Things are bad enough in a disaster situation. Living in an emergency shelter is hard enough, we don’t need the added complications of abandoning our gluten free diet. Today (April 15, 2012) the problem is tornadoes — who knows what we will face next week!
My wife and I have made the decision to lay in a supply of various types of gluten free pasta. We will mark the purchase date on each package, and eat the items in the order they were purchased. At all time, we will keep enough gluten free pasta on-hand to last at least a month.
Every family’s decision about disaster planning is unique. Here are some of the factors that led us to our decision:
- We both enjoy gluten free pasta, although my wife is able to use other types of pasta. It is very unlikely that anyone will be “caught” in our house by an unepected disaster would have a problem ‘surviving’ on gluten free pasta.
- Gluten free pasta is relatively inexpensive and we would be purchasing it anyway. Our decision simply means that we will be buying it sooner.
- Gluten free pasta has a long shelf-life especially if the packages are unopened and everything is kept dry.
- Pasta is reasonably in-expensive.
- Pasta is relatively easy to cook and the procedures for avoiding cross-contamination are fairly straight forward: prepare our gluten free pasta before cooking other pasta in the same water, use a freshly-cleaned colander.
- We live at a high enough altitude that there is no concern about flooding. Range fires will probably not occur. There is some possibility of being snowed-in. Power failures have never been a problem in our area.
