Some of you have been asking me to show you how to put together a long term storage plan in more detail. After thinking about it a bit and discussing it with my wife, we’ve realized that this is a huge undertaking and one that needs to be thought through.  Advising folks on how to do this isn’t always easy!

After much consideration, I’ve decided to start a weekly food storage school. Once you sign up for it I will send you an email every Monday with a food storage goal for the next week. I may occasionally send you some other hints, tips, or recommendations throughout the week, but the lessons will come out on Monday. You can join at any time and I’ll start you with week one and we’ll go from there.

My approach will be a bit different than some. I won’t be going whole hog all at once, trying to put a year’s worth of everything away all at once. Instead, we’ll take it slowly, putting together the basics and then begin to turn that into a longer term plan.

Look for a post in the next day or two telling you how to sign up for the class.  Don’t miss it!  Tell all your friends and neighbors!  Invite the family dog!

There are three major classifications of sweeteners we should consider for long term storage.  Right now I’m only considering natural sweeteners.  I don’t know that much about the shelf life of artificial sweeteners since I don’t actually use them.  In any case, the three categories to consider are Sugars, Honey, and Syrups.

Sugars and Long Term Food Storage

There are several types of sugar that are suitable for long term storage.  Sugar is particularly sensitive to moisture so it is critical to keep it dry.  Aside from that it’s important to store it with the usual guidelines:  Cool, Dark, and Dry.  Sugar has an indefinite shelf life, though some folks say to use it within two years.  Microbes can’t grow in it and it doesn’t mold or anything.  Good stuff!

Rudy’s Tip: Sugar can actually absorb flavors and smells from the air around it.  Be sure to store it in an airtight container!  You’d hate to have Motor Oil flavored sugar.

Granulated Sugar

This is what you see all over the place at the store and is the cornerstone of your storage plan.  It won’t spoil and if you store it dry and cool it will store forever and a day.  If you happen to get it wet it will cake up and get all hard and crusty.  Never fear, Rudy is here!  Just smash it up again and voila, you’re in good shape!

Powdered Sugar

This is good stuff and a cornerstone for icing, frosting, and the like.  It’s actually the exact same stuff as granulated sugar which has been ground even finer.  Sometimes the refinery adds corn starch to prevent caking.  The biggest problem with powdered sugar is that it absorbs water like a frat boy guzzles tequila on spring break.  If you let moisture in, it will cake up and you won’t be able to get it back to then fine powdery condition you’re used to.  Life goes on.  Since you now know it’s the same stuff as granulated sugar, just use it for that instead!

Brown Sugar

I gotta say, this is one of my favorite kinds of sugar.  It’s basically granulated sugar with molasses and a bit of caramel coloring.  It comes in Dark and Light variants.  Dark has more molasses and thus a darker color and a stronger flavor.  Brown sugar is different from other sugars in that it is supposed to be moist.    That means you can’t dry it out.  Best bet is to store it the same as other sugar but leave out the  desiccant.

Rudy’s Tip: Just store dark brown sugar.  If you need light brown, mix one part granulated sugar to three parts dark brown sugar, mix well, and enjoy!

Honey and Long Term Storage

I love honey.  I think it’s one of the ultimate long term storage sweeteners.  It’s natural, you can easily produce it yourself, it’s healthy, and it keeps forever.  And it tastes so darn good.  The only problem is figuring out what to buy.  My preference is to buy local honey if I can’t produce it myself.  If you can’t find local honey, look at the store but be careful.  You MUST buy honey that is labeled pure.  You want to get filtered honey if possible over liquid honey as the process to liquefy the honey after initial filtering destroys most of the nutrients.

Honey stores forever, just keep it dry and away from air.  Over time honey can darken which can intensify the flavor but is otherwise nothing to be concerned about.  Store it with your other food and you should be fine.

Rudy’s Tip: Honey can crystallize relatively easily.  If it happens, drop the container into hot water for a while and it will liquefy.  It’s nothing to worry about!

