Food Storage - Where, What, and How Much?

This week I want to talk about food storage.  That can be a scary phrase.  It can bring to mind images of extreme preppers who have basements full of supplies.  You might be looking around your house trying to figure out where you're going to store that much stuff.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret.  You do not need to store enough food and supplies to feed a village for a year or more.  Set a goal and work towards it.  Everyone is different and everyone's family needs are different.  You might not be somewhere where you can have a large storage.  I have a lot of military friends who cannot keep large food stores because of moving frequently or where they're living doesn't have a place where they can fit a storage in; they generally keep a small storage (1-6 months).  

For my family, it really depends on the item for how much we are storing.  Some items we have a months worth, some items we have 3 months, some 6 months, and some 12 months.  It just depends on what it is.  Our goal is to have 3-6 months of storage.  We have an attached garage on our house that was converted into an extra room; half of the room is dedicated to our storage and the other half is my office/craft room.  It's just enough space to meet our storage goals.

Maybe you only have enough space to store food and supplies for a month.  That is OK...store one month of supplies.  Once you are comfortable with that, maybe stretch to two or three months.  It's OK if you only ever store one month of supplies.

I frequently think back to our early years of marriage.  We lived in an itty bitty apartment.  There was a closet that we could spare to store our meager food storage.  My mom threw me a pantry shower (some call it a "pounding" or a "kitchen shower") and I was gifted a lot of food items to help us get started.  I plan to do the same for my daughter and my future daughter-in-law when the time comes in the future to grow our family through the marriages of my kids.

We were so ridiculously broke in those early years and could only spare $1-5 per week to build our storage.  We'd look for sales and buy a little extra.  I didn't use coupons then - I really don't now, but we'll talk about couponing another day - so everything that I got was a sale item.  If you watch at the stores, you'll notice that they run on cycles.  If pasta is on sale this week, it will be on sale again in 8-12 weeks.

One of the blogs I found through Pinterest had a list of suggested items that you could get for $5 a week.  If you know how to bake - or are willing to learn how - this is a pretty good list that you can follow or use to create your own list.  If you click on the image it should take you to the blog.

You might have more than $5 a week that you can spare to build your food storage, so you can adjust the amount.  You may also want to save your budgeted amount of money for storage and use it in combination with another week to buy a bigger ticketed item.  For example, a package of toilet paper at Sam's Club (45 rolls per package, depending on the brand - we like Member's Mark) is $20.  If my budget is $10 per week, I might save my $10 from one week and save it for toilet paper week so that I have $20.

Another question that I have been asked is what should be stored.  I will answer this with a question...What do you eat/use today?

If you don't bake, and aren't willing to learn how to bake, then don't store flour and yeast.  If you are allergic to peanuts, then peanut butter would be a really bad idea to keep in your food storage.  If you eat your weight in pasta, then you might want to keep a few boxes of pasta, some jars of pasta sauce, and a canister of Parmesan cheese (if that's your thing) in your storage.

When I started my food storage, we were given a list of items that we should store.  On the list were items listed out by pounds.  So we should have so many pounds of flour, sugar, rice, oats, wheat, etc.  We don't use wheat.  I do have some, and I have a manual wheat grinder, but if I needed to rely on this wheat for survival, I would get sick and I'd be really hungry.  Our mantra - when it comes to storage - is "buy what you eat and eat what your store".  

I did see a funny meme on Facebook this week...

Before you laugh too hard, if you need chocolate to survive and emergency, by all means, store it!  I have jars of chocolate chips that I have sealed with my Food Saver.  I'm thinking that maybe putting some M&Ms in a variety of flavors into some jars would be a good idea.

One thing that you definitely want to store is water.  Water is essential to a food storage set up.  You'll need it to mix powdered milk, add to pancake mix, drink, etc.  It seems like once a year we enjoy a boil advisory for some reason - water main break, something weird happens at the water treatment plant, etc.  Having water stored allows you to have drinkable water in case of that kind of emergency.  We did a great job with water storage for awhile, but are low right now.  The rule I have always heard is to store one gallon of water per person for a day.  We do not have space to store 3 months of water.  To be completely honest, if we didn't have water for 3 months there would be a much bigger problem.  Our family goal is to store 1-2 weeks of water.  That means making space for 28-56 gallons of water.

Hopefully this helps you to start thinking of what and how much to store.  If you have questions, enter them in the comments or contact me.  Next week I'll talk more on what to store and how to use some items that we keep in our food storage.