08:57 – It was 65.3F (18.5C) when I took Colin out at 0650, clear and sunny.
While Barbara was down in Winston yesterday, I spent some time working downstairs in the food storage areas. I found the four #10 cans of Augason Powdered Whole Eggs I’d ordered a couple of months ago, and moved them into the freezer, where they joined seven other cans of eggs. That’s roughly equivalent to 65 dozen fresh eggs. Not that we’ll be eating scrambled eggs or anything, but over the course of a year that gives us a couple eggs a day for making up pancakes or whatever.
The remainder of the freezer space is filled with vitamins and other mostly OTC drugs, which leaves the refrigerator. I’m currently moving a couple hundred 28-ounce cans of Keystone Meats and 12.5-ounce cans of Costco chicken into the refrigerator, which’ll extend their real-world shelf lives by a factor of at least four. I’d like to get us eventually up to one can of meat per day for a year. That won’t all fit in the refrigerator, obviously, but the more we can fit in there, the better. Eventually, I want to start pressure-canning meats, like the sausage Barbara gets at Costco. I may even try pressure-canning bacon.
Any space left in the refrigerator for now will be filled with #10 cans of Augason powdered cheese and butter, 15-ounce jars of Bertolli Alfredo sauce, and perhaps a few bottles of olive oil. When we’re finished, that refrigerator/freezer will be jam-packed with relatively high-value food.
I’ll keep the oldest stuff on the shelves at room temperature, where we’ll use it first. Room temperature downstairs, particularly in the unfinished area, is noticeably cooler than upstairs. In cold weather, it gets positively chilly down there.
I’m moving most oils/fats, syrups, vinegar, etc. to the upper, less accessible shelves in the unfinished area. Currently, there are seven or eight gallons of pancake syrup, a couple gallons of white vinegar, and about five gallons of vegetable/olive oil on the top shelf. They’ll soon be joined by a dozen 3-pound cans of shortening, a 3-gallon jug of peanut oil, several more gallons of vegetable/olive oil, and a gallon or two of wine vinegar.
Speaking of oils/fats/lipids reminds me of something I’ve meant to mention for a while. The LDS Church LTS recommendation is to store one quart/liter of oils per person per month, or about 2 pounds’ worth. Keep in mind that the current LDS iron-ration recommendations are for a minimal diet to sustain life, so you should consider them an absolute minimum.
The LDS recommendations are particularly light on oils/fats. Overall, the recommended amounts provide about 2,200 calories/day. Carbohydrates and proteins both average about 1,700 calories/pound, give or take. Oils average about 4,000 calories per pound. That means that the LDS recommendations provide a diet in which only about 12% of the calories come from fats. That’s much, much lower than a typical American diet, which yields somewhere in the 25% to 35% range of calories from fats. A diet that’s too low in lipids can have undesirable gastrointestinal and other effects, and should be avoided.
So instead of storing only one quart/liter per person-month, my goal is to store about twice that much, and I recommend that others do the same. Call it two quarts/liters or 4 pounds per person-month. That’s roughly six gallons or 48 pounds per person-year, or 27 gallons/216 pounds for the 4.5 of us.
You can store the bulk of your oils/fats supply as the obvious items: vegetable/olive oil and shortening. But other fatty items like butter, ghee, lard, peanut butter, mayonnaise, and so on also count towards the total.