Food Storage

If you are new to putting back a little food storage, you’ll likely do what I did many years ago, and read books (or these days surf the net) looking for how-to articles, which usually have some sort of list of what to store. I have a couple I’ve seen over the years that I like, although I’m a big fan of developing your own list that essentially comes out of your day to day grocery consumption. It will of course require common sense modifications (powdered milk vs. fresh is an easy example), but it will be things that:

1. You WILL actually eat.
2. Since you will eat it, there is a better chance that you WILL rotate your storage in a timely manner.

That said there are some seriously BAD storage plans out there as well. The faults are many, including but not limited to:

1. Being nutritionally unsound. Deficiency diseases are not fun.
2. Far too bulky. Having a few hundred cans of beans and weenies is all well and good, but have you tried getting them in your car? What if you need to go somewhere else?
3. Require too much preparation. If at least part of your supplies cannot be eaten cold as is, you’re not thinking through your possible scenarios properly. What do you cook with when you’re off grid and out of propane? If it’s dehydrated, where is the water coming from to re-hydrate?
4. And the greatest sin, being too expensive. You can assemble your own food reserves far cheaper than buying a pre-packaged ‘kit’, or buying individual freeze dried meals.

Anyways, here is one of my ‘bad’ lists from the internet. This list is an older one, but still pops up on different forums from time to time. The idea is to buy five dollars of food per week, and at the end of a year, you have:
• 500 lbs of wheat
• 180 lbs of sugar
• 40 lbs of powdered milk
• 12 lbs of salt
• 10 lbs of honey
• 5 lbs of peanut butter
• 45 cans of tomato soup
• 15 cans of cream of mushroom soup
• 15 cans of cream of chicken soup
• 24 cans of tuna
• 21 boxes of macaroni & cheese
• 500 aspirin
• 1000 multi-vitamins
• 6 lbs of yeast
• 6 lbs of shortening
• 12 lbs of macaroni

Supposedly, this will give you “1,249,329 calories which based on a 2000 calorie a day diet will provide enough food for two people for 312 days!” It might, but let’s go through this line by line to see what faults (if any) there are in this plan.

a) 500 lbs of wheat – ok as far as it goes, but there are basically only three ways to use it: Eating it hot or cold as ‘wheat berries’ requires water and fuel. Processing it to flour and then using it requires both of the above plus special equipment. Not quite as cheap when you look at the big picture, since it requires other inputs.
b) 180 lbs of sugar – Sugar is a necessary ingredient in many things such as bread, as well as being a sweetener, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have. You need to think about whether you need 180 pounds of it, and if substituting some other foods might not be a bad idea. By the way, just under 25% of the roughly 1.25 million calories that this list gives you are from the sugar!
c) 40 lbs of powdered milk – Fine, but remember it requires water as an input to use it.
d) 12 lbs of salt – Fine, except I think there is too little of it. You’ll need it as a vital component of food preservation, not just as a spice.
e) 10 lbs of honey – Its ok, but again, not a real stand alone food. About 16,000 calories here.
f) 5 lbs of peanut butter – Better, but not enough of it. If you look at the whole list, there aren’t a lot of fats/oils on it other than the peanut butter. And at nearly 2700 calories to the pound, a very nice calorie/weight ratio.
g) 45 cans of tomato soup and …
h) 15 cans of cream of mushroom soup and…
i) 15 cans of cream of chicken soup – Seriously?? Nearly fifty pounds weight in those 75 cans of soup, giving you only 14,700 calories or about a week of calories for one person. And that’s without looking at the water and fuel inputs required for best results. Dried soup base is a far better option here.
j) 24 cans of tuna – good, just not enough of it. If this list is supposed to feed two people for 312 days (10 months), then you each get a half can of tuna every two weeks. Pretty sparse, protein wise.
k) 21 boxes of macaroni & cheese – bulky, but high in calories. Water and heat inputs required. It would be a bad choice for me personally, as I hate this stuff!!! But since you only have enough to eat one box every two weeks, you won’t get sick of it, I guess.
l) 500 aspirin – It’s not food, so why is this on here? To keep your arteries from clogging from all the crap? This should be in a different category of preps altogether.
m) 1000 multi-vitamins – you’ll need them, since there aren’t any vegetable or fruits being stored on this list.
n) 6 lbs of yeast – I assume so you can bake bread. Nice to have but not strictly necessary, as you can make unleavened bread, or make sourdough starter if you must have raised bread.
o) 6 lbs of shortening – baking and cooking. Again an ok thing, but not stand alone food.
p) 12 lbs of macaroni – At last, a good choice! This is your wheat processed and condensed. It stores as well as most foods, if not as long as wheat in pails, is no worse to prepare than anything else on this list, but has a pretty high calorie to weight ratio. Still requires water and heat inputs.

There you have it, my critique of what I see as a “bad” list. It is of course better than no storage at all, but a little forethought will give you a better balanced, higher calorie list for your money. Which beings me to the one thing I DO like about this list: The idea of a regular weekly allotment of a small amount of money to food storage purchases. It’s an older list, so I suggest that five dollars per week is a bit small. I’m currently conducting an experiment on what you can amass on one dollar a day (i.e. $7/week) and it seems to be working well.

So what about your own experiences with purchasing food for storage? Do you have the ‘ideal’ one-year list? Or a list of don’ts instead of dos? Feel free to share them.

In the meantime, keep putting away food, if only a little every week. Any amount is better than nothing. Given the last crop year and the current prospects, it is worthwhile to do so as an inflation hedge, if for no other reason.