Memory Lane - Food Storage

This weekend I cleaned up my food storage closet. Yep, it's just a closet. I took out all the other junk (luggage, rackets, blankets) and decided this would be my "emergency preparedness" space. And, by the looks of it, I will be eating an awful lot of rice, spaghetti, and soup if there is an emergency. Plus, there's a box or two of emergency brownies that will come in handy when a chocolate craving occurs.

Growing up we had two storage rooms. One was behind the stairs and contained a wall of shelves with applesauce, "bread-n-butter" pickles, peaches, cherries, grape juice and everything else that my mom had canned. There was a small secret passage behind the stairs that lead into the huge storage room/work room/dart room. In this room we had a lot of barrels. Some of the barrels were about 3-4 feet tall, bright blue and contained water storage. We'd empty them out every once in a while to freshen it up with new water. Or we'd take them out in the backyard to practice our balance or see who would win races across the yard. Looking back I can't believe we didn't break any bones.

Other barrels contained Thai rice (we lived in Thailand when I was little and brought a lot back) that we ate all growing up. Others contained wheat, floor and all the usual emergency preparedness essentials.

There were also tons of MREs (Military meals ready to eat) from that same stint in Thailand. Each box contained smaller boxes and each of those contained really dark army green cans. I don't remember what most of the cans contained, but each had a special can with 4-5 crackers and sometimes a chocolate patty of sorts. This little treat was the object of many a food storage raid. Sometimes a couple of us would sneak through the boxes looking for this special cracker/chocolate patty combination.

Remember, this food was about 14 years old at that point! No wonder our stomachs are made of steal - not the abs - the stomachs! Another surprise in this endeavor was finding a little tiny box containing two pieces of Chicklets gum in some of the MREs.

Aaah! The days of sneaking into food storage are gone. Mine isn't worth sneaking into nowadays. I purposely rotate food or use it if I'm running out of something in the kitchen. But, it's important to have food stored and I had forgotten all of the little memories associated with it in my family.