Food Hoarder

Please forgive the long post. This has been on my mind and writing usually helps me figure things out. I welcome your input as well. :)

I'm trying to figure out my relationship with food. I don't mean in a diet way, like food for comfort or food as the enemy. I've got that figured out and feel that I have a pretty healthy diet psyche, thank you very much.

No, it's food storage and gardening and home canning that I'm trying to figure out. Sure, I'm Mormon, so all those things have been important my whole life. But the mystery is why I have such an emotional connection to it all. I mean, nothing makes me happier and feel more secure than a full pantry and a full fridge. It's a deep, to-the-core thrill, yet somehow it never feels like enough.

My sister introduced me to a book that totally feeds that need: How to Grow More Vegetables... Sure there are lots of chapters on soil prep and composting and all that, but the chapter that takes my breath away is the one with sample garden plans for a year-round garden that will supply all of your food needs for a year. I study those diagrams with glee and fantasize about the mini farm I'll have one day, when I add chickens and beehives and maybe a few goats to the mix. It really wouldn't take that much land, except for the goats. It thrills me to think of buying and filling a chest freezer and basement shelves with summer produce and using it all winter.

Yes, I know that this plan requires a great deal of dirty work, both in the gardening and the canning and freezing. But it's work I want to do, and it's the kind of work that makes me feel competent and human and alive.

But gardening and canning aside, I'm also feeling more urgent about a basic year's supply of staples and a three-month supply of standard meals. I get the same feeling about my savings accounts, and I'm having major conflict at the thought of pulling money from savings to buy food storage. Which is more important right now? Which will make me feel more secure--the food or the money?

What I'm trying to figure out is my motivation for all this. Several people I know who have a lot of food storage are preparing for "the big one," a major disaster or food shortage or political uprising. I'm not really concerned about those things. I mean, if the fault line we're sitting on goes active, our foundationless 100-year-old house and all the food storage in it will be reduced to a pile of sticks and rubble in two seconds flat. And I have no desire to move out to the middle of nowhere and start stockpiling guns to keep marauders at bay.

And it's not like I ever went hungry growing up. There were a lot of us, and there were never enough mashed potatoes no matter how huge a bowl of them my mom brought to the table (we really like mashed potatoes), but we always had enough to eat. So that's not it.

What do you think it is?