More time than money...

H:
A little fun statistics for you tonight.

We spent an hour this evening inventorying our dehydrated food supply.  This is something that I meant to do all along but never took the time to keep track as we were drying the food.  We would just empty and reload the trays as fast as we could, stash the food in baggies, then get on to something more entertaining.

I put together a spread sheet as we were sorting through the food.  Currently we have about 66 pounds of dry vegetable matter and 17 pounds of dry fruit.

I know that we have a bit of a deficit on dried vegetables, 1/4 of the over 30,000 grams of dry vegetables are actually vegetables.  The rest are legumes.

Frozen vegetables dry pretty fast, about 12 hours for an entire 12 tray dehydrator which holds 4 bags of frozen veg (at 2 pounds each before drying).  The cost to dry 8 pounds of frozen vegetables is about 7.5 cents per pound.

My veggies run about $1 a pound.

We cook with propane and I blanch the vegetables before I put them in the dehydrator so I will need to find a way to figure out about how much fuel is being consumed, for the moment we'll go with 1.5 cents a pound because I have no real idea but it sounds good to me and makes math easy.  This brings the grand total of drying a pound of veggies to $1.19.

Corn dehydrates to about 1/4 the starting weight, i.e. 2 pounds ends up being about 8 ounces when finished.

I was looking into backpacking meal recipes and found a recommendation for Just Tomatoes Etc.  This company sells an 8 ounce bag of dry corn for $8.50 (before shipping).

My 8 ounces of dry corn costs me $2.38 to make.

"But wait," you cry, "what about the time spent driving to the store, blanching, washing trays, bagging food, washing pots, etc, etc."  I go to the grocery store anyway.  After a few attempts the process of filling the dehydrators has become very streamlined and takes little real time that can't be split between two jobs (such as blanching vegetables and knitting a few rounds on a sock).  If I wasn't spending my time washing pots and trays I'd probably be knitting more which would cause me to buy more yarn and then I would have to spend more money on yarn, you can see a pattern developing.

I could spend my time right now making money to buy food, or I can spend my time right now working to make food.  In the end who really knows if I'm any more ahead than if I'd gone the other way.  I just know that at one o'clock this morning my calculator says I saved $6.12 on half a pound of dried corn and my brain says go to bed!