05/22/2026
11 Survival Items the Amish Buy in Bulk — All Under $5 at Walmart
In a Holmes County, Ohio root cellar, on shelves a man named Eli built in nineteen eighty-four, there are eighteen blue cylinders of plain white salt lined up next to twelve plastic gallons of white vinegar, a wooden crate holding three hundred paraffin emergency candles, and two hundred boxes of strike-anywhere matches — and the family that owns the cellar has not run out of food, light, soap, or medicine in forty-one years of marriage. A twenty-six ounce blue cylinder of plain non-iodized salt at any Walmart costs one dollar and forty-seven cents and preserves roughly twenty pounds of pork shoulder indefinitely. A plastic gallan of white vinegar costs three dollars and twenty-four cents and pickles cabbage that stays edible on a pantry shelf for two years. A one-pound box of baking soda costs under a dollar and replaces six different products under the average American sink. A box of one hundred and twenty paraffin emergency candles costs four dollars and ninety cents and raises the temperature of a closed bedroom by three degrees Fahrenheit per candle. A queen-sized fleece blanket costs four dollars and eighty-eight cents and lets a homeowner drop the nighttime thermostat from sixty-eight to fifty-five without losing sleep. And when you combine these eleven items using methods the Amish have been refining since the first Anabaptist families landed in Philadelphia in seventeen thirty-seven, you eliminate the need to ever pay another six-hundred-dollar annual cleaning supply bill, four-hundred-dollar winter heating bill, or three-hundred-dollar prescription cough medicine bill — without permits, without contractors, and without modifying anything in the house already standing on your property.
In nineteen forty-two, the United States Department of Agriculture published a bulletin explaining that one pound of plain white salt could preserve roughly ten pounds of pork shoulder indefinitely without refrigeration. The Anabaptist farmers of the Alsace region had been doing this since the sixteen hundreds. Pennsylvania Dutch sauerkraut, fermented in stoneware crocks with nothing but cabbage and salt, has been keeping families fed through European and American winters since the seventeen twenties. The Ordnung — the unwritten rules of Amish living — has stated since eighteen sixty-five that a household should be able to feed itself for one year without leaving the property. Buried in the archives of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, cataloged under the title Folk Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans, written in nineteen thirty-five by a researcher named Thomas Brendle, there is a documented account of dozens of cases going back to the eighteen twenties in which Amish and Mennonite settlers used dried mullein leaves — the tall yellow flowering w**d that grows wild on every roadside in America — mixed with plain table salt as a chest poultice for severe respiratory illness.
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