Mormon Sister Rants about food storage and the waste it has been

by Mia Feb 2012

She has 5 adult children. She did the food storage thing for 20 years.

Last week she cleaned out the food storage room. She's cranky about the whole deal.
She feels like she obeyed a commandment that didn't serve any good purpose.(her words)

It cost them 1000's of dollars, most which were a waste.
Lots and lots of time and energy.
space that could have been better used.
The recommended food to store is disgusting to her.
She feels like she was pressured to waste a lot of time energy and money on a worthless project.She is resentful about the pressure to comply that she constantly gets at church. She thinks there are more important things the church should be worried about. She thinks it was a wasteful way to live. She has spent 2 days hauling wheat out of her basement. Nobody wanted it. I don't blame them, it's 20 years old. It's all going to the dump. It sounds to me like she thinks her leaders led her astray on this one.
I asked her if she could estimate how much time and money she put into the food storage program. She replied that she doesn't want to think about that, it would make her too mad.
One more chip in her mormon life.

Marcionite
Re: TBM [Mormon] Sister Rants about food storage.....
Years ago I helped clean out DW's grandmother's food storage. She was 90 when she died. I just shook my head thinking of all the time that was wasted over the years. There must have been 60 years worth of effort (canning, rotating food, etc.).

That was my wake up call about food storage. I never did buy the brainwash on that one.

CA girl
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
It's a current rant of mine too. Last year, I paid the kids to go through our large walk-in closet/food storage room, and get rid of all the expired stuff. There were 3 garbage bags full of food.

That being said, I still buy stuff in bulk when the prices are low - things that don't expire like TP and things we use a lot of like tuna and applesauce and pasta. When pasta goes on sale, I'll buy 10 or 20 packages, just because I know I'll use it. Same with spaghetti sauce. And I hold on to the wheat, salt, honey etc. just in case....

But keeping a full year's supply? Not any more. They recommend stuff you can't rotate because you might eat it in an emergency but you wouldn't eat it up before then.

freeman
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
My MIL doesn't rotate. Her food storage looks like something you might find in the social history section of the British Museum... "ah, so this is what they ate during the war..."
Don Bagley
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
Remember that food storage was based on "prophecy" about an apocalyptic shortage of food. Since this hasn't happened, we know the prophecy was false, at least up until now. That's a long period of failure.

Ironically, I went to high school hungry while wheat and dried food products rotted in the shed.

Carol Y.
LDS Inc. has vested interests in Continental Grain Co. since the 1960s. They've made money, hand over foot, off of her, and many of us, as well. 
freeman
Good point. Often overlooked.
LDS Inc also owns half of East Anglia in the UK, the most fertile agricultural land in the country. Many church members manage the farms there.
bona dea
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
My TBM mom and her TBM sister had the same complaint after they cleaned out their mother's cellar after her death. Most of the food needed to be thrown out.
lillium
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
ROFL. Hey you should get her to take some to the next Antique's Roadshow. It might be worth something!

Can't Resist
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
Yeah, like you want to have food poisoning on top of your emergency...

Apocalypse with a side dish of salmonella.

Paintinginthewin
I feel no one supported me storing my then favorite actual culinary repretoir Frozen shrimp spaghetti linguini rigatoni garlic tomato and chovolate 

guynoirprivateeye
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
as I recall, the reasoning was problems of

-personal/family economics

-supply chain problems

more than of some catastrophe

Which came first; Food Storage counsel or survivalist mentality?

Just browsing
TBM Sister Rants about food storage...Not always the case..
At a tough time during marriage --got laid off and money was tight --so we lived on our food storage and what natural food, meaning fruits and berries and nuts etc .. It was certainly a learning experience and we did manage to go nearly 4 months without having to buy groceries ..

JB

jessica
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
Tbms throwing away food while people in the world starve--yeah because it wouldn't be right or moral to help others we must first help ourselves. This one is a pet peeve of mine, count me in on the group who never believed in food storage beyond a couple weeks and also grew up hungry.
lillium
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
My mother threw out a whole bunch of 32 gallon trash cans of wheat, rice and beans when she moved from the house I grew up in. I have no idea what happened to the canned stuff she had, but she didn't have room for it at the house she moved into, so either gave it away or threw it out too.

I love to buy extras when stuff is on sale, and when I saw the news about the bad peanut crop I went and bought 6 jars of peanut butter before the price went up. There's a big difference between doing the smart thing for yourself financially and doing what a profit tells you to do.

forbiddencokedrinker
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
How about this. If the members had put the money they spent on food storage, and instead put it into a savings account for emergencies, they probably would have come out far farther ahead.

Don't believe all that nonsense about being able to barter in an emergency. No one is going to barter for moldy cans of grain. Cash on the other hand, will always demand a price.

