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This page is still under construction, and may be incomplete.
These are the fundamentals that you'll combine with each other and with fresh and canned foods to make your family's meals. There are no convenience foods here. The list may seem heavy on carbohydrates, but that's for a reason. Carbohydrates have the greatest percentage of calories for the least demanding storage requirements of any food. Eat fresh veggies and meat when you can get them, but make sure you have a solid selection of carbohydrates in the back of the pantry or food storage area for when you can't get anything else. Someone new to food storage is likely to look at this list and ask, "How can I possibly acquire all that food, while I'm trying to feed my family every day at the same time?" The answer, of course, is that you don't have to buy it all at once. Some things will be more expensive in the long run if you buy them in small quantities. But if that's the only way you can get them, then pick up one or two items on every trip to the grocery store. Buy an extra bag of rice and an extra bag of beans each week until you have enough. Or two boxes of your favorite pasta instead of one. Sugar is available almost everywhere in 25-pound bags, and at a reasonable price (at this writing, anyway), so that's one item you might be able to purchase all at once. Salt is also usually available in large bags. Beans can be purchased in bulk from most produce stands (and many grocery stores) for much less per pound than the small bags on the supermarket shelves, though the selection may be limited. You can count two children as one adult (unless the children are babies, and in that case you have more specialized food needs anyway). You might want to count teenaged boys as 1-1/2 adults, just to be certain you have enough. This information is set out a bit differently than on many other sites, where you're encouraged to just buy the things your family already eats. There is nothing wrong with that advice, except that many families are accustomed to eating a restricted selection of highly processed pre-cooked and packaged items that only look like food. They take up far more storage space than is justified by the amount of food in them, and many of them are meant to be prepared in a microwave. Moreover, the nutritional content is often minimal, and the chemical and preservative content is sky high. If your family has to live through a prolonged emergency, you need food with as much nutrition in it as you can possibly manage. You also need things that, if they must be cooked, can be prepared on a camp stove, in a solar oven, on a grill, or over a fire pit in the ground. If you already cook your family's meals from scratch, then by all means make a list of your favorite dishes and use that to determine what you would need for a year. But consider that you may also need to make things that you typically buy now, such as bread, breakfast cereals and snack items. There is an excellent modular storage plan at a site called Stockpiling Food for Small Spaces and Small Budgets. This plan uses 66-gallon plastic storage containers that hold two weeks worth of food for a family of two adults and two small children. Because the intent is to store everything that would be needed for that period in one container, it doesn't provide very well for bulk storage of staples. But it's a good way for someone new to food storage to get started. In addition, if you had to evacuate your home in a hurry, it might be possible to grab one or two of these plastic containers to take along, even if you were unable to retrieve the other foods. |
Dry Foods for a year (per adult)
| Food | Amount | Notes | Flour or whole grains | At least 200 pounds | Wheat, rye, spelt, etc. |
| Oats | 40 pounds per person | Oats can be used in so many ways besides oatmeal |
| Salt | 50 pounds per person | This is more for food preservation than for seasoning |
| Rice | 50 pounds | White rice. Brown rice has more food value but will mold much faster |
| Sugar | 20 pounds | Honey can replace some of this (try beekeeping) |
| Baking Powder | 5 cans | The non-aluminum kind, such as Rumford. |
| Grits | whatever you think your family would consume--hard to give a recommendation | If your family likes 'em |
| Corn (whole, dried, not canned) | 20 pounds | Dried corn can be ground for cornmeal or polenta, or reconstituted to use as whole corn |
| Pasta | 10 pounds | This may not seem like much. I prefer not to store pasta because of the room it takes up, and to make it when it's needed. If you don't think you will do that, then buy more pasta |
| Beans | You can hardly have enough beans. Long storing, high protein, combine with rice, tomatoes and onions for a complete-protein meal when meat is unavailable. 50 pounds per person at the minimum | Navy beans, speckled beans, kidney beans, black-eyed peas, all are easily available and store for long periods |
| Dehydrated fruits and vegetables | 20 pounds (or more, depending on how much canned food you have) | Dried from your own garden or a nearby produce stand or farmer's market. Purchased in dried form only if necessary. |
| Coffee | Quantity depends on your level of addiction to coffee, but I can go through a pound a week | Roasted coffee doesn't keep long unless it's frozen. For long term storage buy green coffee beans and roast them as needed. |
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The Latter Day Saints site, Provident Living, has a food calculator that you can use to estimate quantities of grains and beans for your family. For example, the calculator suggests 600 pounds of various grains (wheat, rice, corn and other grains) for two people for twelve months, and 120 pounds of dry beans and other legumes. This is a lot of grain and beans, but between them, they represent most of what a family could survive on, if necessary. Additional sources of protein and fresh fruits and vegetables would be very good to have, but if all you could store was grains and legumes, you could probably make it through a protracted emergency period.
