Rotating Your Food

The DVD I watched from Wendy DeWitt had a lot of great advice, and I'm going to be putting some of it up here, and then pass out the materials next month. She's from Gilbert, AZ, and has been doing food storage seminars all throughout the country as part of her church calling to get people motivated and inspired to do food storage.

But I wanted to share her tip for rotating her food storage. She doesn't use her food storage everyday, which I'm sure I won't either. So every New Year's Day, she goes through her food storage. She figures out what is going to go bad that year, and pulls it out for use. Then she purchases new food to replace those items she's using. For example, she'll get out 12 cans of flour that might be ready to expire, put it in her pantry, and make sure it's used before it goes bad. This way she is consistently rotating her food storage.

Now as for replacing the items from food storage, she has what she calls a "slush" fund. After your food storage is created, each month put $10 or so away into your "slush" fund. Then when it's time to restock your food storage, you already have the money there, and it's not a financial burden or hardship.

Of course, you don't need to do it every New Year's Day (which is our day for taking down Christmas Decorations) but pick one day a year to make sure you do it consistently. Also, remember all the foods you buy this year of one kind (like all sugars for instance) will expire together, so you'll want to start this process the first or second year, to make sure you're able to rotate it, and aren't just stuck with it all at once. An idea might be to eat a meal from your food storage once a week, or twice a month, just to get the hang of it.

Hope this information helps!