Just curious. We did. It included TVP (urggggg, never good to begin with); huge bulging cans of honey; bug and mice-infested wheat, and other miscellaneous disgusting stuff.

The weird part was that some guy came by in an old pickup truck and took a bunch of that stuff off our hands. Yep, the bad food. He did some dumpster diving to save some of it.

It saved us money on our dumpster hauling. I just wonder what that guy did with the stuff. <shudder>

My parents had a lot of wheat put up when they died...tons of it. Some of it was put up when I was just a kid, and I remember doing it decades ago. My mom made some bread from it now and then and that was it.

One of my TMB brothers took all of it so now the wheat is second generation. Lots of water bottles were dumped out too.

What a waste of money and storage space!

My dad also had sheets of plywood set aside in the garage. As a kid, I used to always ask if I could use it to make a tree house in the yard, and was always told "no, its being saved to board up the windows of the house during the last days when the wicked are trying to defeat the mormons".....did mention we had guns and ammo set aside for that purpose too? Used to scare the shite out of me as a kid....I was certain I would be part of combat in the streets at some point in my future!!!

Some people over here still have ammo and weapons. I am worried something will set off my parants and I get told to shoot at people which are actualy police trying to calm the situaion down.

Holy shit! Nothing like growing up in a terrorizing environment.

When I was a kid, I took my Aaronic Priesthood seriously. I spent hours every week visiting with the widows of my ward, mowed their lawns, cleaned their gutters, fixed appliances and so forth. I also threw away tons of food storage. It was hideous. I would find food preserves that had been stored for 40 years, some of which the women would not want thrown away (I did it anyway, but it was a battle). There were bags of flour that had turned to cement, A variety of rodentia, both living and mummified, A jar of jelly in which a cockroach was suspended, with no discernible point of entry, So many bugs, and yes, the old bulging cans.

It was truly horrifying. These poor ladies had no idea what kind of filth existed in their homes, which is a wonder, because most of them kept their homes otherwise immaculate. I'm glad I did it, but it convinced me that I was never going to keep a year's supply of food in my home.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2011 01:37PM by homo sapiens maximus.

yep, more money wasted on a ton of canned wheat than I can count.

Oh yeah. Right after we got married, DW and I went through her grandmother's food storage. I imagine there was at least 30-40 years worth of food. It really opened my eyes. If the mormon god wanted people to prepare for a catastrophe, wouldn't he at least hint at the time and place it would occur? What a waste of time, money, effort, etc. I thought of how this poor old lady had devotedly stored food, canned etc., for years and years, all for nothing.

It was one of those aha moments that things didn't add up in the only true church.

I refuse to can (I hate gardening anyway as I was raised by a farmer)--but my mom canned a lot and I know my sisters threw out a bunch of old canned food. We did eat a lot of the food storage my mom bought when we were at home like soups and tuna, etc., and some of her canned things, but she oftentimes canned stuff that nobody ever liked anyway.

My ex's parents had tons of stuff--and it was all out of date.

I also refuse to have food storage. It seems any time I buy anything extra, it just gets tossed anyway.

TBM DH and I are working on having a three months' supply of food but we rotate it out. The worst we have is shitloads of canned pickles that I would LOVE to get rid of, bwaa haa haa!

Yet they never went for the food storage. Oh, Mom canned fruit and made jam and stuff, but we ate it up during the winter.

After moving our half-ton of wheat for the third time we decided it was time for it to go. Once I used some of it to make home-bagels. When I told the RS pres about it she almost swallowed her tongue, but then recovered and said how nice for us to make our traditional foods.

7 years ago when my parents moved from so.california to so. utah they stopped by my new house with some furniture that wouldn't fit in their new place. Along with a few pieces of furniture, they dumped several hundred pounds of 30+ year old wheat. It was as if they had some weird emotional attachment to it and couldn't just throw it away. My nevermo BF at the time thought that they were INSANE! This was the 7th move for the wheat in over 3 decades, covering THOUSANDS of miles over 3 states. When I broke up with him, I gave him custody of the wheat. He was NOT amused!

That is too funny!

Not me. I threw my own away.

Ron

As soon as the thought passed, I remembered tossing one Grandmother's when we moved her into a lovely apartment....and also tossed much of my folks after 45 plus years in their large home.

About that TVP. I recently tossed my recipes on how to make various meat forms and prepare that crap to look and taste like meat. OF COURSE IT NEVER DID!!! We had more than one Homemaking Meeting (middle of the week, during the daytime 1970's) on cooking with food storage items.

I had a list of how much wheat, salt, vitamins, beans, rice, honey, TVP, seasoning, and water to store per person. (Toilet paper was optional). The way we stored water....do not rinse laundry bleach bottles, fill with water and that will keep it good. We also bottled fruit, veggies, meat, stream trout (bleh), and on and on and on. Since I grew up with a small family farm owned by Gramps, farmin', bott'lin', pickin', slaughterin' irrigatin', and weedin'...just par for the course.

