The Food Cannery

As part of our family's efforts in provident living and self-sufficiency, we stock up on food when we can. Many times we buy canned goods on sale. Other times we bottle, juice, or otherwise preserve food in it's peak of freshness. This time, it meant a visit to the food cannery for some heavy duty food storage. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints harvests, stores, and distributes all kinds of dry and wet food for people all over the world (usually members of the church, but they don't have to be) to build up their supply of food in their own homes. Having a year's supply of food is usually the recommended goal. I know you are thinking- That's a lot of food!- and you'd be right, it is.
So, on this day I visited the cannery closest to me in Arizona. Check out those huge silos behind me! There's ten of them there and they are all filled with wheat!...and you know how much I love wheat! When we lived in Philadelphia, we visited the cannery in Southern New Jersey a few times, but it was nothing like this!


This is the dried foods warehouse. It's filled with rice, oats, flour, wheat, dried apples, dried onion, dry milk, and more. The first step is to get your clipboard and figure out what you are going to can that day. This is my mom and Aunt Julie trying to do all their figuring- no time for smiles, this is serious business.

Now that we have all our food to can, we get all dressed up with our fancy hairnets (they're making a come back), latex gloves, and plastic apron. Lovely! Here's my Uncle Greg and my Mom distributing milk into the cans. If you open a 50lb. bag of milk you have to can all of it, even if you're only buying one can. After it's in the can, each can gets a freshness packet and a lid and gets sent over to me at that huge machine to seal the lid. (Surprisingly, I didn't hurt myself or the machine.) Each can gets a label with today's date so we know what's in there and when it's about to expire. Bye bye milk! See you in 15 years!

If stored properly, much of this food will last over 30 years in these cans and still be in perfect eating condition! So, here we are with our stock pile of food that we are going home with that day. I don't know why Uncle Greg is so excited about that bag of beans...Maybe because it's the magical fruit? (haha) All the other food that we canned but didn't buy goes out on the shelves for someone else to buy.

After I bought my canned goods, I'm off to home to try and find room for all of it...which means cleaning out the pantry- ugh! Here's some of what I have so far. It's not even close to a year's supply, but little by little and we'll get there.

I take pleasure in knowing that if we weren't able to buy food due to a food shortage or job loss or a natural disaster or any other reason, that I would be able to provide food for my family of four. It's not enough to have this food, but to know what to do with it once we have it. Which is why we regularly grind wheat- and make bread, grow fruit- juice and freeze it, go fishing- eat what we catch, find recipes that use our dry milk and potatoes- get our kids used to the taste...so that we are less reliant on the world's economy and more reliant on ourselves. And to teach our children the importance of it all so they can teach their children someday.

And speaking of recipes using food home storage- stay tuned for a recipe for melt-in-your-mouth Wheat Oat Pancakes! Yum!!