Syrup and Long Term Storage

There’s a bunch of different kinds of syrup, but there are only a couple that are interesting for me.

Molasses

This is good stuff.  Tastes good to me, though my wife doesn’t like it all that much!  It’s a byproduct of the sugar refining process.  It will store for about two years on the shelf.  Make sure it doesn’t have any corn syrup in it as corn syrup has a far shorter shelf life.

Rudy’s Tip: In a pinch, add a tablespoon or so of molasses to a cup of sugar and make your own brown sugar!

Maple Syrup

Yummy pancakes!  If you like syrup on your pancakes and whatnot, then store this too.  Preferably glass bottles for maximum storage life.  Similar to molasses, it will store for two years or so when stored on a cool dark shelf.  Again, make sure that there is no corn syrup on the ingredient list if you’re buying pancake syrup vs pure maple syrup (which is ridiculously expensive).

In Closing

I hope this helps.  Like I said at the beginning of this post, we can’t forget about sugar in our long term storage planning! As always, let me know if you have any questions about any of this.

There are a number of different methods for storing dry food that (more or less) meet these requirements, or at least most of them.

Canning Jars

You can use a vacuum attachment for a food saver, etc to vacuum seal regular mason canning jars.  Say we want to store a bunch of Mentos.  Pour a bunch of Mentos into the jar, drop in a couple desiccant packages and an oxygen absorber packet or two, seal it up using the directions of the food saver.  You’re good to go.  Two major drawbacks to canning jars are the fact that they don’t protect the contents from light and they break easily.

Rudy’s Tip: Desiccant is a substance that absorbs moisture.  You’ve seen them in things like shoe boxes, etc from time to time.  Don’t reuse those for food though, buy new ones!

#10 Metal Cans

These are metal cans that look somewhat like older coffee cans.  They store great and handle damage well. They are one of the best choices for long term storage.  The problem is that they’re expensive and the equipment to seal them up costs even more.  About a grand, give or take a hundred bucks or two.  Too pricy for my blood.  If you really want to use these, you can often rent the sealing equipment from your local LDS family cannery.  Similar to vacuum packing canning jars, you want to use desiccant and oxygen absorbing packets when sealing the can.  Many of the off the shelf ‘food storage’ products come in #10 cans.

Food Grade Buckets

Buckets can be a good starting point.  They’re pretty robust, they stack well, and they are opaque.  They are oxygen permeable however, so that can limit the length of time one can safely store food in a bucket.  You can get around this by adding a non permeable liner or using a dry ice pack.  I’ll write a post about using dry ice later on.

Rudy’s Tip: You can get SQUARE buckets!  They are vastly more space effective than the round ones, and are arguably more stable when you start building bucket towers.

Mylar Bags

Mylar is a ‘space age material’ which means it’s the best thing since sliced bread, right?  Well, it truly is a fantastic material.  It’s water and airtight, impermeable to light and insects.  To use a bag, you fill it with the dry food, add an oxygen absorber packet or two, and seal it with heat.  You can use a sealer designed for sealing mylar bags or if you are desperate you can use an iron.  Practice sealing bags empty until you have a handle on it, then move onto the real thing.

Rudy’s Tip: Since these things are so fragile store them in a rigid container of some sort.  Like the food grade buckets above.

Where Can I Find These Things?

Think local restaurant storage stores for buckets and jars.  You can often find them used for free or minimal charge if you ask around at restaurants and the like.  Jars can often also be found in second hand stores like Goodwill.  Mylar bags can be bought on the internet and you may be able to find local sources at well.  I don’t buy empty #10 cans so I can’t really help there!

Rudy’s Tip: Small Mylar bags can be hard to find.  In a pinch, you can buy big bags and ‘subdivide’ them easily to get smaller bags.  That can be useful for storing things like spices, dried herbs, and that sort of thing.

