Sustenance Food and Complementary Food

[Watchman]

Another way of looking at food storage is by the types of food that we store. Sustenance food is what will sustain you, keep you alive. Complementary food enriches the diet and helps keep you happy. Sustenance food is generally our long-term storage food. When most people begin to panic about food shortages, they panic-buy sustenance foods such as rice, pasta, and beans. Their panic focus is on the bare-bones building blocks of meals that will quickly and cheaply fill a belly. The next thing the panic buyers turned to was bread-making ingredients--wheat, flour, yeast, and other baking essentials such as sugar, baking powder, and baking soda as well as cooking oils.

Sustenance foods provide most of the carbohydrates and much of the protein, and some of the fat in our diet, as they have for millennia. Sustenance food is generally more difficult and labor-intensive to grow and requires much more land to do so. A postage-stamp-sized backyard in suburban America is not going to yield enough sustenance food to feed a family. Because these foods--grains, beans, oils, sugars, salt, and milk are labor- and land-intensive, they are the foods a family needs to store in abundance. They form the basis of a healthy diet. These foods alone can sustain individuals over the long-term. Some of these sustenance foods are short-term storage foods we can raise easily ourselves, like potatoes.......READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE