Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Emergency Preparedness

I've been asked to over see a booth at an emergency preparedness fair we are holding next month. I have been asked to prepare hand out materials and exhibits about cooking with wheat. I have helped with this particular booth before, and even made a DVD at one time that teaches how to make wheat gluten to use as a meat substitute. We will probably do some of the same things we did before, and include exhibits that teach how to cook with wheat, make wheat gluten, and sprout wheat.

In our church we stress the importance of having a supply of food, preferably a year's supply, in case of natural disaster, or economic and financial troubles. Throughout my life, I have heard many stories from church members about how they lived off their food storage when they found themselves out of employment. But in addition to those kinds of hardships, recently I have been reading in the news that at present we have a lower supply of wheat than we have had for 60 years. Because of the production of corn Ethanol, many farmers have switched their crops from wheat to corn. This has serious implications not only for our nation, but for nations that we have been aiding with wheat supplies. I heard this morning that rice crops are down as well, and this could have a devastating effect in Asia. And of course, I'm sure you have heard of the shortage of honey bees, another problem with potentially devastating consequences.

I encourage all of you to store some food if possible. One church leader, President Harold B. Lee encouraged us, "perhaps if we think not in terms of a year’s supply of what we ordinarily would use, and think more in terms of what it would take to keep us alive in case we didn’t have anything else to eat, that last would be very easy to put in storage for a year … just enough to keep us alive if we didn’t have anything else to eat. We wouldn’t get fat on it, but we would live; and if you think in terms of that kind of annual storage rather than a whole year’s supply of everything that you are accustomed to eat which, in most cases, is utterly impossible for the average family, I think we will come nearer to what President Clark advised us way back in 1937.” (Welfare conference address, October 1, 1966.)
." But even if you are only able to store a month worth of food, if there were a natural disaster, and trucks could not bring food to your city, you would have something to help you survive. I don't think anyone needs to become fanatically extreme in this undertaking, but I do think it is wisdom to do what we can do to become prepared.

3 comments:

Fromagette said...

We were just talking about all that tonight! Our Food Enrichment group was on using our food storage tonight and of course the price of the basic grain came up. Our food storage is getting kind of low, so I will definitely be restocking very soon.

Nene said...

If you're interested, go to http://survivalknife.blogspot.com

His latest blog is on this subject and he has a lot of interesting blogs on basic survival.

Delirious said...

Okay..we need to stop this sibling ESP...I was actually posting about Rintor's blog at the same time that you were writing this comment. I know this because I was watching my email. :)