Another food calculator is located on the Food Guys site. This one includes dairy products, fruits and vegetables, and oils, as well as grains and legumes. I have some concerns about the concentration of apples and bananas in the fruit category, and the overall amount of sugars. But it's a useful starting point for someone who has no idea what to buy. Following is additional detail about each of the staple items listed in the table. Wheat The table says "Flour or whole grains" for a good reason. Whole grain flour has limited storage time unless it's loaded with preservatives (as most grocery store flour is). White flour is lacking the wheat germ (where the oil is located), and without the oil, the flour doesn't become rancid. Unfortunately, much of the wheat kernel's nutrients are also lost in the process that removes the germ. If your family has a knee-jerk reaction to whole grain bread products, you might want to keep some white flour on hand to ease them through the transition from processed food to home-made. Otherwise, you'll do far better to store whole grains instead of flour. Whole grains last for years, if protected from moisture and insects, and kept in reasonable temperature conditions (they're happy with temperatures that people are happy with, in essence). This does require you to have a grain mill of some variety. There are many on the market, some electric only, some hand-crank only, and a couple of brands that can be used either with a hand crank or with a motor. Grain mill attachments are also available for most of the well-known brands of mixers. There are also a couple of very inexpensive tinned steel hand grinders that you may see in ethnic grocery stores or hardware stores. These are extremely difficult to crank, and won't make anything resembling flour. They're fine for cracked grains for your chickens, but not much else. My personal recommendation for a grain mill is some combination of the Family Grain Mill components. They're available from many suppliers, but I have had a very satisfactory relationship with the people at Pleasant Hill Grain. The Family Grain Mill comes in modular form, so you can buy the hand-crank base, a motorized base, an attachment for use with either Bosch or Kitchen Aid mixers, and various milling and grinding devices. I have the grain mill and the attachment to use it with my Bosch mixer, and also the hand-crank base and the oat flaker. I've made flour using the hand-crank base and found it very quiet and easy to turn. In fact, if I'm making flour for immediate use, I often don't bother putting the attachment on the mixer, just get down the hand-crank base and grind as much flour as I need right then. You can also grind dried corn and any other non-oily grain. If you have money to burn, there are more expensive and fancier hand mills, the Diamant being the Cadillac of the list. I'm sure it works very well, but it doesn't work so much better than the Family Grain Mill that I'm willing to spend over $1000 on it. Lehmans in Ohio also sells a locally made hand cranked mill. I haven't seen it in action, but at approximately $200, it seems like a far better buy than the Diamant. It wasn't available at the time I began buying the Family Grain Mill components or I might have considered buying it instead. But the Family Grain Mill does have additional attachments so it can be used as a meat grinder, a food processor or an oat flaker. And if you want something with the convenience of electricity now, and the ability to hand-crank later, it's pretty much the only choice. While you're researching grain mills, you may notice that some of them (the electric ones) are referred to as "impact" mills, and the others as "burr" mills. The impact mills don't actually grind the grain kernels; they throw the kernel at a very high speed against the inside of an impact chamber, where the kernel literally explodes. This does make nice fine flour, but of course, it requires electricity. The other disadvantage of an impact mill is that if you want finer flour than the mill provides, you're out of luck. You can't run the flour back through the mill to make it finer. With a burr mill, you can regrind the flour as many times as you want to get it finer. To store grains for a really long period, it may be advisable to exclude oxygen from the container in one of several ways. You can put the grain in mylar bags with one or more packets of oxygen absorbers, you can put dry ice in the bottom of the bucket before adding the wheat, or you can just buy pre-packaged buckets of wheat or other grains. That's the expensive way to do it. I have found it easiest and least expensive to use dry ice to preserve grain, in five gallon food-safe buckets. Dry ice has the advantage of not only removing the oxygen from the stored food, but also killing any insects that may already be present. It can be difficult to find a source of dry ice, but welding shops often have it, and in the continental US, you can find it in most Kroger supermarkets. The Walton Foods site has a detailed description, with pictures, of how to pack a bucket with dry ice and grains. I'll also take pictures the next time I prepare a bucket of grain, and add them to this page. Packets of oxygen absorbers are the next least expensive method to exclude oxygen from stored food. It isn't feasible to use them directly in buckets, however, because plastic buckets are not completely air tight. Air will slowly infiltrate through the plastic itself over time, and make your oxygen absorbers useless. But you can store the food in sealed mylar bags, with an appropriate number of oxygen absorber packets in each one. The mylar provides a hermetic seal, and the oxygen in the small amount of air remaining in the bags is taken up by the absorbers. You can even line the entire bucket with a single large bag and fill the bag with your grains or other dry food. I have not done that so far here, but there are several websites that illustrate the procedure. FrontierSurvival.net has a Squidoo lens showing how to pack and seal a mylar bag in a plastic bucket. USA Emergency Supply has a similar page, as well as a handy list showing how many oxygen absorbers to use for different kinds of food. The comments about storing wheat apply as well to oats, corn, rye, beans or any other dry food. The only caution I would have is that some dehydrated vegetables, like potatoes, may have sharp edges and could easily puncture mylar bags. I've found glass to be the best container for most dehydrated fruits and vegetables. Oats Whole oats are called "groats." Oats can also be purchased as "steel-cut groats," which are very coarsely chopped oats. And of course, they're widely available in the familiar flaked form in the supermarket. If you buy flaked oats, try to get the "old fashioned" variety rather than "quick" oats. The quick oats have been partially cooked, and they lack some of the nutrients of the less processed version. The best buy would be either whole groats or steel-cut (sometimes referred to as Irish oats). As it says in the table, oats can be used for many things besides oatmeal or oatmeal cookies.
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