Food Preservation is Preparedness

The kids are back in school so here is your reminder that September is National Fruit and Veggie Month.  It goes hand-in-hand with September being Emergency Preparedness Month.  There is truly no reason that you can’t torture your children with brightly colored plant foods ANY month of the year (and you should). That goes right along with emergency preparedness, because PRESERVING fruits and vegetables IS a form of preparedness. Didja like that segue? So here we go with multiple reasons why you should learn at least a couple ways of preserving food.

Food History

Humans have been preserving food for multiple millennia. Even before we stopped living hand-to-mouth as hunter gatherers, human beings have been working out ways to save excess food for later.

Without getting too pedantic, most foods last longer if we make them inhospitable for spoilage germs. Common ways to do that can be with salt, smoking, drying (or combos of those); increasing acidity through pickling or fermenting; or using large volumes of sugar to take up of all the water, thus not allowing bacteria to reproduce.

Like beef jerky for snacks?  It’s not just junk food. Early humans in many cultures learned how to dry, smoke, and salt meat and fish as a way to keep it from spoiling for longer periods of time.

You might just enjoy eating pickles these days because you like the flavor, but the root motivation for sticking something in vinegar was originally preservation of that food for later consumption when fresh foods might not be available.

RTWT.