When people ask me how to store up enough food for a long term disaster, I answer that the best way is to start small. Usually the tendency is rush out and buy a bunch of emergency ration buckets, which most of the time are stored away in a safe (read: hidden and forgotten) place and not thought about until two years after their expiry.
I think this is a poor tactic for several reasons.
Firstly, I’m there is often a cost involved to do this. These packs, if they are even remotely worthwhile, quiet often represent a substantial outlay. Not only is this a prohibitive cost to start with, but if you calculate dollars per calorie, there is actually much more efficient ways to buy (buying 20kg of rice and dried beans is actually the best bang for buck calories per $).
Secondly, they almost always taste like shit. Trust me, I’ve lived of dehydrated food and ration packs for extended periods. It’s not enjoyable. If you don’t eat these things on the regular, you won’t want to at any other time.
Thirdly, how long these packs can support you for is often severely over inflated.
I’m not saying don’t buy these things, but buy them with the intention to use them as intended: under duress.
A much more sustainable and easy way to store up food is to copy can. This is simply the practice of buying one more can (or any shelf stable item) when you do your normal shop. So instead of buying one can of tomatoes, buy two. Then the next week, buy two. Then again the following week. After a month or two you’ll find a line of tomato cans in your pantry. Of course if any item goes on sale, use that opportunity to grab more.
This is what is called a ‘deep pantry’. As long as you keep rotating the newer items you’ll be in line with the principle of ‘eat what you store and store what you eat’. This is a much more sustainable, integrated and cost effective way of building up one of your preps.
The beauty about this system is that it doesn’t need a full scale collapse or zombie apocalypse for you to start utilising it. A small scale disaster (like a loss of job, being flooded in or the dreaded snap lockdown - all of which have happened to me in the past 2 years) can be a legitimate reason for you start using these preps.
Again, don’t discard or throw out emergency rations, they have their place, but also consider building more resiliency into your daily life.
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