Also, after an apocalypse that wipes out the financial system, a year supply of food is probably not going to do you any good, as you are probably going to need to move, and will not be able to take all that food with you. A bug out kit, and a weeks supply is all anyone really needs.

forbiddencokedrinker
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
I just remembered the cool track board tower my father built for can food. We had hundreds of cans of food on the thing, you would pull what you wanted from the front, and all the cans behind would slide down a slot. It kept the food rotated, let him know what needed replaced, and probably could have kept us going for months. All the church suggested stuff, the big self sealed cans of wheat, only rotted and attracted rats.

Mia
Re: I feel no one supported me storing my then favorite actual culinary repretoir Frozen shrimp spaghetti linguini rigatoni garlic tomato and chovolate
I'm coming to your house it things get bad!
Those are my favorites too.
Mia
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
They sell plastic snap together versions of this at Costco. I have 4 of them in my pantry. It's a great way to store canned food, and takes up less space.
possiblypagan
food storage.....
After my mother died in '03, I rented a big bin from the city and proceeded to clean out her little storage area. It was amazing, all the mouse-poop covered cans and 40 lb container of crystallized honey crammed into that small space. My mother did not make much money (taught special ed), yet she followed the council of the attorneys, business owners, etc. that run the church, and had that food storage. At least the weevil infested wheat fed the cute ducks that hung around all summer.

I hope my mom is getting some such reward wherever she is now.

bignevermo
botulism would be likely as salmonilla ...
and worse for your health... noe one talks of rats...i would think this type of storage would attract rats...
just sayin!
bignevermo
ummm the honey was still good sparky!
just crystilized...easily remedied with hot water...honey NEVER goes bad...
and sorry for your loss!!
just sayin!!

bona dea
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
A certain amount of food storage isn't a bad idea, but as usual Mormons go way too far. Not only do they often waste food, they treat it as if it some sort of moral responsibility.

Mia
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
To some it becomes their true religion. They take it way over the top. They live and breathe it. I've often wondered if it was a church sanctioned version of hoarding.
The members of the church of food storage were the most annoying of them all.Preaching guilt and fear while flaunting their one-up-manship over those who didn't or couldn't comply.
baura
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
I do "food storage." I've probably got a 3 months supply at most, but it's not that pre-packed stuff. It's just a large pantry that gets stocked (and rotated) depending on when the specials are on the things we eat.

But it has nothing to do with waiting for Armageddon or "obedience to leaders." Just prudence and common sense.

nosko
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
The thing about food storage is that if there's really an Apocalpse-food shortage, I guess that the mormons with food storage will the first ones to get robbed and attacked...

I've always thought that if there's an Armageddon-food shortage, I'll just need to rob a mormon house, a Macdonals and a Walwart, then I should be all set! (joking!)

Just to tease your TBM sister, you should ask her is her food storage is flood-proof? :p

Non-mo lurker
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
Liquor. Turn the food storage locker into a wine cellar. You can always barter with booze.

Horsefeathers
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
Besides the hopefully outdated church plan to gather up the faithful's food storage & dole it out at centralized locations, the other glaringly overlooked problem inherent to the idea of two years' worth of food storage is the utter & complete avoidance of any thought of how to keep it from being raided by those who do not have their own.

Nosko has it- those who don't have it will take it by force from those who do, unless those who do have some realistic means of defending property and possessions.
(This is worst case, longterm disaster, not just a couple days without power from a flood or earthquake.)

dk
what's the point of having wheat?
If there is an emergency, I would think a can of something you could eat without heating it up would be a good thing. But why wheat? How do you eat that in an emergency?
nickerickson
Re: TBM Sister Rants about food storage.....
At most one needs only 3 months of "food/water storage". And most disaster experts say 30 days supply is plenty. It's good to have a little something for back-up, especially if you live in a hurricane zone. But a YEAR is ridiculous. My parents still proudly have their food / water supply - still wasting money.
Itzpapalotl
Just, yikes!
I've mentioned this before, but the whole food storage used to give me nightmares about the apocalypse when I was a girl. My brother and I spent a Saturday cleaning out empty Clorox bottles, then filling them with water and a capful of bleach at my TBM mom's request. The amusing thing is we had a creek running at the edge of our yard, so unless there was a serious drought we had water. We also had a few tubs of the raw wheat, but my mother rotated it and baked bread weekly with it. Lots of home canned goods as well that were rotated out.

I don't understand the mentality of hoarding food just to let it spoil a year later. Goods like canned tomatoes only have a shelf life of 6-12 months. I would be terrified to clean out some of the food storages described above, especially with rodent droppings and the prevalence of the Hantah (sp?) virus in the southwes.

"Recovery from Mormonism - www.exmormon.org"