How to get started buying food with long-term storage in mind.

I was perusing a subreddit earlier today and someone asked a question about how to go about buying and storing food and it struck me that this is one of those “prepper-n00b” questions that everyone should ask before running out to the store and spending $500 on “emergency supplies.”

There are hundreds of hours of reading ahead of you, not to mention instructional videos if you’re looking to get into the business of putting food away for your family for an emergency, but before you get launched down those rabbit holes, let’s cover a few basic things everyone needs to know starting out!

Do NOT rush out to the store and buy all at once!

Ask me how I know…

So you’ve decided to get serious about preparations for you and your family. The first instinct you’ve got is to to go the store and purchase everything you ever saw your mom or grandparents buy that got you through every snowstorm, power outage, etc. You’re gonna need canned soups, rice, beans, ALL the stuffs!

STOP!

Slow down and think it through first. Trust me, you will thank me later.

How many are in your family?

First things first, how many are you going to need to buy for? I don’t mean look at your wife or husband and say “well, two, duh!” Be realistic. You’ve got a mindset of preparation going so let’s think about this. Do you have any kids? Maybe you have two children that live with their other parent half the time. Are you going to plan for them in your meal planning? If not, and you plan six months of food for two and you have your kids with you when disaster strikes, you now have exactly half of that in an instant.

If you haven’t had a conversation with your family yet about how they feel about prepping and you’re going to be the hero that does this all on his or her own, you’re going to fail and you’re going to waste a lot of money before you finally do. You’re going to need your immediate family or spouse on board at a minumum, unless you live alone. If you live alone, screw the rest of ’em, you got this!

Example: My mother is 74 years old on a fixed retirement and social security income. She can’t afford to prep for herself and let’s face it, she’s 74. She’s not gonna make it on her own for an extended period of time with no food. So it’s up to me. Now I’ve got my wife, my son, my mom. That’s four. That just doubled the amount of food I’m going to need.

Ask yourself WHO you’re going to need to feed, and be serious about it. You can always add support for more in later on. That’s easy, but don’t start out thinking you’re just gonna buy for two and maybe you’ll share with mom. Plan for the reality you’re going to face. After all, you’ll eventually learn that a family need approximately 300 pounds of grains per person per year (rice, oats, etc). Where are you planning to put 1200 pounds of Uncle Bens?

Start with basics

It’s totally fine to start with some basics first. After all you have to start somewhere and you can use that first trip out to the store to take notes about other things. While you’re buying rice, go ahead and look at cans of soup and green beans. Take notes on the following:

How many servings per can/bag does it provide?
How many calories do you get from it? (Because calories are king. The rest is important but calories are KING in a survival situation. If it takes up the space of a gallon coffee can but only provides 100 calories, it’s wasted space and you should skip it at this point).
How much does it cost at this store? At the discount store? You’ll need to budget.
How long is it good for? (Read the expiration date. Many foods can be eaten beyond their expiration date. After all, that’s printed for insurance purposes, not as an indicator of how long the food is actually good for. You will eventually need to plan that into your rotation of items and I’ll get to why in the next section.

Buy in quantities you can afford and that you can eat while it’s still good.

Even if you’ve come into a windfall tax return of an extra $1500 and want to go all out on food prep tomorrow, don’t make the mistake that so many others do by purchasing a truck load of food from a local grocery store all at one time.

If you know you want to have 30 cans of soup per person as part of your emergency 30-day supply, don’t go out this week and purchase 120 cans of Campbells Chunky Steak and Potato soup. If you do, you’ll be crying in a year when you throw the 90% of unused soups in the trash and think about all the money you wasted. Stores purchase food in lots that expire on or about the same time. If you want the longest lasting stuff, reach to the BACK of the shelf, not the front. Store stockers are paid to put the stuff with the closest expiration date up front where you can reach it so it doesn’t go bad on them. That’s not your problem. Get the newest stock you can find of a particular item.