Final Thoughts

There are other options for food storage but these are the mainstream choices.  Please feel free to ask any questions you might have and I’ll do my best to answer quickly!

What kinds of dried milk are there?

There are three main types of dried milk available to the general public.  They have different characteristics and vary widely as to suitability for long term storage

Dry Buttermilk
It is what it says it is … buttermilk that has been dried out.  It’s a reasonable replacement in recipes calling for buttermilk.  The problem is that it has a high fat content.  Fat goes rancid easily, and so does this milk.  It’s not a good candidate for long term storage and I don’t recommend storing any of it.

Dry Whole Milk
Similar to buttermilk, dried whole milk is heavy on the fat and is thus not suitable for long term food storage.  Thankfully it’s pretty rare so the temptation probably won’t be there.

Non Fat Dry Milk
This is what you usually find on the shelves at your local store.  It’s non fat so it keeps well, and is what I recommend to you for long term storage.

Rudy’s Tip: You can find dried milk in things such as hot chocolate packets, etc.  Be sure to look at the ingredients list to make sure those use non fat milk before you store them.  Incidentally, storage of hot chocolate packets is HIGHLY recommended.  Yum!

Non Fat Dried Milk it is…

When you go buy this stuff, make sure you buy it fortified with vitamins A and D.  This is usually the case, but you want the extra vitamin content since those vitamins are not found in non fat milk.  You want to buy the Instant kind instead of Regular, because it reconstituted easily and is easier to find.  It takes up a bit more room than regular, but the ease of use is well worth it.  Ideally you want ‘Extra Grade’ which is a higher quality product.  So to sum up, you’re looking for Extra Grade Instant Non Fat Dried Milk Fortified with Vitamins A and D. How’s that for a mouthful?

Do I need to repackage this?

Yes.  The packaging this comes in off the store shelf is poorly suitable for long term storage.  In fact, you’re pretty much shot at about three months.  You want to repackage it into containers that will keep the milk moisture and oxygen free and away from light.  The best way to store it is in mylar bags or #10 metal cans.   My personal preference is to repackage it into mylar bags with an oxygen absorbing packet dropped in.  Sealed mylar bags are then dropped into five gallon buckets (don’t have to be food grade, but should be new) and covered up with a tight fitting lid.  You can also store it in large canning jars with the packet, but you MUST make sure to keep it dark.

So now that it’s repackaged, how do I store it?

Store it in the dark as cool as possible.  Heat is the main factor in how long it will store.  If you store it at 70 degrees it should keep for about four years.  As is often the case, our mantra here is ‘Store it dark, store it cool, store it dry’ for best results.

Rudy’s Tip: Once you open a package, you should use it within three months.  Be sure to continue to keep it cool and dark.  Make sure you keep this in mind when you repackage your milk.

How do I use it?

Ideally you’d write the manufacturers instructions on the outside of your bag or cut it out and drop it in the bucket with the product.  Barring that, figure about 1/3 cup of powder to 1 cup of water for a single serving.  You can aerate it like you would water to add oxygen and improve the flavor a bit.  Make sure to mix it a few hours before you want to use it so it has a chance to dissolve completely.  You can also use this milk to make yogurt, cheese, and the like.

In my mind there’s only one real reason to have long term storage.  It’s to augment fresh food that we can get with stored food that we can’t get or have difficulty obtaining.  This could be as simple as food shortages for non local food, or as bad as a full on economic and societal collapse which prevents you from getting any significant amount of food from the outside.  Or anything in between.  Generally speaking, I like to assume that I’ll be able to produce some food, and buy or barter for other food, and plan accordingly.

Rice, Grains, and Pasta

All three of these store well, and you can actually make pasta with grain on your own.  All of these foods are carbohydrate rich, provide necessary fiber, and are really a building block for many different kinds of meals.

