The Everyday Bean

I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And as a member of the LDS church, I have been counseled to keep and use a one-year supply of food storage. I have quite a bit of stored food downstairs but I’m not using it to the best of my ability. As a result of a prompting from the Holy Spirit, I have decided to challenge myself to use that food.

I decided to create a fun scenario for this challenge. I call it fun because as a historian, i enjoy looking in the past at various times when people have had to rely on their stored food or food they could produce themselves. While I realize that adversity is never fun, I do enjoy learning lessons from the Lord and seeing the resilience of others. I want to be creative and resilient too.

Here’s the scenario: it’s the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the stock market has crashed. Unemployment is 30 percent. My husband has lost his job and can only find spotty work. It’s enough to cover bills for now but with very little left over for food. We live in the suburbs with electricity and running water. (I’m not testing those things out at this point. Perhaps in the future.) We live on a one-acre lot in town. (This si actually true) Because the Depression is so severe, my adult children have moved back home, and I am now feeding a family of eight adults.

Here are some of the assumptions I have made for this scenario (some are true for me and some aren’t):

1. We are using things we have stored or can purchase from the LDS cannery.
2. I am feeding 8 adults.
3. We are following the Word of Wisdom.
4. We have no allegies or intolerances.
5. We have 6 chickens who give us eggs.
6. We are making use of fresh and preserved garden produce.
7. We are making use of fresh and preserved fruit from an orchard, berry bushes, and grape vines.
8. We have stored block cheese and peanut butter.
9. We have enough meat stored to use it one or two times per week mainly as seasoning.
10. We are making our own dairy products from powdered milk. This includes yogurt, yogurt cheese, and farm cheese and maybe mozzarella cheese.

I plugged these parameters into chat gpt to see how much food we’d need to have to meet these guidelines and feed 8 people. Here is what it said:

Grains: 2400 pounds

legumes: 480 pounds

Fats/Oils: 150 pounds

Sweeteners: 480 pounds

Salt: 40-50 pounds

Baking essentials such as yeast, baking powder, and baking soda

Water 1 gallon per person per day

Powdered milk 240 pounds

Cheese 80-100 pounds total

Peanut butter: 120-150 pounds total

Vinegar

Rennet/culture for dairy

S[ices

120 pounds of meat

Vegetables: 4800-5600 pounds

Fruit 3200-3600 pounds

I will post late about how I plan to put this all together. This should be a very fun and interesting challenge. I hope to learn a lot by doing this. If you have input or have done something similar, I’d love to hear about it.