Emergency Preparedness: How to Store Food at Home

As I think I’ve made clear through some of my other posts, I’m a big fan of resilience. Some of those posts deal with financial resilience, some address resilience through skills (like DIY home improvement or fitness), and still others highlight the importance of resilience through preparedness.

This post is one in the vein of emergency preparedness, specifically food-related. I have mentioned how I’m mildly into prepping in a reasonable-person-kind-of-way, right?

A Recap on the Rule of Threes

Food is low on the hierarchy of needs when it comes to emergency preparedness. You might remember that I wrote about the Rule of Threes in this post. To review:

When it comes to survival, the Rule of Threes helps drive a lot of how to prioritize for your own situation. The Rule of Threes is pretty widely-known and referred to in the survival community, and some variation of it has been taught and used since I was a kid in Boy Scouts. The Rule of Threes goes something like this, and each successive line assumes the one before it has been satisfied:

You can survive three minutes without air or in icy water
…three hours in a harsh environment
…three days without water
…three weeks without food

Not sure about you, but I’d like to survive more than three weeks in my home should it be necessary. I’d also like to be able to use that time period wisely for planning without thinking nonstop about how hungry my family is during it…

Why Storing Food is Reasonable

Food Storage for Short-Term Scenarios

Though it might not seem intuitive to stack food to prepare for a short-term emergency like a hurricane or ice storm, there is definitely reason to do so. As is the case with just-in-time logistics in our food supply chain, there is a certain fragility to supermarkets’ ability to stay stocked during and after disasters (or even forecasted disasters).

Consider that it takes only a short-term power outage for grocery store fridges and freezers to shut off and allow for food to spoil. The logical next consideration during this scenario is that, depending upon where you live, you are competing with over 5,000 of your closest friends for that grocery store’s non-perishables.*

Depending upon the cause of a power outage, it could be days or weeks until the grocery store’s shelves get re-stocked. The ice-storm that hit Texas in 2021 left residents all over scrambling for what little food was left on store shelves which quickly went bare, according to the Texas Tribune. A little pre-planning for such a scenario when times are good might go a long way.

Long-Term Scenarios for Food Storage

Not to seem too Malthusian about this, but there are a myriad of factors that may impact our collective access to food over the long-term. Over the long-term, the US seems well positioned due to our access to productive farmland and wealth. However, there are developing issues that threaten both of these advantages.

Climate change, the depletion of aquifers used to irrigate vast swathes of our most productive industrial farmland, a rising likelihood of regional crop failure due to mono-cropping, and our stubborn refusal to do away with market inefficiencies in our agricultural system (like growing corn for ethanol), all erode the US “access to productive farmland” advantage.

Globally, we have other issues that our (US) wealth helps mitigate to some extent. However, a growing middle class in both China and India, our global population centers, leads many economists to forecast consumption to rise consistent with that. This will almost certainly lead to more food competition and, potentially, scarcity.** Food will, at the very least, probably become more expensive in the future.

How to Store Food

By now, hopefully I’ve convinced you that it’s pretty reasonable to set some food aside for times that might not be quite as good as they are today. If you’re starting from scratch, what should be your first step?

Learn to cook. If you’re relying upon stored food, chances are good you aren’t going to be able to order in. If you don’t have even this basic level of ability to properly prepare food, then start there. Eating your stored food is really going to be a hardship if you don’t know how to make it tasty (or safe to consume!).
Buy a bit more of the things you already eat and set them aside. If you’ve already got a pantry in your kitchen, you probably already do this. If you don’t, consider setting aside a cabinet in your kitchen or even a linen or coat closet to put extra food in. Making pasta? Buy a few extra boxes and few extra jars of sauce. Campbell’s Chunky Soup for weekend lunch? Buy a bunch of extra cans. These things all keep pretty well, so just setup a rotation in your pantry to eat the oldest ingredients first.
Buy a lot more of the things you eat and set them aside. Nothing like shopping grocery store sales or a warehouse club to stock up. In my basement, right now, I have at least three 25-pound bags of rice. Luckily I have the space for them, so it doesn’t do me any harm to put some extra bags down there because they keep for a really long time if they stay dry. For this category of storage, think most canned goods, dry goods, honey (this lasts forever), peanut butter, spices (especially iodized salt).
Buy long-term storage food. This is where things start to get into “prepper” territory… Dehydrated foods, freeze-dried foods… You can spend a lot of money buying food in this category. It’s relatively easy to store (think cool and dry, like a basement or interior closet). Freeze-dried stuff lasts damn near forever. The Mountain House freeze-dried foods that I buy have 30-year “best by” dates on them, but even those dates are a suggestion. The same rule applies to these as to your other pantry items—rotate through them starting with the oldest, if you can. I take them camping because they’re unbelievably easy and satisfying. Often you can get them at a pretty good discount if you wait for them to go on sale.***

Another Consideration for Food Sourcing

What I’ve touched on thus far has to do with storing food in your house that you would source commercially. As I discussed a bit in my water storage post, keeping what you need on hand can really only last you so much time. Most of us have money or space constraints, so food is probably not something we can easily keep a lifetime supply of.

The ultimate way to ensure that you’ll always have enough food is to learn to create it. This can be done either through growing your own (gardening, farming, livestock) or getting it (hunting, trapping). These are skills that take a long time to develop. If you’ve ever spoken to someone who does either of these things exclusively for their own subsistence, they’ll tell you how difficult it is.

As a result, please don’t think that you’ll simply go off on your own in the wild and live off the land for the rest of your life if it becomes necessary. Unless you’ve been doing it your whole life, you will die. Learn and practice when times are good.

I like to grow food in my garden. I am not stupid enough to think my family could live off of what I can grow on my suburban homestead. I see this as supplementation, at best.****

Bon Appetit!

While a pretty basic breakdown of food storage as a whole, I hope this article presents a decent roadmap as to the why and how. There’s plenty more resources out there on this subject that address things like gamma seal lids, desiccants, how much of the various foods to store, etc. You can really go down the rabbit hole on this.

My advice: First, consider the scenarios you’re most likely to face that could interrupt your grocer’s food supply. Second, think about the effect that would have on you and your family. Finally, plan accordingly.

*I’ve calculated this based on 2016 county-level grocery store and supermarket data published by the Economic Research Service arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, called their “Food Environment Atlas.” According to this data source, there were 65,399 grocery stores in the US. Population data was pulled from the U.S. Census Bureau’s “Population Clock”: 332,399,320 as of Christmas Day, 2021 (Merry Christmas!).

**It’s not necessarily all doom-and-gloom, however. New technologies are constantly being invented to make farming and food more efficient. The cornucopian perspective (the counter to Malthusianism) would argue that we’ve not even begun to approach the Easter Island scenario of using up all our resources. Human ingenuity, they would argue, is boundless. What’s the saying, though? “Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.”

***Note that I do not put Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) into my food prepping categories. I have maybe five cases of them. However, their shelf life is notably shorter (10ish years is what I’ve read), cost is exorbitant (>$12 per meal), and they take up a lot more space than their freeze-dried equivalent. No harm in getting them if you love MREs, but I think freeze-dried backpacking meals ($6-$8) are the way to go here…

****It’s also tremendously rewarding to play in the dirt and eat food you’ve grown yourself.