Rice

Rice is the most common food grain in the world.  It can be consumed by anyone, and oddly enough, there is no record of any sort of food allergy related to rice.  For purposes of food storage, you want to focus on white rice.  Brown rice doesn’t store well  Grain size (short, medium, long) doesn’t matter from a storage perspective for the most part, but some folks say long grain stores longer.  Buy what you’re used to.  Rice can be stored for ten years with no problem, and properly stored it will last for over thirty years.

Wheat

Wheat is a critical part of any long term storage plan.  It’s a very versatile food staple.  You can crack it and make a cereal, grind it for flour to use in breads, etc.  You can sprout it for vitamins and to add flavor to sandwiches.  You can make wheat berries out of it, which are a fun snack, or grow wheat grass for even more vitamins.  There are several common types of wheat varieties, of which I recommend hard red winter wheat for storage purposes.  Once again, properly stored this stuff will store for up to thirty years.

Warning:  Do not attempt to just store whole wheat without it being part of your regular diet.  It will kill you due to all of the fiber shocking your digestive tract.  Make whole wheat flour and things made with it part of your diet now!  Besides, it’s good for you and tastes MUCH better!  Also be aware that many people can develop wheat allergies.  Not a good thing if your storage is mostly wheat.  Get acclimated to it now!

Pasta

Pasta is a processed product, usually created from Durum wheat.  You can make pasta yourself out of wheat flour, water, eggs, and salt.  It’s pretty straight forward!  That said, pasta is cheap and stores well, so buy plenty of it.  Pasta off the shelf will store for about a year in the original packaging, or you can repackage it into airtight containers for thirty or so years.

Other Grains

You can store other grains here too, but I won’t go into them all here.  You can store Corn, Rye, Oats, and really just about any sort of grain you’d eat.  Most of them are stored in similar ways.

How much of this stuff should I have?

All told, you’ll want about 25 lb per person per month for whole grains.  Divvy it up however you see fit.  This stuff is cheap and stores forever, so buy extra just in case.  Remember, these are the kinds of things that will be hard to come by if the zombies show up, but will be easier if we remain zombie-free and are only worried about the weather.

For pastas and similar prepared products, use your judgment and store as much as you might need.  For example, If you eat pasta once a week, and figure that you use two pounds of dry pasta per meal, you need 104lbs of pasta put away for a years supply.

Fruits and Vegetables

This is something you should strongly consider making part of your normal rotation of shorter term foods, and just using as part of your regular diet.  You should have cans or jars of preserved fruits and vegetables put up.  While I’m a big fan of growing your own food (or buying it at a local farmers market, roadside stand, etc) and preserving it at harvest time, you can always buy this stuff at the store.  Chances are you already cook with this already, so figure out about how much you eat normally, and do the math to put away a long term supply based on your term target.

Rudy’s Advice: Don’t underestimate the value of preserving your own food.  Our kids aren’t all that picky, but for example, even some of our kids who hate store bought canned pears will sit and eat a quart of pears that we preserved ourselves.  It really does taste that much better.  It’s also a great family bonding time, and it can be a ton of fun!

Milk

Pretty straight forward here.  You need to store powdered, evaporated, and condensed milk.  These are good for cooking, and make a great substitute for ‘the real thing’ in a long term bind.  You should focus mostly on powdered milk to be sure.  Plan on about 70 lbs of powdered milk per person per year.  Add in another couple pounds of evaporated and condensed milk for cooking, and you’re good.

Dried milk can be stored for anywhere from three months to five years in airtight and oxygen free packaging.  I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty broad range.  As it turns out, dried milk is really dependant upon temperature.  If you store it at about 70 degrees, which is recommended for most food storage, it will keep for about three or four years.

Proteins

Beans

Yes, they truly are a magical fruit.  Well, not really a fruit, but you get the idea.  You should probably pick a nice variety of beans based on your current consumption.  In addition to the usual dried beans, you should also consider split peas, lentils, etc.  Variety makes a big difference, and I gotta say, I love my wife’s split pea soup more than just about anything she makes.

