The canning thread made me think of it.

In Alaska until the 60s the merchants kept a three month inventory to fill their grocery stores in their ware houses.

When airplanes could start bringing in milk from Seattle the two dairy farms closed. (about 1962)


Around 1970 or so, the Teamsters Union in Seattle went on strike for a week. No north bound boats were loaded.

The shelves emptied within that time and did not refill for another week.
It was weird to walk into the grocery stores in town and see nothing but a few stray cans of peas (who likes canned peas anyway?) and a bit of dust or a label that had come off a can.

No food to buy.

Now our house had a months supply of canned goods and a bit of frozen beef and family caught salmon down at the cold storage where we rented a locker, so we hardly noticed the glitch.

The ONLY food we could 'can' was the salmon. We could make blueberry, raspberry, logan berry, strawberry, and salmon berry jam.

We did NOT have peaches or cherries or apricots to can. They do NOT grow in Alaska. In the interior they could grow peas and cabbages. But I was in the southeast where the only way in and out was by boat or plane.

It hit me today why the modern houses I tour on Sundays have LOUSY kitchens.

1. they are built and designed by people who do not use them.
2. they are made for people who buy prepackaged goods.
Why would you need a place for 25 pounds of flour when you buy your bread, cakes, pies, and use pancake mix?

I am always amazed that all you need is one good squash plant and you can eat well for several weeks! Amazing!

Yet here a lot of people gripe about "food storage". or "canning"

I'm sorry, but I guess I'll always be out of step with stateside.

So what is reasonable to have on hand?
And has anyone ever seen empty store shelves in the states?

I remember a time in the 70's..... when gas prices shot up and there was gas rationing... Were the shelves empty? No, but seems like some shelves were cleared out.

Of course, I was a young child then. And I can barely remember.





(snort, j/k)

I also remember the shelves being near empty after a grocery strike and an earthquake.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2013 10:35AM by Cheryl.

I have seen empty grocery store and drug store shelves several times but it was always the result of a)- the owners are getting divorced and they don't want a huge asset to split up. Very little inventory is less money hubby has to split with wife, or b) the place is being bought out by a chain and they want to make room for their special and wonderful "stuff" so they let the inventory decline as much as possible. No food runs in Vegas. Although we get a LOT of food from California so if trucks don't run or the gas lines break, we do find ourselves in a bit of trouble.

Carol

Oh yes, a few times, when hurricanes are forecast in our area. Everything that is nonperishable or does not have to be refrigerated is completely cleared off the shelves in next to no time at all because we usually loose our electricity for at least a few days. Water is among the first things to sell out quickly. Afterwards, when the stores reopen, there are lines around the stores just to get in.

We were usually evacuated for hurricanes, but blizzards? People were clocking each other over batteries and whatnot.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2013 12:47AM by Beth.

The independent supermarket down the street has changed hands 5 times in the last 30 years, & as such has been in a slow decline. The prices are now double the price of even the regular supermarket, & their inventory is pitiful. & yes, they have many shelves that are empty.

I like to keep a lot of stuff on hand, keep ahead with canned goods, water, meds, paper goods, etc.

Now that it's just me, I guess I'd have to live on soup for a long time! :-)
Leon loved soup and I have a lot left!

Never know when some catastrophe will empty the store shelves: nature acting up, strikes, and other difficulties. I've seen it happen in person and on TV.

It makes sense when you have to take care of yourself- to have nice food on hand - for times you aren't well enough to get out yourself easily, and for busy times with tremendous hours when you'll be deluged with work- so can't easily run errands, but priced out of daily restaurant priced meals (so you Have to take care of yourself)

I wonder, if home canning pints of chicken soup make sense with left overs after you cook a big pot of soup, living with one or two people and prefer home cooking. I really wonder if you need special canner recipes or normal food can just be - thrown in- when your meal is done & can left overs. Then you could be six or ten pints of soup ahead until you cooked another chicken it'd all be home made and taste right. Can you do that? is it safe? is it feasible? how bad a mistake can you make? in trying not to use recyclabled cans, trying to avoid the plastic can liners, trying to avoid food additives- but don't time to cook daily. Could this work? one a six a meal cycle for several favorite meals that take a long time? Or would it be a disaster?

canning meats and vegetables require a pressure cooker canner.

I'd much rather freeze soup leftovers, and I have.

Sometimes when I'v found that odd leg of chicken I got a good deal on and forgot can be souped even if it is freezer burned.

The key word of course is bay leaves....and lots of good herbs!

Onions are the real miracle workers for me and garlic.

I agree that usually it is easier to freeze left overs, especially soups. I do can a lot too, but you need to pressure cook any vegetables and meats for the amount of time required for the food with the longest pressure canning requirement. This will overcook any softer foods. I take leftover meats & bones to make my own stock and can those because my freezer is usually overflowing.

In response to OP, before and after hurricane Hugo the stores were empty. Formula and clean water were the items we ran out of first. Otherwise we easily had over a month supply of good food.

Yes but only in the crappy discount grocery stores after a big sale, and they still have lots in the back just nobody to stock the shelves haha

During a week long ice storm. Lucky for me I worked for the phone company and they put me up in a hotel next to my office for a week. I was single then, and didn't have a lot of food in my house.

