#1 - When I was newly married in the mid-70s, we lived in Heber valley. DH had a cousin who bottled water in her empty canning jars, just like she would do bottled fruit. I thought that was a wonderful idea because you have a little water storage plus clean jars when you needed them. So I decided to share this tip in relief society. There was a woman in that ward who thought she was royalty. Her father had been a temple president, she had graduated from BYZoo, & she had 9 children. Her husband grew a large garden & she bottled lots of the produce. After I had shared the idea about bottling water, she gets this smug smile on her face & responds, "Well, Redwing, (insert mirthless chuckle) if we had an earthquake, don't you know your water bottles would break?" She was quite pleased with herself for pointing that out. Then I said, "Well, Royalty, don't you know that all your bottled fruit & veggies would be broken, too?" She got this quizzical look on her face & said she didn't think of that.

#2 - A nice woman told us to come & pick the grapes she had in her yard, as she did not want them. We did. I was new to canning things, so I asked my MIL how to put up the grapes. She said put them in sterilized jars, add this much sugar, fill it up with water & bottle them. So I did just that. In a couple of weeks, we noticed purple ooze coming from under the pantry door. It seems I did not understand that 'bottling' meant cooking them, so they fermented. hahahahahahaha

#3 - Friends who were hunters, used to give us the rest of their deer, after they had taken the choice cuts. We pressure cooked it, & we ate it many times because DH would be out of work. That is one of the few things I liked about all the bottling/canning stuff.

I was raised in a nomo family. My parents could give a rat's ass about the return of god, but heaven forbid any money is wasted. If canned goods went on sale, my mom stocked up. Seriously. One day a repairman came to fix the washing machine. He surveyed mom's canned goods and remarked, "I see you are one of us." Mom was mystified. "One of what?" He tried again. "Your food storage, you are one of US." Mom still didn't get it. The guy had to explain mormon food storage. He probably overcame the embarrassment of the assumption by thinking of the fine missionary work he had done that day. Moral of the story, all food pack rats are not LDS. They just might be bargain shoppers.

We just watched the godawful movie "The Road" where the starving dad and son happen to find a cellar just filled with food cans & stuff a hundred yards from an empty house. I immediately thought "mormon" but before I said it, my nevermo hubby uttered "Those folks must have been mormons!"

Anyway, we usually "hoard" when there's a sale, it's just convenient and if something does happen (not the end of the world scenario) it's practical too. We have just now for example about ten kilos of rice and a dozen different canned soups, and other stuff. And water, in plastic cisterns, which we rotate all the time.

real rich tbms actually have a room the size of a bedroom for specialized racks for food storage. out of the morridor tbms love to stand up in relief society with a signup sheet saying they are traveling to utah and will fill up their 11 passenger van with food storage buckets and grinders for the other tbms in the ward. I think they like thats cuz it makes them feel like a celebrity

I remember growing up, and walking into the store room to discover a bunch of mice who had chewed into one of the cans, and turned about fifteen pounds of wheat into baby food for their new nest. The cat loved that discovery.

I wish I had the money back that was wasted buying food that eventually had to be tossed because it was now too old to eat. The sight of swelling cans on the shelf is just like burning your money.

My mother couldn't bring herself to throw out weevil infested wheat. Instead she would try to pick them out. Disgusting! We all knew this, and refused to eat anything she made that might have wheat in it.

My sister and her new husband lived with my parents for awhile right after they were married. She kept telling him not to eat anything with wheat in it. She was too embarrassed to tell him why. He loved my mothers homemade bread. He thought my sister just didn't like wholewheat.

One day he came home to see my mother sifting through a bowl of wheat before it went into the grinder. He realized that wheat was Alive and moving! My mom grabbed the bowl from him and threw the wheat in the grinder. He never ate her bread again after that.

When we bought our house we were vaguely aware that the previous owners had been Mormon, though honestly I can no longer remember why we knew that.

After a couple of years, we finally got around to replacing a "faux" bathroom wall in the basement with an actual wall. My husband went back there and came out with I can't remember how many dozens of 7-Up bottles filled with water marked "Y2K".

Interestingly, the faux garage wall held a different sort of stockpile for us to discover during demolition. Penis polaroids. Later we found out the husband was something of an apostate and was sent to live in the garage where he evidently kept himself busy with photography.

That's hilarious!

I'm thinking the house had too many tiny little kids rooms might be why you thought they were mormon.