But above all, use some sense when deciding on a quantity of food to purchase. Purchase some this week and then purchase the same amount again of the same things two weeks later, or a month later.

I literally sat with my wife a few weeks ago and went through my “go-to-hell pantry” and tossed probably $300 of items we purchased too much of that had long since expired.

There are a variety of reasons to purchase in small quantities.

It stops you from impulse buying, which saves money for things you remember you REALLY need later on.
You’ll learn how fast you actually go through certain kinds of items and you’ll get in the habit of “grocery shopping from your pantry” and then resupplying the pantry from the store.
Your food’s expiration dates will be further apart.

Make achievable goals.

If you prep long enough, you’ll learn the 7-30-90-180-365 concept. Start with setting aside enough food for one week. Achieve that goal. Then do another week. Then another. Now work towards a month’s worth of food, keeping in mind that you SHOULD be consuming some of this during normal meals or else you’re buying the wrong things so you need to occasionally replenish consumed stock.

If you’re not eating what you’re buying, then you’re not buying what you’re going to eat. Make sense? If the only thing that makes your chubby ass happy is Blueberry Pop Tarts and you’ve only bought lean-cuisine, you’re gonna be a miserable bastard to deal with about 6 days into the foodpocalypse!

Label Things or you WILL get lazy.

When you get home, Sharpie the expiration date on everything where it’s easily visible. That’s usually the tops of cans or glass jars and I use a plastic label on bagged items such as flour, sugar, and grains. I know me. If I have to look hard to find it later, I’m just going to grab what’s closest not what’s oldest. I did this two days ago with sugar… my wife came home with 10 pounds of sugar for the pantry. I immediately put it right in front, right where I’d just used up the last two 5-pounds bags of sugar. I caught myself halfway back down the hallway and made myself go back down the hall and rotate the stock to where the oldest sugar was up front. How dumb might I feel five years from now if I need this stuff and the two front packages of flour or sugar expire soon, but the other 40 pounds I’ve been stocking behind it expired years ago and I was too lazy to notice?

Go shopping, but don’t go crazy!

If you’re new to prepping and food storage, this is as far as you need to read for the first trip to the store. We’re going to get into all the other fun stuff too, but don’t make the mistake of just Googling a bunch of stuff, jotting down a note, and running off to the store thinking you’re prepared.

You’re going to learn all kinds of things rather quickly as you proceed towards one month’s supply of certain things. For example:

Damn, how much sugar do we use in this house? I make a gallon of tea about every 2 days. That’s almost a quart of sugar a week. That’s 1.76 pounds of sugar consumed just in sweet tea. Now factor in coffee, cooking, breakfasts, etc. If you’re burning a 5-pound bag of sugar a week, then you better make room on your pantry shelves if you want to have room to store enough for any amount of time.
Ramen really DOES last forever! (But it takes up a lot of space).
What kind of rice do I need to buy? Instant rice, white rice, brown rice, basmati rice, jasmine rice? I’ll just buy the cheapest stuff right? (WRONG – another article on that later).
You just purchased 42 cans of green beans. How many did you eat last month? Zero. Something is wrong with your preparations. Either you’re buying stuff you don’t like, or you’ve just assumed that when the time comes you’ll just automatically adapt to a healthy diet of fruits and veggies because that’s the thing you heard people do when the apocalypse happens, right? Wrong. What you’ll do to yourself if you try that is spend a week in the bathroom dehydrating yourself because your normal habit of cheez-its and pop tarts has NOT accustomed your body to the 700% increase in fiber you’re about to start it on and you’re going to be tired, weak, poop a lot, and not in a good position to help yourself or your family when the time comes.

I’ll do the next article on vacuum sealing and preserving some of the more common foods you’ll be wanting to purchase.

Update:

Check out the articles titled “Vacuum Sealing – Storing Bulk Food“, and “How to save space when storing” for some more tips.

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