Storage for dried beans is basically the same as for whole grains.  You can store them bought off the shelf for about a year, or stored in airtight containers for about ten years.  Beans do lose some quality after then, but you can eat them for about thirty years.

More Advice From Rudy: Rice and Beans, or Wheat and Beans are naturally complementing foods.  They will provide you a complete protein when served together.  Remember that, it’s important!

Meat, Chicken, Fish

Frozen, dried, canned…This stuff isn’t all that easy to store for long term.  You can dehydrate things like ground beef and it’ll store for a while.  This is an area where you want to augment this quickly with livestock.  Chickens and rabbits are great for raising plenty of good meat with minimal hassle and space.  If you have a pond or something similar, you can raise catfish and other ‘easy’ fish for added protein.  Chickens are good for eggs too.  Highly recommended!  On the whole egg note, don’t forget about powdered eggs.  They’ll store nicely for about a year in an unopened can and while maybe not as tasty as the real thing, they’re better than nothing!

Fats and Oils

This is another one of those critical areas.  You need to have fat to survive.  The problem is that fats and oils go rancid quick, and rancid oil makes you sick.  Bad plan!  The best plan is to buy what you use, store it unopened in a dark cool place, and rotate often.  Store bought oils will have good use by dates to reference.  A good rule of thumb for oils is about a year.

Shortening will last much longer, and is also good for cooking.  Store some!  Peanut butter, mayo, and salad dressing are other fats to consider storing.  They’ll store about a year or so unopened off the store shelf.

For a year’s worth of storage, plan on about two gallons of oils, four pounds each of shortening and peanut butter and a couple of quarts each of salad dressing and mayo.  Yes, that’s per person.  Your aiming for about 13 lbs total of fats and oils per person.

Sugars

For long term food storage, you need to store honey and pure cane granulated sugar.  Store it in a dark dry location, but not the fridge.  DON’T remove oxygen from sugar.  While sugar and honey will both store indefinitely, sugar begins to lose some of it’s appeal in a couple years.  It’s perfectly edible but it will clump and get a bit unappetizing.  Honey will store forever.  You can store brown sugar if you like, but it needs to be kept moist and won’t store quite as well.  Maple Syrup is a great storage item.  It will store for two years unopened on the shelf.

For a year’s supply for one person, you should consider storing 5lbs of honey, 40 lbs of granulated sugar, 5lbs of maple syrup.

Cooking Essentials

I won’t go into these in detail for now, but you should plan on the following items for a one year supply (again, per person):

• Baking Powder: 1lb
• Baking Soda: 1lb
• Yeast: 8oz
• Salt: 10lb
• Vinegar: 1gal

Miscellaneous and Comfort Foods

These are things that aren’t necessarily critical, but store well, and help add variety to your storage.  Once again, one year for one person follows:

• Jam/Jelly: 3 lbs
• Jello or other powdered gelatin: 2lbs
• Dry Soup Mix: 5lbs
• Drink Powders (Crystal Light, Lemonade, Kool Aid): 8lbs

Wrapup

I hope this helps.  It’s not all inclusive, and there’s plenty of ways to augment this, but it should give you an idea on how to get started.   As always, more later!

Rudy’s Final Tip: Many of these things can be augmented by off the shelf items from the store.  Things like Hamburger Helper, those Rice a Roni packages, stuff like that will store well and is often a ‘meal by itself’.  I personally love Zatarains mixes.  Good lord those taste good.  Don’t just store raw rice and wheat when you could also store other yummy goodness.

I'm eating steak tonight!

So earlier I posted about our concept of short to medium term food storage.  If you haven’t read that post, go back and read it now.  I’ll wait, I promise.  I’m still waiting.  No really, I am.  Well, while we’re waiting maybe I’ll just go ahead and show everyone else what I’m talking about.

I’m going to give you a more concrete example of how to plan food storage for short to medium term emergencies.  The general idea here is to try to keep meal time as normal as possible under whatever circumstances.  Since the zombies like brains and not steak, this shouldn’t generally be much of a problem, right?

