Food - Can Help Others
This section assumes you have looked at the preceding Food - Minimal, Food - Basic, and Food - Comfortable sections.
This section is more about a way of thinking.
Let's assume you have 3 months worth of food for you and your family. What about friends and neighbors? This is a really difficult subject, I know, but we each need to think about it.
What if a close friend, neighbor, or extended family member does not prepare adequately... this will certainly happen... and comes to you for help. Do you turn them away? Do you just say, 'go die' and slam the door?
Some people have no problem with that. I do.
There are dangers in even talking with outside people about food during a disaster situation. Sharing food with people will certainly let them know you have food. When things get bad, they may come after more. And more. Where do you draw the line? Groups will form if enough time goes by. They may be armed. They will be looking for food.
I could go on painting a desperate picture, but you can do that for yourself. The question is, what do you do about sharing food?
You will have a very hard time doing it, even if you want to, if you do not have enough. Here are two possible levels of preparedness to help others that you may want to consider.
First, help both them and you by having one year's foodstock on hand. That is expensive, I know, and you might have to build it up over time, if there is enough time before whatever is up ahead. I would think a lot of these stores might be in Emergency Food Pack, although you can certainly do it with grocery food if you are sharp enough to keep it rotated. I understand the Mormon church advises, or at least used to advise, their people to do exactly this... have one year's provisions on hand. I think they are very smart in that respect. I believe they tend to buy a single 1-year package of prepared food, which I'm sure is available from some sources, although I do not know which ones.
(After I wrote the above, I saw a one-year product from Nitro-Pak, the Ultimate Family Preparedness Pak
That way you would have enough to share, if you so desire. It would shorten the time that your pre-prepared foodstores would last, but perhaps a year is sort of an unwieldy amount of time. If you have not been able to find, create, or discover alternate food sources and/or partner with your neighbors to survive together, then when you run out of food... you'll be out for good, whether it is 12 months or 9 months. Stone cold news is, if you have not been able to put together a sustainable plan in 3 to 6 months, it probably won't happen. We have a section on how you might do that, Sustainability on the menu at the top left of the page, which should be up soon.
Another level of preparing to help is less complicated. Get 60 pounds of rice in 20 pound bags, specifically for the purpose of giving, and do not count it as part of your own stores. Give to all who ask. Give them a pound of rice, which happens to be 2-1/2 cups, in a ziplock bag. If you have enough water, also give them enough to soak the rice in and eat cold. Or more, if you have enough for that. Water is more immediately essential for survival that food. See the Water section.
After the emergency begins, open one of the bigger bags of rice and package the pounds of rice. When that is gone, open one of the others, etc. if you do distribute 60 of these packs, which could in the right circumstances actually save that many lives, then you are back to deciding if you will share the rest of what you have. In any event, this will buy you a great deal of leeway, and perhaps some good will (although I would not count on it) and put off that time of decision. It does not solve any of the questions about whether you should let people know you have food. But giving this amount seems to be to be both a good thing to do, and the way it's done tends not to shout that you have a lot of food. Perhaps.
100 percent sure benefit: you will have more food on hand as backup. Never, never hurts to have backup.
We do the second of the ways. We will cross the bridge of how to share more if and when we come to it. You may be smarter than we are in thinking about these things, and come up with a better way to take care of both you and your own, and the people around you. God bless you.