Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I need to get in a trip to the Mormon cannery. I have several ‘broken’ cases of stuff that I need to ‘round off’. Each case holds six #10 cans, so the quantity of any item should be divisible by six…that way you know all your cases are full. But theres a buncha stuff that I am one or two cans away from a complete case and Id like to get those taken care of. Unfortunately the folks who were managing the cannery, volunteers from the church, had to give it up and a new set of folks took it up. They’re a bit less accommodating than the previous couple and, I suspect, maybe not as ‘into’ the preparedness thing as they were. The couple that used to run it were great…they were true believers in preparedness and walked it as they talked it. It was great to just hang around and talk with them. This new bunch they have running things….I dunno. But, personality issues aside, the important thing is to get what I need so I’ll prolly drive up there tomorrow and see if they have a group coming in for a session that I can piggyback onto. Failing that, perhaps they’ll let me just buy some stuff ‘off the shelf’. According to the handy-dandy spreadsheet here in my BlackBerry I need a  total of seven cans to round out the ‘odd lot’ stuff. One of those items is sugar, which is a little bit of overkill since I have several 5# bags of the stuff vacuum sealed and stowed away in five gallon buckets but I really dislike the unorderly situation of having five cans in a box designed to hold six. One of the very few times I care about things like orderliness and symmetry.

If you haven’t gone, I highly recommend you take advantage of your local cannery. Last I checked you don’t have to be a Mormon to use it. They don’t try to convert anyone, they don’t ask about your religion and they generally don’t seem to care if youre a believer or not. (A nice change of pace from some of the other religions.) As I understand it the higher-ups who run the show figure that if they let the unbelievers like myself use their facilities to stock up that’ll be one less starving heathen they have to worry about when the apocalypse gets here. Good thinking.

I should also point out that the Mormons also sell several of the items you can get at the cannery online and already packed in #10 cans. Additionally, Ive found them to be a very handy source for mylar bags and oxygen absorbers. Finally, if you get in good with them and ask nicely you can probably borrow their portable canning unit to take home and use to can stuff that they normally don’t can at the cannery.

A case of six cans, by the way, fills a box that measures approx. 18”x 8” x 12”. This means that, assuming you have a normal 8-foot ceiling in your house, if you can spare a square yard of floor space you can fit..uhmm…carry the two…around 432  #10 cans (72 cases) in a space with a footprint of 36”x36”…so don’t tell me you don’t have room for storage food. You’ve got room.

It’s an incredible useful resource, these facilities. I’ll have to take some missionaries out to lunch or something as a thank you.