A Review: Emergency Food Storage and Survival Handbook by Peggy Layton

I’ve never been dissatisfied with living in the Midwest until I started getting into prepping. Materials for prepping are so much more easily available in the West. I’ve heard that regular ol’ Wal-Mart carries #10 cans of dehydrated foods and big buckets of wheat in certain areas! I’m sure many libraries in the West also carry a variety of food storage and preparedness books. I’ve not had much luck finding any at our local libraries.

I did, however, stumble upon a copy of Emergency Food Storage & Survival Handbook by Peggy Layton at a big city library. I was so excited I did the moonwalk down the aisle. The reason I embarrassed my darling children with my dance moves is that Peggy Layton is one of the big names in food storage literature. She has written about eight different food storage cookbooks that are highly recommended.

The subtitle of this book is “Everything You Need to Know to Keep Your Family Safe in a Crisis”. I tend to disagree with that since this book really doesn’t touch many of the key survivalist topics in detail. It does, however, cover food storage extensively as well as 72-hour kits and water storage to a lesser extent.

The chapters of the book are entitled:

Preparing for Short-Term Emergencies

Storing Water for Emergency Use

The Economics of Long-Term Emergency Storage

The Logistics of Long-Term Emergency Storage

Building Your Stockpile of Food and Other Necessities

Obtaining Food for Storage

Implementing Your Food Storage Plan

Recipes Using Stored Foods

One of the strengths of this book is the many checklists Layton includes. Want to know what should be in your car kit or canning equipment? She’s got a checklist for that. She also includes many pages of inventory planning charts that you could photocopy and use for your own family.

There are many different types of recipes included in this book. They use commonly stored items like beans, dried eggs, powdered milk, etc. I have only tried one of them - Cracked Whole Wheat Cereal - and it turned out to be a failure. That may be more my fault than the recipe's fault, though, and I'll discuss that next week. The recipes do seem a little basic, but they would be a good starting place to design a meal that caters to your family’s taste. I’m kind of scared to try the “pinto bean punch”, though. I don’t think beans combined with 7-Up would ever agree with my family’s palate!

This book was obviously written with a wide audience in mind. She has taken this notion as far as not even bringing up the LDS food storage guidelines (ie. 150 lb of wheat per adult per year, etc.). These guidelines are accepted by preppers far and wide, so I’m not entirely sure why she omitted them in her book.

In fact Layton never gives you an idea of how much of anything you should be storing. She suggests listing some recipes and then figuring out how much it would take to make three months of those meals. Multiply by 2, 3, or 4 and you will know how much to purchase for 6, 9 or 12 months of meals. That’s all well and good, but I think it’s important to give food storage newbies an idea of just how much this will be. This is not to overwhelm anyone, but it is important to be realistic. The 202 lb of wheat I just ordered sounds huge, but because I have an idea of the amounts you are supposed to store I know that is only about 3 months worth of wheat for my family.

I’m being nitpicky. Overall, this is a great book that you can learn a lot from. I do not feel compelled to buy my own copy of the book because I a) have a lot of this information from other sources, namely Food Storage Made Easy and b) I’m going to photocopy the relevant pages to add to my food storage recipe or preparedness binders.

You can buy Emergency Food Storage & Survival Handbook at amazon.com or www.peggylayton.com.

A Review: Emergency Preparedness the Right Way, by Howard Godfrey

The first prepping book I bought was Emergency Preparedness the Right Way by Howard Godfrey. I’m not exactly sure why I decided to purchase this one over the many other books on this topic available. I was just browsing on amazon.com and somehow this book ended up in my cart. I think it was the cute little girl on the cover that did it.

This is a small book – only 143 pages including the index and references. Small though it may be, it does cover the major survival topics. Chapters include:

-Planning and other random thoughts

-Water

                                       -Food

                                       -Storage Tips

                                     -Cooking, lights and fuel

                                     -Medical and sanitation

                                     -72-hour kits

                                     -Miscellaneous recipes (HH says: These are truly
                                      miscellaneous. Don’t buy this book for food storage recipes)

                                     -Improvised equipment

                                     -Some Last Thoughts

One thing I appreciated about this book is that it makes survival topics very accessible for the novice prepper. It’s not full of jargon or highly technical discussions. I got a good basis and it inspired me to do further research.

One weakness of this book is that it has a bit of filler. The author includes long (the one on pinto beans is 1+ pages) quotations from scholarly studies done at BYU. While the information may be relevant, the author could have simply summarized the findings of the studies. It felt like the author was trying to beef up the page count of his book, much like my students would do when I was a teacher back in the day. Add a bit of filler, make the margins 2 inches, jack up the font size and PRESTO you have a 5-7 page research paper, teacher! This book is self-published. This kind of stuff, plus the random nature of the first and last chapters, wouldn’t have made it past the editing process of most publishing houses.

Since some people are put off by heavily Mormon content, I will make note of it when I do reviews. Personally it doesn’t bother me. Some of the nicest people I have met are Mormons. I also have read enough Mormon preparedness documents to be able to quote their scriptures by now! The Mormons are on their game when it comes to prepping. The author does say "Remember, if you are prepared you shall not fear", which is a Mormon scriptural reference. That is about it.

This wasn’t a bad start to my prepping library. It covers the most important topics, albeit not in great depth. There is some filler included, but it is an adequate primer for the beginning prepper. I’ll keep this for reference and it has whetted my appetite for more.

Emergency Preparedness the Right Way is available at Amazon.com