband into beekeeping next year-we live on 350 acres (in-laws’) so land is not an issue, but I don’t want to take on too much new stuff at once (I’m famous for doing that and then having a meltdown because I took too much on). My husband and I both work 35-40 hours a week and we have a son who is autistic-he is brilliant and unique and says the most awesome things sometimes, but he is also very stressful! Thank goodness my mother in law is just next door and can watch him and pick him up from school when we need her to.
As prices on things have increased, I have learned to do more things myself-I make my own laundry detergent and other household cleaners, I cook more from scratch and freeze leftovers for nights I work late, I have started sewing again, and I have given up makeup (it was not as hard as I thought it would be!) I am thankful for your blog, as well as several others that have offered wonderful tips and advice for frugal and healthier living. I wish I had found them sooner, a few years ago when money was flowing better. I would have bought a dehydrator and a pressure canner and stocked my pantry instead of buying flatscreen tv’s (although, we did eat almost exclusively organic food back then, and I did invest in a freezer and a worm farm).
October 25, 2012 at 11:52 am
Freezer camp, that made me laugh!
A thank you goes to Gene Gibson above, who taught me to can a year plus ago! Thanks, Gene!
I like making soup – a huge stockpot – it doesn’t cost much when you buy in bulk. Then, some goes in the freezer for “quick dinner nights”, another jar into the fridge for lunch the next day and some goes to the neighbors. Then they reciprocate another time – we are all trying something a bit different. Discovered one neighbor makes incredible peanut butter fudge with chocolate frosting OMG, and another makes killer chili. Nice to know
We are working towards having a “rotating” Thanksgiving dinner – each apartment in our 11 (though I think it’ll be six or seven households of us who participate) will make something different and we’ll all wander around with our plates, lol! Should be fun 
October 27, 2012 at 6:58 pm
$19 for a chicken? I nearly fainted. As much as I would like to support our local grass fed and pastured meat producers — one of which is seven miles from my home — $3.25 a pound for a broiler and $9.20 for breasts simply is not in my still reduced by 30% income from six years ago. I really don’t know who would spend that kind of money in this area. Its a rural area and if you have the room you raise your own. I do not have the required amount of property where I’m at, but I just can’t go there when the local store is selling whole chickens for 89 cents a pound.