I always wondered why all the trouble? Since we hunted, and knew survival skills, if there was that horrid crisis the fear mongering LDS warned of.... why couldn't we simply head to the mountains, live off the clear water, deer, birds, fish, plenty of wood for shelter or fire? All one really needed? A bunch of match's, gun, ammo, hatchet and saw. This WAS Utah, afterall.

Oh, and I thought it was a 2 year supply in the 70's. Am I incorrect?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2011 04:56PM by wings.

My grandmother died recently and my family decided to move in with my grandpa. So my mom decided to clean out their storage room to make room for her own food supply. There was canned food that was over 13 years old!!! Really gross.

I come from a hardcore survivalist background. In my late 30's I am just starting to not think in terms of TEOTWAWKI. I have thrown away tons of food. In fact we just ate 13 yr old MRE's when we went camping just to see if they were any good...they were! It is a hard habit to break.

Now I use my wheat to make the sacrament bread my son takes every week. It is a honey wheat and everyone wants the recipe! I am thinking about buying a quarter bag to put in with it. Do you think the spiritual experience will be especially good the week I finally do?

I do like fresh flour, so I buy 25lb bags of wheat, but I never have more than 75lbs on hand at a time.

I have a neighbor who worked at a county dump. Over the years he seen truckloads of food stuff dumped. He raised chickens and feed them with the wheat and rice dumped. I have seen people that couldn't use the basements of their house because of food storage. My idea of surviving during hard times,,I have guns and lots of ammo.

Why do they even talk about this anymore? Everone in your neighborhood knows you have food storage. So, when the apocalypse comes, they're going to shoot your ass dead and steal your food storage.

Idiots.

Ron

Memo to self: when the end comes, rob Mormons.
LOL

OMG.....and all those years I thought the end of the world was tomorrow or that we would be enclosed in safety eating all of it! funny I try to live with as little as possible these day's. Thanks Goodwill! As long as I have my peace,sanity and happiness, I need very little!!

We still have a couple of big blue cans of wheat, but the paint has flaked off and you can clearly make out the olive drab paint under it with old Civil Defense lettering; anyone have that? I just found my dad's Magic Mill grinder the other day, so maybe I'll make authentic atomic bread!

I have thrown out everything dated prior to 1999, and some bulging honey and a couple hundred pounds of wheat. There are a lot of cans that got rusty from a recent fridge water line leak. I'm giving her 6 months to use that, then any can with rust goes too. The rust is minor, but can seals will eventually fail once rust has started.

Oh, and I found 250 rolls of toilet paper. That should be a year's supply even in a dysentery outbreak. Oy.

My own wheat storage got tossed when I moved to North Dakota. Paying to move wheat to North Dakota is stupid beyond words, even for a TBM. There are oceans of the stuff there.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2011 04:23PM by Brother Of Jerry.

Me

I got a divorce and sold my home this year. Threw away 25 year old wheat. Had to do it two cans a week cuz it was too heavy to put in the trash all at once.

Food` storage cost me an allowance, lunch money, school clothes, and empty pockets. Idiot Dad sent the funds to Salt Lake for cartons of powdered food products and infested wheat. We moved every two years and the multi-thousand dollar piles of pretend were discarded and replaced with fresh crap from Utah.

I knew a Mormon family in California in the 1980s who stored several cans of gasoline and tons newspapers in the garage along with the food storage. Always wondered if their house might not blow up.

I can always tell when the Mormon families in our area are rotating or cleaning out their storage--those bulging cans, flour sacks and crystalized honey start showing up on the doorstep of our food pantry. We have to throw it out for them . . .

I always giggle about this story when I think of food storage. When I moved from Alpine I sold my house to the family who wrote this crazy book about making your furniture out of wheat food storage tins (the squares). Some of you baby boomers may remember the book. There was no excuse for not having food storage when a family of four like the XXX's were so creative they made their FURNITURE in their living room out of food storage.

Need a bedside table with a skirt? Round food storage plastic pails.

Need a bench for the breakfast nook? Square wheat cans and a cushion on top (covered with fabric....you are so fooled, you thought it was upholstered, didn't you). The pictures were small so naturally I made friends with the woman and was really looking forward to seeing her lovely home, all made out of food storage containers.

Not.

Here comes her furniture - antique French Provincial with a harpsichord. She gave harpsichord lessons in her home, she explained, so the furniture had to match. Since it's her business, you understand.

But the kids' bedrooms were not made of food storage, like in the book, either.

I was naive enough to be shocked.

Anagrammy

Anagrammy, wow, but I'm really not surprised...

I helped clean out an elderly widow's house after she died and we had to throw out so much food it was insane. She had no wheat but we threw out at least three whole dumpster's worth of just 10+ year old cake mix and jello! My non-mo friend was astounded and asked me if she was storing up for the apocalypse. He wasn't far off...Oh but the funniest stuff we found were 40+ year old scotch and whisky bottles hidden in the storage room above the garage.