Mormons are known generally for our church’s counsel to store a year’s supply of food. Here’s ours. Now if the swine flu really turns into something (unlike avian flu, a passé disaster), we’ll be set for everything except milk, and we’ll even have enough of that if we start drinking dried milk (right now it’s just for cooking).

This is our root cellar. It’s actually a 2000-gallon concrete septic tank set down into our crawlspace, a concrete box 7′ x 13′ x 54″ high set there in the first stages of house construction, before the floor joists went on. (The tank was poured especially for us and has never been anything but a big concrete box.) We put a rug on the floor and made shelves of OSB, and a freezer lives down here too for frozen goods. The root cellar is accessible via a trapdoor in the mud room, and we’re down here four or five times a day. For most of the year it is cold enough to act as a refrigerator (the cardboard box on the extreme left holds cartons of fresh eggs), but during the last two winters, even on the coldest days, it has never frozen down here.

What you don’t see in this picture is the hundreds of jars of canned food that Beautiful and I put together each summer and fall. I’ll detail that when we get closer to it, but since it’s almost May half our jars are now empty. (We used six quarts of canned beans, tomatoes, and salsa for our supper last night.) The two yellow boxes in the upper right are full of empty jars to be stored for canning season.

But our food storage is more than that. The nearest grocery store is almost an hour away, so we can’t just dash out for a cup of sugar. With a family the size of ours we must buy in bulk, and this is how we store it. And there is something comforting in having everything we need just downstairs. Then, come what may—be it blizzard, flood, or pandemic flu—we have just what we need, within the walls of our own house.