Mason Genie ad: Saving Food With Sally

I've been prepping since 1998. Groceries cost 3x what they did then and I'm spending less at the store than ever. Here's what most people get wrong… I'm going to save you a lot of time and money if you let me. I started prepping the summer before Y2K. Everyone laughed at me. Then everyone stopped laughing in March 2020. Then they laughed again. Now with what groceries cost, nobody's laughing. I'm 67. I've watched four "once in a lifetime" economic events in my adult life. I learned a long time ago not to count on the grocery store being stocked, the power being on, or a dollar being worth what it was last year. So I built a pantry. A real one. Not the freeze-dried bucket nonsense they sell on late night TV for $4,000. Here's what most people get wrong about long-term food storage. They think the answer is a chest freezer. A freezer is the worst thing you can rely on. One power outage, one bad storm, one equipment failure, and you've lost a thousand dollars of food in 48 hours. I watched it happen to my neighbor. She came home from vacation to a garage full of spoiled meat and cried in my kitchen for an hour. Then they think the answer is canning. Pressure canners, water baths, boiling jars in July, worrying about botulism. It's a skill. It's a good skill — I still do it for certain things. But it takes a whole afternoon, a hot kitchen, and specific equipment. Most women try it once, swear at it, and never touch it again. Then there's the Mylar bag and oxygen absorber route. Works fine for dry goods. Useless for anything else. And every time you open a bag you've got to reseal the whole thing or it's done. The answer the old-timers used — the one nobody talks about anymore — is dry vacuum sealing in mason jars. My grandmother did it. My mother did it. And for forty years I did it with a bulky machine with a hose attachment that took up half my counter and broke down every 18 months. About a year ago my daughter sent me a link to something called the Mason Genie. I'll be honest — I was skeptical. Anything that comes in bright packaging and gets advertised on the internet, I assume is junk. I've been burned before. But the thing fits in the palm of my hand. No cords. No hoses. No counter space. You set it on top of any standard mason jar — pint, quart, wide mouth, regular mouth, doesn't matter — and press one button. Under 60 seconds later the air is out and the jar is sealed. I tested it the way I test everything. I sealed a jar of rice and set it on a shelf in my basement next to a jar I'd sealed with my old machine. Six months later, both jars were still holding the seal perfectly. The Mason Genie jar was identical to the one I'd sealed with a machine that cost ten times as much. I threw the old one out. Here's what's in my pantry right now. All in mason jars. All vacuum sealed. All shelf-stable for years without refrigeration. **Dry goods.** Rice, beans, lentils, oats, pasta, flour, sugar, salt, coffee beans. Vacuum sealed in mason jars, these last 20-25 years. Not a typo. Twenty-five years. No oxygen means no bugs, no rancidity, no nutrient loss. **Dehydrated produce.** I dehydrate what my garden produces every summer. Tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, herbs, apples, berries. Sealed in jars they last 5-10 years easy. I'm still eating tomatoes from 2022. **Jerky and freeze-dried meat.** Sealed properly, years of shelf life. **Hard cheeses, butter powder, egg powder, dry milk.** All of it. All sealed. All good. I don't own a chest freezer anymore. I don't need one. Here's the part that matters with what groceries cost right now. I buy in bulk. 25 pound bags of rice. 50 pound bags of oats. Bulk beans from the feed store, not the grocery store, at about 40% of retail. Then I portion them into mason jars, seal them, and they're good for decades. My husband and I spend maybe $40 a week at the grocery store now. Mostly fresh dairy and produce. Everything else comes out of the pantry. When the neighbors complain about egg prices, we're pulling powdered eggs from a jar I sealed in 2023 and making breakfast. When a storm knocks the power out — happened twice last winter — we don't lose a thing. Everything in the pantry is shelf-stable. Nothing depends on the grid. My daughter came out last Thanksgiving with her husband. He's a good man but he's thought I was being paranoid for years. He walked through my pantry and said "how much of this did you actually grow or buy yourself?" All of it. Every jar. He asked me what it would cost him to get started. I told him they probably already have the jars. Everyone does — sitting in a cabinet from old spaghetti sauce, jam, pickles. Wash them, get new lids if you need them, and you're in business. The Mason Genie itself is under a hundred bucks. That's the whole setup. He ordered one before they left. He called me six weeks later. Said he'd already sealed 40 jars of dry goods and my daughter had stopped rolling her eyes at him because the grocery bill had dropped noticeably. Look. I'm not going to tell you the sky is falling. I'm not selling fear. I've been around too long for that. What I will tell you is this — food costs more every year, the grocery store is not a guarantee, and the women I know who weather hard times best are the ones with a pantry they built themselves. You don't need a bunker. You don't need ten thousand dollars of gear. You need mason jars, something to put in them, and a way to get the air out so they last. That's it. That's the whole skill. One button. 60 seconds. Decades of shelf life. The Mason Genie is the only piece of equipment I recommend to anyone starting out, and I've tried them all. Do with that what you will. EDIT: Getting a lot of questions about where to find it. Here's the link my daughter sent me: https://masongenie.com/products/mason-genie