The bizarre shortage of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, a year-and-a-half ago, brought an unexpected realization to Americans used to an abundance of everything from food to 20 different kinds of toothpaste. With each news report about backlogs in ports and shortages of truck drivers – not to mention store shelves pockmarked by empty spaces – the possibility of true scarcity seeps deeper into our psyches. While hurricanes, power outages, and snow storms continue to pose their acute, albeit familiar, dangers, these new developments awaken a sense that a chronic problem may be on the horizon.
You don’t have to
be a “prepper” holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in West Virginia to embrace
the idea of preparedness. Many members of the frum community are keeping extra water and other necessities in the
basement, just in case. Some are taking it a bit further. Bayla Berkowitz, for
instance, has a new hobby: canning. Like other old-fashioned homemaker skills,
such as bread baking, fermenting, and sewing, canning is becoming popular
again, driven by a vague feeling of unease brought on by the COVID era.
Ironically, what
led Bayla to canning was not scarcity but excess. “When they started
distributing food boxes, we had so much food that our large freezer and two
frig freezers were all packed solid. I would make big pots of soup, but we
couldn’t eat it all, and I hate throwing food away. With canning, if the power
goes off and the freezers don’t work, you have ready meals in your basement.
Bayla learned how
to can by watching online videos made by a homesteading family in Idaho
(www.homesteadingfamily.com), and also took out books about canning from the
library. She bought special glass Mason canning jars, which have a two-part lid
that creates a hermetic seal. She also bought a large pressure cooker made for
canning. “High acid fruits can be canned in a hot water bath,” says Bayla, “but
you need pressure for low acid foods like vegetables, meat, and soups, and you
need recipes that have been tested, to make sure it’s safe.” Bayla made chicken
soup, meat balls, beef stew, and split pea soup. “I follow a recipe that tells you
the amount of pressure to use and the cooking time, which depends on the type
of food,” says Bayla.
The process
involves filling the jars with the food, placing them on a rack in the pressure
cooker, and turning up the heat to build pressure. After the food is done, the
jar is labeled with the name of the food and the date and stored in the pantry
or basement. “Home canned food is shelf stable for a year or longer,” says Bayla,
“but it also comes in handy if you come home late from work one day and need
supper. Just go to your ‘store’ and open a jar.”
Along
with the shelves of home-canned jars, Bayla and her husband Akiva store “the
things we would need if we couldn’t get to a store for a month,” she says. “You
don’t need to go out and buy everything at once. Stock up slowly over time.
Every time you go to the store buy something extra to store. Keep a list of
what you have and rotate your stock so nothing goes bad. Buy foods that your
family likes to eat and that you can store long term without a fridge
or freezer.
“Store
everything in a place where the temperature is cool and stable. Put bags of grains
like rice and barley in the freezer for a few days to kill any bugs or eggs, then
store in glass or plastic containers to keep bugs and rodents out. Pickle jars
are great for this. Flour and sugar, etc., can be stored in their bags in large
plastic bins.”
To
the uninitiated, all this prep sounds like a lot of trouble, but probably not
more than all the trouble we go to for Shabbos, Yom Tov, and many other
worthwhile endeavors. As it says in our mesora,
one who labors to prepare before Shabbos will eat on Shabbos – literally.
