This month I carved out room in the budget to start storing food. My first goal is simple, 2 weeks worth of food. I want to be able to bug in and lie low for 2 weeks and not have to leave the house. I have 110 gallons of water stored, and now need to work on the food. I don't really know where to start. Where can you find how long different types of food can store? The food will be kept either in our large pantry, or a closet in the basement. The basement is pretty cool (60-65) all the time. What do you recommend starting with? Any good resources to read?
Two weeks is easy. Simply buy more of what you already use in the way of canned/dry goods. Assume that refrigeration won't exist, and then be pleasantly surprised if it does, so plan on not having it. Buy some things that would replace what you would refrigerate, such as dry milk. Take whatever you use now in fresh milk, for example, and buy that much replacement for two weeks in dry form. Then I'd add things like a more or less "whole meal" like canned stews, chili, etc, that you can "heat n eat" with or w/o a side dish. Don't forget a way of cooking as well.....get a Coleman camp stove, I like the propane models, and store enough of the propane bottles to handle cooking for a while. That will get you a basic start. Then I'd expand that out to couple months. That much, you can use in rotation and never worry much about stuff being too far out of date. Most "use by" dates are extremely conservative, you can eat canned goods 2-5 times past that ( depending on the contents ) and still have excellent food. Once you get out beyond few months, you need to start looking at dehydrated and/or freeze dried foods for really long term shelf life. I keep a LOT of cases of Mt House freeze dried, for example, that have a 25 year "best by" date, and I suspect would be good well past my expected life span. We also store a lot of whole grains, such as wheat/oats/rice/corn in dry whole form, and have the means to grind into flours/meals for baking/cooking, or use in whole form. If you're not used to cooking from REALLY scratch form, this is a learned art, and requires tools most home kitchens don't have laying around, so you need to tool up and learn how to take something like wheat from the whole berry form to a loaf of bread. Then, once you get a GOOD supply of stored food, say a year or two, you'll want to move on to the NEXT stage....which is food production. Nobody can store enough food to last forever, at least not in a form you'd probably want to live on forever, so growing/raising at least a part of your own is the next logical step. Raise a garden if you don't already...start small.....work your way up. Then consider some critters.....chickens/rabbits are easy sources of protein and both simple to raise. If you have the room and desire, move up to pigs/cows/fish. We do all of those, and rarely buy "outside" sources of meat....haven't bought eggs in years ( in fact, we sell our excess ). It's a long process to wean yourself from TOTAL dependence on others for the basic necessities of life, but it certainly CAN be done.....and should be IMHO, if you understand how fragile the supply system is.
Andy has about "nailed it". Just a commitment to start is a good first step. Seeing the need means you have recognized a problem. Preps need not be an expensive project although you can put a lot into it if prefered. The bulk of our preps are dried grains. We do have about 4 months of MREs as a quick grab if needed. An extra box of salt/pepper/sugar/etc. all along will soon have your stores up and going. Keep at it.
we are planting a decent size garden, about 80x40. this will be the second year doing that, last year we had mixed results. After some lessons learned hopefully we can get a better result this year.
I just posted a thread called, "one year supply of food and inflation". Check out the link I posted. Grandpappy has a ton of info on his site, but specifically to what you have asked.... This dream one year supply for one person that grandpappy lists.... tells you what has a short self or other storage life, what has a long shelf life, total calories for the quanity he lists as recommended. You want to shoot for 2400 to 3000 calories per day minimum. All your canned goods like soups and canned corn etc in tin cans has a minimum of 2 year shelf life if you were keeping it cool and dry. I Hope this helps.
