A couple of days ago, we had a video from Viking Preparedness about how you can’t buy you way to being prepared and how you need to be growing your food. In this video, AlaskaGranny talks about what to have on hand for food storage for one year. Which is correct? Well, both of them.

Being able to grow your food is important for long term survival should some long-term disaster happen. But even if you’re growing your own food, events can happen that force you to survive on some food storage. Early frost in the Fall. Late frost in the Spring. Wind storms. Mild flooding. Wild fire. Any of those can destroy all or part of your garden.

Ideally, you will be able to process your own produce into storage via water bath canning, pressure canning, dehydrating, smoking and other methods of preservation. But there’s nothing wrong with having purchased a stock of food. During good times, you should rotate through the food storage while keeping up the stock for longer emergencies.

I have a close relative who is a financial analyst, managing billions of dollars in investments. I talked to him once about food storage, and he recognized it as valid type of investment against food inflation. He also said something else that stuck with me. Any investment, he said, should help you sleep at night. If someone else doesn’t like your investment, it doesn’t matter if it’s helping you sleep at night. That in itself has value. He said he invests in gold because it helps him sleep at night. Preparedness is an investment that should be helping you sleep at night. As AlaskaGranny says in the video, if she dies and her family throws out all of her food storage, then that’s awesome because it means she was never in such a bad situation that she went through it.