A stockpiling Mormon has food in his thoughts

The long, narrow room in Kenneth Moravec’s basement looks like a food bank.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves are lined with canned fruits and vegetables, dried or powdered herbs, spices and drinks, along with drums of pasta, rice, wheat and other grains. Each is labeled with its contents and the date of purchase or when it was home-canned, usually right out of Moravec’s garden.

“Right now I have about a six-year supply of food,” said Moravec, whose e-mail tag line reads, “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.”

Moravec has taken to heart a decades-old directive from leaders of his Mormon faith that members should prepare for hard times or natural disasters by stockpiling up to a year’s worth of food. A church website, www.providentliving.org, provides a guide for members.

Moravec’s own preparedness philosophy has been cultivated through church teachings and hard personal experiences, including job losses and natural disasters. As a child, he said, his family weathered an East Coast hurricane and lived off their cache of stored food.

“I’ve been in and out of work a lot in my life, but I’ve always been able to feed my family because of food storage,” he said.

Concern for others propelled Moravec to share what he knows. For two decades, he’s taught preparedness classes nationwide; his students have included Boy Scouts, business executives and church women.

Once a year Moravec drops in on neighbors, regardless of faith, for a preparedness checkup.

“The question is: If you had to live on your food storage and couldn’t go to Albertsons every day, how long could you live?” he said. “Some people look at me like I’m nuts, but most people understand where I’m coming from.”

Since 1985, Moravec has also placed group orders for bulk quantities of grains, dried herbs, potato flakes and other staples. Once or twice a year, a semitrailer pulls onto Moravec’s street and unloads enough food to fill his garage.

Moravec’s fellow Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregants seem to have been converted. By his own accounting, Moravec said, about 11% of families have socked away a year’s worth of food.

An additional 10% have about six months of food saved and 15% have a three-month supply, he said.

Moravec’s neighbor, Cheri Christensen, said her family recently used a small windfall to increase its food storage to a one-year supply. Christensen buys grains and pasta in bulk and cans fruits, vegetables and even butter.

“After we saw what happened in Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. . . . Those people were in dire straits. Take one look at that, and you know you have to take care of yourself,” Christensen said.

In the event of a real disaster, Moravec said, he doubts his six-year stash would last more than a few months. He expects to feed not only his family but also the friends and neighbors who didn’t or couldn’t prepare.

“I’ve been blessed very well to have this kind of food storage,” Moravec said. “But I don’t think I’ve been blessed for me; it’s for me to share. It’s for the single mom over there, or the widow around the corner. I see that as part of my responsibility.”