Rotating Your Food Storage

Sister Julie Beck, the General Relief Society President, asked several bishops what skills the sisters in their wards needed most to be self-reliant. Their answer: living within a budget and cooking. Rotating and using your food storage can help you to be more self-reliant. Why is it important to rotate your food storage?

1. Prevents throwing away unused, expired food, which saves you money.
2. Allows you and your family to get accustomed to eating stored food, essential in effectively dealing with emergency situation.
3. Eating your long-term storage is healthy. Most food storage items are lower in fat and higher in nutrients than most convenience foods.
4. Because these high-fiber food will be upsetting to the digestive system if you suddenly begin to eat them, it is important to start incorporating them into your diet now.
5. By already knowing how to use your food storage, it will help to relieve a lot of stress in times of emergency.
6. If you will eat food storage meals two days out of the week you can have a whole year’s supply rotated in just three and a half years.

How can you remember to use your food storage?

1. Keep a permanent marker in the same place where you store your food and then every time you bring home a new package or can of food, just date it. If the item has an expiration
   date already on it, you might want to circle it. I have also written the date on the item at the time of purchase.
2. Keep small amounts of your food storage in the kitchen. The more you see these items the more often you will use them.
3. Find recipes that sound interesting using food storage items. The Internet is a great resource. Many of the cooking websites allow you to enter either the recipe you are looking for and/or the ingredient(s) you have on hand. I like the websites where users rate the recipe and give comments. My favorite site is allrecipes.com. Also, BYU TV and byubroadcasting.org have a wonderful program called Living Essentials that has many segments on preparedness. Three of them are on rotating and using your long-term storage. You can also print the transcripts.
4. Incorporate food storage items into your favorite recipes.