Step One:  What on earth do we eat?

This one should be pretty easy.  Well, that is unless your family’s favorite meals consist of Big Macs, Whoppers, and the Chicken Volcano Burrito from Taco Bell.  The chances of those things being available in an emergency situation are pretty low.  And while McDonalds burgers may have the texture and taste of salted cardboard, they DO go bad.  Well, actually they seem to turn into this hard flat hockey puck thing, but that’s beside the point.

Some of our staples:

Breakfast

• Cereal
• Oatmeal
• Pancakes
• Toast

Lunch

• Sandwiches
• Chicken Strips

Dinners

• Pasta
• Green Bean Casserole (or Hot Dish if you’re a cheesehead)
• Potato and Ham Casserole
• Lasagna
• Tacos
• Pot Roast
• Pulled Pork
• Black Beans and Rice

Definitely not an exhaustive list, but it’s enough to get us started.

Step Two:  I’m not a Chef, why am I creating a menu?

Time to plan!  It’s pretty simple.  Create a rotation of your overall staples.  This could be a week rotation, or a two week rotation, or three, or whatever floats your boat.  I find it easiest to do this in a spreadsheet, which can then tell me EXACTLY what I need to have to make the meal.  I MIGHT be able to be convinced to share my secret spreadsheet sometime, but that’s for another day.

For simplicity, I’m going to plan on a one week rotation.

Bonus Tip: Sometimes things like Sandwiches get boring.  Think of ways to vary it up…Different kinds of jam, or different types of sandwiches.  BLTs instead of just plain lunch meat.  Maybe a mock Panini.  Use your imagination, your kids will thank you!

Step Three:  Menu?  Check!  What do I need to make all this?

This is where  you look at your menu, figure out how much you need per meal, per day.  For example, my family will go through about a box and a half of cereal a day.  Apply Rudy’s Rule of Extra Goodness and add a buffer.  So assuming we have three days of eating cereal at two boxes a day, that means I need six boxes of cereal per week.  Plus milk.  Yummy powdered milk.  Regular milk doesn’t store all that well!

I know you guys are all smart, so I’ll let you do the rest of this exercise yourself.  Figure out what it will take to keep your family eating food they actually like, instead of trying to figure out what to make today with the bucket of red winter wheat you have stored in the basement.

Another Bonus Tip:  Don’t worry TOO much about shelf life for some of this stuff.  I’ll talk about that down below.  For now, if you need stuff like regular milk, or ground beef, or whatever, just plan on that.

Step Four: Good grief, that’s a ton of food

Now we want to figure out how much we need to store.  This is a simple math problem.  But since we’re all old farts, we may need to grab the closest third grader to help out here.  In our example, since we planned on a one week rotation, and we’re planning for three months of storage, we need to multiply our ingredient list by twelve!  So my family needs 72 boxes of cereal to continue living the way we do.  Great Scott, Batman!

Step Five:  I don’t think all of this will last three months

Perfect for harnessing the excess energy of six year olds

Since we determined above that we’re all smart, we all recognize that while we certainly hope that we have power in the case of an emergency there is no guarantee that we will.  That said, I’m fond of steak and eggs, and good lord I love my wife’s fried chicken.  Most of which need some form of cold storage to keep for a while.  And the freezer doesn’t work without electricity.  Until I hook up the jumbo hamster wheel and lock my hyperactive six year old into it for a few hours a day, but that’s another post for another day.

