Provident Living (and Spending)

Saturday marked the culmination of months of planning and the beginning of a new era of food management for our family.

Charity has spent countless hours building a database of information that has tracked how we eat food and how much it has cost us. For example, over the last 3 months, among other things, we have eaten the following vegetables:

• 1 lb cabbage
• 17lbs carrots
• 5 stk celery
• 2.5lb corn
• 1 cucumber
• 10lb broccoli
• 5lb peas
• .5 lb garlic
• 3lb lentils
• 12 lb onion
• 15lb potatoes
• 18 heads of romaine
• 2lb split peas
• 48 tomatoes

What can I say, we love our vegetables.

Through careful research and analysis (Charity is an engineer, of course!), we have done a cost comparison of all the major grocery outlets, online stores, bulk food suppliers, and other foodstuffs venues, and discovered where the good deals were. For example We can see that on December 14th, 2007, we paid $1.50 for 2 lbs of carrots. What a deal!

From that information we have gained an understanding of what food typically costs, how much we eat of it, and where the best prices tend to be. At this point, I sense a lot of you may be raising your eyebrow at our "enthusiasm" for detailing our food consumption. All I can say is that it's been real fun and informative.

We discovered that the Home Storage Center at the Bishop's Storehouse was the cheapest place to buy bulk Beans, Oats, and Wheat in the area where we live. So we set up an appointment to go in and serve at the Bishop's storehouse and also placed our order. You can see what they have here on their order form.



The Piscataway Bishop's Storehouse is located at
121 Ethel Rd W Ste 7
Piscataway, NJ 08854-5952

There phone is
(732) 248-7606

They are open from 5-9pm on Tuesdays and 8am-12pm on Saturdays if you wanted to go and help fill orders. The people that work here are some of the nicest you will ever meet. I highly recommend serving there.


Upon seeing the warehouse, Charity commented that she would love to own or run a place like this. I agree. When we were there, I couldn't help but feel that this was a wonderful gift to so many people. It is a place where I would like to find myself often.


After serving, we loaded up the car with our bulk foods. Photoshop you say? I don't know what you're talking about. That was all muscle!


Our food storage here is taking up the bulk of the back seat.


This is our food storage shelf, only slightly smaller than a warehouse.

The great thing is that we already know that we are going to be eating the foods that we bought. No mystery meats or exotic dehydrated menus for us! What a blessing it is to know that we have one more safety net in place in case of hard times. The prophets' counsel is truly inspired.

If you are interested in learning more about how we are planning our food storage system, we would be happy to share some of the results of our research.