Food Storage: Where to Start?

January 04, 2012 The Provident Princess 0 Comments

I think there are a lot of people who are interested in having food storage but just feel too overwhelmed to even know where to start. I know I was when I first started thinking about it.

1 year worth of food...it just seems so daunting.

I know it can be so overwhelming to think about getting a year's worth of food storage. The task seems almost insurmountable. But I have a few ideas to make it easier to get started.

There are so many different angles you could take. You could just buy extra of what you are already eating every time you go shopping. But I think the problem with that is that there are so many things that we buy that are perishable that I wouldn't want to 1. buy more of that or 2. buy the dehydrated or freeze dried equivalent because those foods are a lot more expensive and lets face it, not essential.

I think the best place to start is to think about how much food you would need to survive.

When I say survive, I mean it. No frills or extras.

To stay alive you could live off of Wheat, Milk, Honey and Salt.

Obviously you would need water too but we already established that it isn't really reasonable for a family to store more than about 2 weeks worth in a previous post.

The nice thing about these 4 items is that they can essentially be stored forever.

Honey, sugar and salt can all be stored indefinitely and if your wheat is packaged correctly, it can be stored for 30+ years. Same with powdered milk.

These items are also used as a base for almost everything in most of our diets and contain nutrients vital to survival. I will cover each of these items in separate upcoming posts.

To get an idea of how much of these items you will need to store, check out this food storage calculator.

Note: I think that having enough of these items stored would give a beginner peace of mind knowing that their family could survive if they had to. Remember though, this is just a place to start, a jumping off point.

Variety is the spice of life. Especially for food storage.

The next thing on the list would be beans/legumes. But I will show you how to enhance your food storage after the basics are taken care of.