For various reasons, after a year I decided to come home from overseas and move back to Utah. A lot had changed in that year, and my books were starting to earn enough that I could cover all my publishing expenses and pay myself a small salary. It wasn’t much, but the cost of living in Utah is much cheaper than it is elsewhere in the US, so I figured I’d make it work.
Right away, I started looking for ways to cut my expenses. When you’re self-employed doing what you love to do, cutting expenses is the difference between living the dream and working a dead-end job that you hate. I realized very quickly that one of my biggest expenses was food.
Backtrack a little bit. For most of my life, I’ve been a huge fan of breakfast cereal. In fact, my parents tell me that that was my very first word: “breakfast cereal.” But the thing about breakfast cereal is that it’s expensive. When I graduated college and my dad told me I was financially on my own, I realized very quickly that my cereal habit was making me broke. So I switched to oatmeal.
At first, I bought my oats in tins like this. The price was reasonable, and it lasted much longer than a box of cereal. But then I started shopping at a whole food store, and I realized that oats were much cheaper if you buy them by the pound. Some stuff you don’t want to buy that way, but oats are oats, so it really doesn’t make much of a difference where you buy them. So I switched.
Fast forward to 2013. While browsing through the grocery store looking for ways to cut my food expenses, I found one of these:
A fifty pound bag of anything is prone to give you sticker shock, but when I calculated the price per pound, I realized that the value was almost twice as good as the stuff I was buying at the whole food store. And since I had completely switched to oatmeal by this point, I knew that I would eat it.
I stood there and thought about it, checked the price again and thought some more. Then I threw caution to the winds and loaded the 50 lb bag into my cart.
The great thing about oats is that if you store them right, they will keep for decades. When food goes bad, it’s usually because something else (mold, fungus, bugs, etc) is eating it. That’s all mold is: a really disgusting organism that’s eating your food while it sits there in the fridge. In order to live, these organisms need water and/or oxygen. Since rolled oats are a dry food, if you store them in a sealed container without any oxygen in it, you can keep out the mold and the bugs practically forever.
After I hauled this giant cement-bag sized thing of oats to my third floor apartment, I realized very quickly that I needed to figure out a way to store it. Fortunately, my dad knew exactly what to do. He told me to get some dry ice, put a 1 lb. chunk of it in the bottom of a lidded bucket, and fill up the bucket with oats. Dry ice is carbon dioxide in a solid form, which sublimates (turns to gas) at room temperature. Since carbon dioxide is denser than oxygen, as the ice sublimates it will fill up the bucket from the bottom up, pushing out all of the oxygen. Put the lid on the bucket but leave it partially open, to allow the gas to escape. When you can seal the lid without the bucket starting to bulge, that means the ice has all sublimated and the bucket is ready for long-term storage.
So that’s what I did. I bought a bunch of cheap 3-gallon empty ice cream containers from the BYU Creamery, a small local grocery store owned and operated by BYU. They sell the buckets for $.50 each, so I got five and sealed up four of them after removing the oxygen with the dry ice. I then took the internet for more oatmeal recipes and came across The Oatmeal Artist, where I discovered all sorts of great recipes. Who knew you could do so much with oats?
That was how I got started with food storage. Though I have to backtrack again in order to explain.
I grew up in a devout Mormon household, where we practiced our religion as faithfully as we could. One of those principles is food storage. The idea is that in order to best help others, you first have to help yourself. Self-reliance enables you to provide for yourself and others through times of hardship and trial. By keeping this principle, the Mormon pioneers were able to thrive in a desert wilderness more than a thousand miles from civilization.
Food storage is an important component of self-reliance, not only for the major emergencies like the zombie apocalypse, but for the personal emergencies like declining book sales and a stalled career. If you only buy your food one or two weeks in advance, you’re living hand-to-mouth—literally. If you can learn how to store some of that food long-term, then even if your income streams dry up, you know that you’re still going to eat.
The #1 principle of food storage, though, is to eat what you store and store what you eat. These days, it’s pretty typical in a faithful Mormon household to have a couple buckets of rancid wheat in the basement that no one has opened in decades. We keep food storage because our religion teaches us to, but we don’t really know what to do with it because we never actually eat from it. The principle becomes just another empty practice—another rote tradition.
I knew right from the start that I didn’t want to do it that way. For one, I couldn’t afford to. But as I learned to store food that I actually liked to eat, I found that it reduced my food expenses significantly. Instead of buying oats every couple of weeks, I just gradually ate through what I already had. Since I ate oatmeal every day, and since buying in bulk cost roughly half as much as buying it by the pound, I came out ahead.
From oats, I expanded to other dry foods like rice and beans. Both of those are also easy to store long-term, and a 20 lb bag give you a significantly better value than the smaller bags (especially if you buy it on sale). I also expanded into wheat, which deserves a whole blog post of its own. And later on, I got a slow cooker to help with cooking the beans. If you’ve never cooked beans in a slow cooker, you don’t know what you’re missing. More on that in another post.
The best prices you will ever find for bulk dry goods is at an LDS Home Storage Center. It’s part of the religion, after all—many of the people who work there are volunteers doing missionary service. The last time I went there, it was $10.00 for a 25 lb. bag of oats—that’s only $.40 per pound. Beans, rice, wheat, and pasta is similarly cheap. Most of the Home Storage Centers are located in the western United States, but you can also order the products online. Or if you prefer, you can also find most of this stuff at your local grocery store.
Through food storage alone, I was able to cut my monthly food expenses by 25%. I also had the peace of mind of knowing that I would never have to starve for my art. Even if times get tough, I now have enough of a food security buffer to ride it out.