When I did go home, there was no power. I did have a wood burning stove that I could cook on. I made a big pot of soup and invited the neighbors over. They brought flour, eggs and baking soda. We made biscuits and cooked them in an iron skillet. We opened a bottle of blackberry wine, and had a great evening playing cards.
They slept on cots next to my stove. They were so grateful to be warm and fed.

Even though I was single, I miraculously had firewood, a woodstove, and things like canned ham and dried beans to make soup with. We ate that for two days, and it tasted wonderful. The wine tasted better than any wine i've ever had. Put wine in your food storage.

All you need to store are guns and alcohol haha

What the food shortage paranoid always forget is that we produce so much food in America, that we have literally destroyed the entire agriculture economy of Africa with all the food we give them for free.

We also have a very diverse diet. True, genetically modified crops of cloned seeds leave us vulnerable to plagues that might destroy all the wheat, or all the corn, but it is unlikely we would loose every single kind of crop. Even then, the crops are genetically modified for specific regions, so we would only probably only lose most of the wheat in a large area at worse. We are not the Irish dependent on a single type of potato.

If the worse were to happen to our crops, it would be the third world that would suffer, not America or Europe.

I live on Vancouver Island and apparently there is only ever three days worth of food in the island's grocery stores. We rely heavily on food being shipped over on the ferries, yet I've never seen empty shelves. Not ever.

However, I have had my local beer shop run out of my favourite beer once. I still have flashbacks.

After they finally cleared the snow from a big blizzard back in the mid-90s, we went to the supermarket and saw numerous shelves cleared out. Pretty freaky for someone who had always assumed that supermarkets are right around the corner and have everything you need.

them mormon canned beans sure do sound good now

I only see empty shelves at wal-mart

wtf? do you live in the ghetto? The two walmarts in my town always have crap on the shelves. Hostess pies, campbells soup, stale bread. They have it all!

I take back my ugly words :)

A typhoon in the mid-70s. Our island was without water for one week and electricity for nearly two. Stores emptied out quick. Almost every shelf was empty. What wasn't purchased was stolen.

When Mt. Saint Helens blew in '80, my town took a direct hit. I had a job at the local grocery store, and people came out to the stores on about the 3rd day after.

Bread, milk, eggs, batteries, and beer - all gone. Can't remember exactly how long we were out of these items, but seem to recall the shortages didn't last long.

Back then, it was funny to me to see people loading up shopping carts with beer. Now I'd be first in line!

I remember when that happened. Shorly after we had a huge tornado in our town and we had to shop on empty shelves.

An hour after one of the big earthquakes here in California, my friend was shocked to see the milkman drive up to her house. He said he might as well finish his route because all the milk would go bad anyway.

The stores in the area of damage had no bottled water, and all the spoiled frozen and refrigerated food had to be thrown out.

However, if you drove 20 miles down the road, you could get anything you wanted.

It's good to see another Alaskan on the board. I've lived in Anchorage since '94 when I moved here with my family when I was 7 from California.

In Hawaii, this can happen. Hurricanes, earthquakes, strikes, wars, problems in California, can all cause the shelves to empty. If the boats stop coming, we have nothing. When people get worried, they go buy everything up. So it just makes sense to store stuff, grow stuff and be independent as possible.

Yep. When I was a wee lass in Hawaii (many years ago), we saw completely bare shelves right before and after a tsunami warning in the mid 70s. People panicked and bought everything that wasn't nailed down. I also remember seeing very scanty shelves a couple of times during the gas rationing, which affected transport both on the mainland and on the islands.

The post commissary had sporatic shortages during the winter months. Fresh fruits and veges were dearly priced, when available.

No, I can't say that I have, really. Not an entire store. Around the holidays you might see some empty spots for some of the foods, like where the stuffing is supposed to be or whipping cream. You might see empty shelves before they fill them with seasonal stuff. That's about it. If they run out of something it doesn't last long.

I have been in a department store when it was totally and completely empty before they opened. That was pretty cool.

My grandparents told me that they didn't really notice the depression. They were already quite poor and lived on a farm. They co-op'd meat between neighbors and pretty much grew everything else.

My mom told me the grocery store shelves were pretty empty when they had a blizzard a few months ago. She said the dumbest shit was missing and the college kids were going to starve because they bought all the candy. (She lives in a college town.) Every major snow storm in her state empties a lot of the shelves.

I've never seen the shelves completely empty, but on the East Coast stocks will often be very depleted before, during, and sometimes after blizzards, ice storms, and hurricanes. I usually keep about three weeks supply of food on hand, most of it stored in my pantry. During really bad storms we can lose electricity for up to a week or longer, but that's unusual. So it doesn't pay to keep a lot of food in your freezer unless you have a backup generator. I have a gas stove so I can always heat up soup or something else.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2013 10:39AM by summer.

During the L.A. riots the grocery store shelves were cleared out first by shoppers then by looters. The city was on lock down and we were ordered to not leave our homes for about a week.

I would bet that our 'Mormon' shelves are empty or laying on the floor, from the collapse...


As a teen in the 70s, I recall planned shortages of toilet paper, coffee, gas etc...

It was the beginning of the end of 'low prices'.

Everyone created a shortage and jacked up the prices.

That is when the 25 cent cup of coffee went to one dollar, forever...