Preserve Food

Part of living on a Seasonal Menu and Hundred Mile Diet means that for health and a varied menu, you'll need to store the food -- usually produce -- between the times when it's bountiful and when you want it.

Before we had global food distribution networks, and when the cost of labour was low, it was practical and necessary to preserve food. Now, people do it for several reasons:

• as a hobby;
• to maintain some notion of [[Food_Autonomy?]];
• and because its DIY Value is high.

If you encounter very cheap produce of any kind, you can can preserve it -- but it has to be very cheap for this to have any reasonable DIY Value DS -- dollars saved.

For example, you can [[U-pick_strawberries?]] for under $2.00 / box and [[make_strawberry_jam?]] which you can use the rest of the year. Strawberry jam is very cheap from the [[grocery_store?]], but homemade tastes tonnes better than storebought, so its DIY Value value is higher.

The usual ways, in order of current popularity are:

• [[Freezing_(Food)?|freezing]]
• [[Pickling_(Food)?|pickling]]
• [[Dehydrating_(Food)?|dehydrating]]
• [[Canning_(Food)?|canning]] / bottling
• [[Salting?|salting]]

There are many resources for preserving food, but two of the best are

• Local [[Department_Of_Agriculture?]] Publications, and
• the [[Usenet?|newsgroup]] rec.food.preserving