Food Stockpiles: Stocking What you Eat

In last week's post on 5 Basic Steps to Starting a Food Stockpile, we went over a few tips to help you get started on your food preps.

Over the next series of posts, I'd like to break down each of the 5 basic steps and discuss them in more detail.

Stocking What You Eat

This is a very crucial first step in starting your stockpiles! As I mentioned before, if you are in the middle of a situation that is causing you to survive off of your food preps, you are probably going to be feeling stress from many avenues.  Adjusting your diets, or arguing with children to get them to eat something they normally do not, can be mostly avoidable.

So a few things to consider when you think about stocking what you eat.

What Kind of Food to Stock
There are many different options available when thinking of stocking food.

• Purchase canned vegetables, fruits, beans, meat, from the store
• Can your own items from things you have harvested yourself
• Bulk containers of grains, sugar, etc.
• Dehydrated (DIY or purchased) foods
• Freeze Dried Foods or MRE's

Each type of preservation has it's pros and cons. 

Food in a can, purchased or home-canned, are heavy and bulky. They take a lot of room to store and are not ideal to transport. However, they last a long time and for many items they can be eaten straight from the can or just warmed.

Bulk storage of grains, sugar, etc are ideal for long term storage. But like canned foods, they are not ideal to transport and they take a lot of room to store.  However, these items can help supplement your vegetables and meats for complete meals.

Dehydrated foods do take up less room and store longer because you are removing most of the moisture from the foods.  And freeze dried foods are quite light because all moisture has been removed; however, water is needed for cooking.

MRE's are heavier than freeze dried, but still light weight and are truly ready to eat. You wouldn't necessarily want to plan  to live off of these, but they can be great for bug out/get home bags and to help supplement your food storage.

The best method in my opinion, is to store a variety of these types of food. However, keeping in mind that you will want to make sure your family is accustomed to eating some of the 'stranger' foods - especially MRE's. I have not personally ate them, but read many a tale and I'm sure it would take some adjusting for kids.

By stocking what you eat, and eating what you stock you will make sure that everyone is used to eating different textures and flavors of foods. Then you aren't just 'living off your food preps' but just eating normally.

 



Cooking Methods
Think about how you will prepare the foods that you are storing.  When you are preparing for a short term emergency, things like sternos, or grills may be a common way of cooking or heating food. 

However, when you begin to think of long term storage for a complete grid down scenario you can't run to the grocery store and stock up on milk, bread, and eggs as you may for a winter storm. You will need to think about ways to prepare foods using more back to basics cooking techniques rather than the pre-packaged, instant methods commonly used today.

Layered Approach
I do sincerely believe in all of your prepping endeavors it's best to take a layered approach.  Start with having ways to survive short term emergencies, 3-7 days and then layer on new items and methods to extend that time frame.


I hope that you find this to be helpful information. Feel free to leave comments below as to how you approach your food storage preps!

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