My approach to this is simple and quite brilliant.  I plan on having grid power for most emergencies.  So I keep a freezer stocked with meats and other frozen items like my wife’s hidden ice cream bars that I’m not supposed to know about.  Please don’t tell her I’m the one who sneaks one a few times a week!  Anyways, the way I figure it is that if there IS an emergency without power, then we’re eating steak and chicken and burgers and ice cream for the first couple days.  Then it’s on to the food storage!  At least we’re eating well at first…

After that, you have to figure out longer term options for things you’d normally consume fresh.  Canned goods, whether you can it or you buy it at the store is a good option.  Another good option is dehydration.  You can dehydrate all sorts of stuff and it’ll store great.  Ground beef is a staple in this household and it dehydrates wonderfully.  Now that I think about it, I haven’t ever tried dehydrating my world famous hamburger patties and then trying to cook them.  I should try that.  Anyhow, be creative here, and look what’s on the shelf at the store, and you’ll manage fine!

Step Six:  Rotation, Rotation Rotation … Not Location!

Rotation, Rotation, Rotation.  Keep an eye on what you have on your shelf.  I know I talked about this in my summary post, but I can’t emphasize enough.  It’s important enough to get a post on it’s own soon, but until then, I recommend you practice FIFO rotation.  First In, First Out.

I hope this helps!  Please ask any questions you might have in the comments and I’ll try to answer them!

Don’t get me wrong.  Wheat, rice, and other bulk stored items have a place you your expanded pantry.  But far too many people just throw it in the garage and call it good.  Then the zombies show up and you’re stuck figuring out what on earth to do to make this hard red wheat edible.

Unfortunately this is a path rife with peril yet far to commonly traveled.  Wheat and other grains are undeniably critical to proper nutrition.  Wheat is hard to digest if your system isn’t used to it.  If you aren’t used to eating wheat in more natural forms you’ll get sick, and you can easily develop gluten allergies.  Not a good thing.  It’s actually frightfully likely that you’d die as a result of that.  More on that later!  The flour and whatnot that you get at the store isn’t a very good substitute, and 90% of the bread you buy doesn’t help either.  You have to use the real stuff.

Great, so what do I do for short to mid term food storage?

Read on, loyal readers!  All shall be answered below!

Rule one!  Store what you eat!

You have to know what to do with your food storage when you dip into it.  This means that unless you have whole wheat as a key part of your diet already, you shouldn’t depend on it.  It has a place, for sure, but not to depend on.

Figure out what the staples are for your family.  What are those recipes that are the ‘old standby’ for you?  What do you cook when you don’t have much time?  If you’re like most families, you have a relatively low number of meals that you have on a regular basis.  Focus on those first.

The goal here is to have the fixings for these meals in storage.  And again, you HAVE to look at things with a certain level of abstraction.  So plan out a sample month worth of meals, repeating the things you have often appropriately.  Make it look like an average month in your household would look like in ‘normal times.’  Then figure out what ingredients you need for that month.  Voila, there’s your monthly baseline.  If you want six months of food storage, multiply it by six.

I know you guys don’t need me to tell you this, but for the common sense impaired out there, be sure to be appropriate with what you get here … if something you need has a three month shelf life, you don’t want to keep six months worth of it around.

Rule two!  Eat what you store!

Now you have a couple months or so of your families food needs stored, a couple interesting things happen.  First, you’ve got a bunch of food in the basement, so if you run out in the kitchen, you just go down to the basement (or wherever) and go shopping there instead of the store.  Then, when things go on sale, replenish your basement food storage room.  It’s cheaper, easier, and vastly more convenient!

Be sure to keep track of what you have in your storage room.  Use a spreadsheet, label boxes, etc.  Practice FIFO (First In First Out) for proper rotation.  Be sure to keep track of shelf lives of different foods.  The last thing you want is to get food poisoning.

The beauty of these two rules is pretty simple.  You won’t have a drastic dietary change if something happens and you have to dip into storage, as you’ve already been eating from your storage.  Food storage is no longer some foreign concept that Mormons and Camouflaged Survivalist Freakazoids do, but is just a method of getting a deeper pantry to be prepared and be more economically smart.  Camouflage fatigues are optional.

What else do I need to know?

Well, I’ll have some posts about longer term food storage (back to the 50lb bags of rice and beans) and food preservation methods such as canning and drying.  Need to write those first though!