Mormon

What a family of four ate in the 1950s in a year

Mormons don't smoke, drink or swear. No wonder some people consider them a little odd.

Nit-picking aside they do have one policy that I admire, and that is keeping a one-year's supply of food on hand. Think about it. We live in a land of bounty, but what would happen if one year, say, the Midwest got hit with a massive drought and was not able to grow any food at all? How much food reserves does this country have? How much canned food is in the warehouses? How much frozen food in the giant warehouse sized freezers? How long would the grain in all the grain silos last?

It might be a good idea to lay in a supply of food, just in case. There are companies that will sell you a years supply of food for however many people you need, but it is not what you would call appetizing. It is basically emergency rations, and who knows how long it will keep before you need to throw it out and replace it.

I am thinking you need something that you can use as you go. You could do this with canned goods. Keep a years supply in storage. Every week you pull from the front of your stored supplies what you are going to use. When you go to the market, you buy enough to replace what you took from storage. Take what you just bought and put it in the back. This way you would constantly be updating your stored supplies, so they would effectively never be out of date.

But man cannot live by canned goods alone. Well, he might be able to, but he won't like it. What about bread? I don't think bread keeps very well for more than a few days. You could store the ingredients for bread, but that would mean you have to be constantly baking bread. Some people enjoy that kind of thing, but others (people like me) just want a nice, fresh loaf of sliced bread, ready to eat. Now, if baking were the only way to obtain fresh bread than, yes, I would be willing. But circumstances would have to pretty dire. Like no bread for a year.

How about meat? People who live in the country can keep animals, but the biggest animals you can keep in suburbia are rabbits. Well, you might be able to keep a sheep if you have a big enough lawn. But what if the grass is all dead from drought? Or covered with snow? You could slaughter the animal now and freeze it, if the weather is cold enough, or you have enough power to run your freezer.

Well now we are getting into hard core survival and farming. Bags of flour, beef jerky and canned goods would make an adequate emergency store. After all, nothing terrible bad is going to happen, is it?

Update January 2016. Replace missing picture (http://www.booksattransworld.co.uk/billbryson/billBrysonAssets/images/Endpapers-pic.jpg) with a new one. We shall see if Google's photo cache will remember this one.