That, and there was no porn in sight. lol

As a "technical Nevermo" (long story, and honest I belong) was about how Mormon conditioning runs deep...

I mentioned going to Smith's and finding a sale and coming home with a year's supply of Folgers...

People laughed and me feel welcome, and I've been here ever since....

Second one was about the Angel Macaroni, the patron saint of large families...

Things started out gentle, but the trolls were often thick as thieves. and there was a group that was surreptitiously egging on this one particularly obnoxious homophobe... It got pretty bloody...

With the president's announcement last week, it's pretty clear we're on the right side of history on that one.

My folks were into honey - because it never goes bad. While that may be true, once it crystallizes it is a pain in the a$$ to get out of the 5 gallon pails my folks kept stored in their basement. We had a particularly sturdy steel spoon (we actually called it the honey spoon) used to dig out the honey anytime we needed more upstairs.

Gah! It's not like you can set a 5 gallon pail in any ol' pot of hot water to decrystallize!

I've moved a couple of times too many in the last few years, and I'm still sorting through stuff...

So there was this white box, taped shut with packing tape on a shelf in my laundry room... For the life of me I don't remember it...

So I opened it a few minutes ago.... It had a "Made in China" label, and I was thinking it was some Christmas ornaments an aunt sends for my kids that I'm saving for when they're older...

Nope, This one was a hand-cranked multi-band AM/FM receiver... In other words, one with its own generator, presumably for after you've run out of batteries (reminds me, I should stock up on some of those).

I don't know who sent it to me... At least it didn't have "Glenn Beck Approved" anywhere in the packaging literature...

In the event of the Second Coming, if you don't have any other way to listen to the news, you're all welcome over at my place...

Hahaha. My mom gave me one of those when I moved out for college. (Mine actually had a flashlight on the top as well)

I actually used it on the day I was moving out of the apartment because the power went out when I was cleaning the bathroom, which was the only room in the whole place with no window. The light wasn't awesome, but at least I had some music to scrub to...

I also remember the powdered milk days. Yuck. We also never had real eggs for scambled eggs for most of my childhood. Every sunday mom made a big ol' pan of powdered eggs with some sort of canned or pouch ham in them. I got so used to them that it took me a few years to eat real scrambled eggs.

I got one of those radios, too, with a little light. I also have one of those shake-to-charge flashlights (why? because it's awesome). I've also got a few of those chemical light sticks stashed in good places.

Hey, you never know when the power might go out, and I live in earthquake country.

I still do some things that Mormons do. For example, I breathe oxygen. :-)

I took one apart to see how it works, because I couldn't believe that the little coil in there was enough to produce enough of a charge for the light, even from three LEDs. I found that the coil isn't even connected to anything, and there are two coin batteries (non-rechargeable) power the flashlight.

Radio-schmadeo. I'll bet none of you got a crowbar to keep under your bed from your Doomsday Prepper TBM mom. Just in case there was an earthquake or something and I needed to hack my way out of the bedroom...or so she said. I got it when I moved back to CA from BYU and the first couple of times my mother visited me, she checked to see if I'd put it under my bed and left it there. The only thing has ever done in the last 20 plus years is give me a nasty cut on my foot when it somehow slid out from under my bed and I stepped on it in the dark one night.

I think it's somewhere in the garage now.

My ex-wife bought a big freezer for our basement which she packed completely full of meat and fish. We had some contractors over to do a job, and they unplugged the freezer and forgot to plug it in again. A few weeks later, we started to notice a smell of death throughout the house. The smell got worse and worse and we couldn't figure out what it was. Then one night around 3am the smoke detector went off in the basement, and when I went in to turn reset it, I realized what the smell was. It had oozed out of the freezer and around the floor in a big puddle. The fish was the worst of it. I can't describe how bad the smell was. We spent the rest of the night until morning bagging rotting meat and fish and bleaching everything. I disassembled the freezer trying to get the smell out of it, and I never could.

