As a grown adult do you ever find yourself visiting your own parents’ home and being gravitated toward their refrigerator or cupboards in search of something to munch on?  Probably you are not doing so because you cannot afford to feed yourself, rather it is a deeply ingrained habit that might possibly have ties to feelings of emotions that have been generated in the past that are especially related to comfort and nurturing.  This action of visiting the food bank at your parents’ home may not seem at the conscious level to have anything to do with psychology, but it is possible that visiting the fridge there represents a concept you have established dealing with security.  Your parents provided (hopefully!) the love, attention, and nurturing that now something as simple as a refrigerator has come to symbolize.  Go figure!

I may be completely off base on this, as I am not a trained psychologist, and am disclaiming this so as not to be practicing medicine without a license (lol), but there may be some tie-in here with food storage believe it or not.

Food storage foods are generally of the types that don’t generate a lot of excitement for most people.  In fact many folks buy the cheapest items money can buy to store in their food storage just to save money, and also because they don’t ever expect to have to use it.  They may reason further that its use is just to tie them over and they can make it through on boring, second-rate food in an emergency situation if they must.  This is the wrong mindset for several reasons.  Please reference my post on food storage rotation to get a better feel for the reasons why, but I will very briefly point out a couple of them here.  First, you should be storing food that you eat.  Storing cheapo foods just because they are inexpensive makes it more likely you will actually spend more money in the long run because you won’t rotate the food, and it’ll eventually make its way to the pig sty or the city dump if (fortunately) there is no emergency in the interim.  Another reason is because in an emergency situation you will become flaming mad at yourself for not having more sense/cents.

This brings us to the purpose of this particular post.  If you’ve come to understand the importance of food storage rotation and storing foods that you will eat, then you will quite possibly be open to the fact that you are also going to want to have in your food storage some of the “comfort foods.”  I’m not advocating here that you develop any neurotic tendencies.  Much like the example of your parents’ refrigerator, you will also in moderation want to add foods that can break the monotony, and provide an uplift and pleasant memories.  Get creative.  I mean bring back some candies and confections from your vacation to Disneyland!  Won’t that be a double treat to be sucking on some Mickey sugar while you take turns reminiscing about your visit to the “Happiest Place on Earth?”  That should make you a little more positive and serve to lift your spirits when facing the discomfort and inconvenience of living in survival mode.  You can store a variety of sweets that have come to symbolize as well visits to places far and near and represent “sweet,” cherished memories or have deep meaning for you.  These confections don’t all have to be tied to vacations, either.  Tie them to events such as family reunions.  The point being—they should all serve as tools in your “second-aid” kit: the ready-recall of sweet memories.  And avoid at all costs the omission of chocolate!  Whatever you must do to create a memory with the cocoa bean, by all means do it!  Even if you have to buy a fondue fountain and simply go outside on a summer day in your bathing suits and have a slimy chocolate mud fight, afterwards licking your delightful wounds until you are all clean.  Talk about sweet memories!

I would love to hear back comments on this post from those brave and daring chocolatiers who have conquered the chocolate fondue fountain mud fights (or variations thereof) and made their sweet food storage memories!

Related Posts:

Your Body’s Need for Energy in a Survival Scenario
Food Storage: Protecting Your Hard Won Foodstuffs
Food Storage Rotation
It’s a Fact: Everybody Eats!