My father was a big dehydrated milk person. I probably don't need to tell any more of this story, as I'm sure many of you have lived it. Dad tried a number of different methods of making powdered and settled on mixing it in the blender to get the powder completely mixed in, but that left a big head on it -- about an inch of powdered milk head. He would pour it from a pitcher for each of us, and then Mom and Dad would marvel to each other about how really excellent it was and how indistinguishable it was from regular milk. They were lying. It tasted absolutely awful, and none of us had more than a sip. Next, they tried ordering us to drink it. We couldn't get up from the table until we'd had all of our powdered milk. So, I steeled myself and started drinking and drinking and drinking and then suddenly I hit a lump of powder and spewed it out. Then they tried mixing it half and half with regular milk. All that did was ruin perfectly good milk. Dad used to try to fake us out with powdered milk. He would mix it with regular milk and then if anyone drank it, he would say "Aha! See? You can't tell it's powdered!" Yes, we could. So, nobody drank milk anymore, because we couldn't trust it. I went through most of my teen years without drinking milk. I'm 5'9" and wonder if I could have been taller. Anyway, as an adult I discovered that powdered milk cost MORE than regular milk. Absolute insanity.

OMG, your milk story made me lol ... I've got the same memories ;)

I guess they were trying to save money. Blech.....!! I still can't stand non-fat regular milk, from the carton, because I have such bad memories of the dry crap.

One thing that did work, back in the mid-60s, in Northern California, was something like evaporated milk. It wasn't sweetened, or canned, and came in 1-quart cartons. You'd mix it with 2 quarts of water and it was regular milk, like regular milk. It was good, too. I think they just took out 2/3 of the water and we'd replace it.

That milk story is so funny. It happened to me too. The funniest thing is that we lived on a dairy farm! We could have walked down to the barn and got milk anytime, & here we were drinking 1/2 powdered milk. Once when I asked my mom about it she said something along the lines of, "she didn't want us drinking so much milk anymore"... LOL!!

Drinking powdered milk on a dairy farm -- LOL!

That happened at our house growing up as well. It is no wonder I hate milk!

I havent drank milk for 40 years. Just the thought of it makes me queasy.

My mother did some crazy stuff. She had a milk cow, but still mixed the milk with powdered milk. She sold most of her milk to other people so she could afford to feed the cow. Then she got a goat. Everyone in the house stopped drinking milk. We never knew what she was trying to feed us. She tried to assign me to milk the goat before seminary every morning. Um no. That's your crazy hobby mom, not mine. And I just did my nails.

I never saw her knit or crochet anything. She bought a spinning wheel, an alpaca and an angora rabbit. I don't know what became of all that stuff.

I had a chest freezer go bad with about 100 lbs of meat in it. We caught it on a friday evening and had a huge BBQ inviting everyone we knew and our whole neighborhood. About 40 or 50 people trickled in, I grilled for 4 hours it turned into quite the party(dry of course). The most fun I have ever had with food storage.

When I bid adieu to the morg a few years ago, I threw most of my food storage cans and pouches away> I had come to the realization that I was sooo tired of eating food from last century and really really wanted to start eating real live fresh food, you know, like from this year's crop! I now use my few remaining cans of ancient wheat berries to grow wheatgrass in decorative containers. They brighten up my house and look very stylish. : )

My DS and her family have several "you-know-the-type-of-barrels-made-of-metal-thingny" with wheat stored in them and the family moved quite a few times. They always used the services of the same moving company and each time the guys would arrive to their place to begin loading the truck, as soon as they saw the faces of my DS and her family, they would instantly remember the wheat barrels…not very fondly, I’m pretty sure :)

When my DH and I got married his parents gave up his portion of their food storage. I am pretty sure it was older than either of us. We moved it around a couple of times and finally I just threw it away. Why in the world would I want number 10 cans full of anything older than me for my wedding. They also gave us used dressers.

In 1974, my father sealed a bunch of wheat into about a pallet full of what were essentially new, unused paint cans. They were then stored behind a false wall under the stairs and forgotten for many years.

Recently I was visiting my parents and eating some of my mom's home made bread. I found out it had been made from that very same wheat, which they had finally taken out from under the stairs after 38 years.

Back in the late '70's I was on my mission and was tracting in New England and tracted into a guy who was a professional mover. He gave us the "I'm not interested" line, but then said, "Hold it. I do have one question. What's up with Mormons and all the wheat. Man, I about put my back out moving some Mormons last week."

I would love to have a year's supply of Folger's!

I know a lot of TBMs who eat food-storage type stuff as part of their daily fare, and many of them are sick a lot, overweight, and really tired all the time.

I wonder if there's any connection?

Oh, and TBM survivalist MIL loads us up with her old food storage items often (DH is too polite to refuse them). Last week, she gave us a gallon jug of waffle syrup. HCFS is the number one ingredient, of course. (She's always shoving diets in my face and hinting about how I can trim down, even though I'm a 5'8" size 10-12).

I sure hope that "98" stamped on the side is the lot number and not the expiration date!