Stocking an Emergency Pantry, Part 2 in a Series on Keeping a Prepper's Pantry

When talking to people about stocking an emergency pantry, people often say they don't know where to start or how to calculate what they will need for their family. That can be a daunting process if you look at it as the big picture.; What I suggest is to break things out into smaller, more easily-handled tasks. I think that the best place to start is to look at what you cook at home right now and write it down in a notebook that you have designated for this project. Mark down what you and your family eat, breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, remember to note condiments that you used and what beverages you had.. Also make note of how often you eat out and what you eat when you do go out for a meal. Save your shopping lists and your cash register receipts, put them in an envelope that you have taped to the back inside cover of your notebook. Keep diligent notes for a month. This information will be used to help you make a plan for beginning your emergency pantry. For the present you will be focusing on building up your every day food supplies, we will call this your "Three Month Pantry". The goal for this pantry is to provide your family with foods that can be used daily, rotated and restocked frequently. But that will ultimately have a three month stockpile of foods available in the event of a short term emergency situation.

During the month that you are collecting data about what you eat, you can begin to look around for an area that you can designate to hold you pantry supplies. I know that this may actually be the hardest part of the process... Many people live in apartments with little storage, or in homes, but are up to the gills in stuff and have no where to put anything. This might be a good time to take stock of what you have and what you need, to de-clutter and pass along things you don't use or that are just taking up space. If you are an apartment dweller, does the apartment complex give you a storage locker or outdoor shed that you can store some of your possessions in to make room for your food stockpile inside the where it is climate controlled? Can you spare 6 inches of floor space and pull your couch out from the wall, so that you can store some supplies behind it? My son did this in his apartment. He made room behind the couch by pulling it out several inches,(6-8"), then used the area he made to hold some of his storage goods. He kept the end tables up against the wall to hide the gap,; I never even noticed that he had done so until he pointed it out. Consider under-used spaces like the top shelves in closets, how about that dead space at the back of a kitchen base cabinet that you have to be a contortionist to get into? Can you put your bed on risers and use the space under the beds? Do you have a closet you can retask by de-cluttering? How about a garage? Do you have a designated junk/storage room that you can organize and use part of ? At one point in our lives, we used some of our storage as furniture... instead of an end table we had a crate of stockpiled good that we topped with a piece of plywood and covered with a pretty table cloth and a lamp. No one ever noticed that it wasn't a table. The same thing could be done for a coffee table. We did away with our bed frame and used our 2 gallon long term storage buckets, covered by a dust ruffle to hold up our box spring and mattress... it worked fine and we never had to clean under the bed! How much space you can carve out will determine how much of a stockpile you can realistically put aside as a reserve.

I have already written a blog post on this subject, but I feel like more detail would be helpful, so I will elaborate and hope to not repeat myself. To read the first blog post on this subject, go here. For simplicity of illustration, lets suppose that you found adequate space for your emergency pantry goods, inside your living space, with easy access. Now it is time to take all the notes you have been compiling on your eating and shopping habits and turn them into a comprehensive list of your most often used food items. From the list of meals that you prepared during the month, write down the ingredients that you used for each of the recipes. Once you have done this for all the recipes, you should start to see some patterns emerge. Are there ingredients that were used in the majority of the recipes you prepared? Make a list of these items on a separate Item page, one food item per line. Each time an item appears in the recipe notes, make a mark next to it on the Item list. This Item List will tell you which foods you use the most. Look at your cash register receipts to see if there are repeat items on them, if there is a repeat item on the receipts that is not on your Item List, add it to the list. What you want to end up with is a list of items that you can use as a shopping list to begin your emergency pantry.

At this point you will be able to see what foods your family most commonly eats. These foods, coupled with some staple items like sweeteners, salt, oil or shortening, flour and seasonings, will be the base that you will build your pantry stock on. Now you are ready to start adding these items to your regular shopping list. Start with the foods on the Item List that are used the most. If there is an item on your regular shopping list that is also on your item list, then put a star next to it on your shopping list and purchase two of those items instead of one. In the case of fresh meats or produce, purchase your fresh items for immediate use and a shelf stable version of the same item for you stockpile. For example, if you have meat on your menu frequently, then buy whatever meat you will use for your meals this week and then add at least on can of some kind of shelf stable meat, poultry or fish to your stockpile. It may not be fiscally possible, every time you shop, to get doubles of all the things that match on your grocery shopping list and the Item List. So on each trip try to add at least a few things to your pantry stock, starting with the things that are used the most and moving down the list from there. This is a great time to plan your weekly menus by watching for sales, and clipping coupons for items that you regularly buy, to keep the costs of stocking up to a minimum.

In order to make sure that you are covering all the important bases, here is a list of items that would be important to have in an emergency. Shelf stable milk, either aseptic boxes, evaporated canned milk, or dried milk powder, shelf stable fats, like coconut oil , ghee, canned shortening, and to a lesser degree olive oil or vegetable oil. These fats need to be rotated out of stockpile and into the kitchen regularly, since they can go rancid. When you use your kitchen supply of oil up, then shop from your pantry stockpile to replace kitchen stock and replace the emergency supply on your regular grocery trip. Shelf stable meats, poultry and fish, need to be in your pantry stock, to take the place of fresh meats, etc. if there is no way to get to a store. Sweeteners, flour, grains, canned vegetables, canned soups and stocks, pasta, rice, and spices and seasonings, can help to round out a menu should you have to depend on your emergency pantry to put meals on the table. I don't stock any beverages except bottled water in my emergency pantry. Since water is very important to health, especially in stressful situations I don't want to have less healthful choices available. Also fruit juices and bottled drinks don't have a long shelf life so I don't spend money on them.

These are the beginning steps to establishing an emergency pantry. There is still much left to do, but if you start by buying shelf stable versions of the foods that you eat the most, then you will be well on your way to having a stockpile of food that you can depend on in an emergency.

In future posts on stocking an emergency pantry, I will discuss Beginning a long Term Pantry. Until next time!

Pantry Keeping 101, Part 1 in a Series on a Keeping Prepper's Pantry

   There are many ways to manage long term storage foods. Some people purchase a certain amount of food, like a 1 year supply for a family of 4, from a company that sells package deals of freeze dried, prepared foods.These foods are purchased for the sole purpose of supplying the family food in an emergency, but will not be used as part of their present diet. Others buy large quantities of staple items in 5 gallon buckets that have oxygen absorbers in them to keep them viable for 15-20 years, but the plan is to leave those items in buckets as insurance in case it is needed in some future crisis or food shortage. Both of these forms of food storage are more stock piling than pantry management. There is absolutely nothing wrong with stock piling food for hard times, it is a prudent and responsible thing to do, but there are some drawbacks to both buying prepared freeze dried meals, and buying 5 gallon buckets of staples to save for later.
 

There are some very good companies out there that provide quality foods, that will feed the family 3 meals a day, (Legacy is one that I have heard good things about). For some that is just the ticket, quick easy meals that require very little preparation. But for my family, it just wouldn't work...The prepared freeze dried foods are OK if we were are going on a back packing trip, where light and easy to prepare foods are necessary, and won't be consumed for any length of time.  but if it was the only food I had to offer my family for a long period of time, the limited choices, and relatively bland flavors, would lead to a familial revolt, or worse it would cause food fatigue, ( where people can't stand to eat the same things anymore and just stop eating). I would also have concerns about the lack of dietary fiber, high salt and preservative content in a steady diet of freeze dried, processed foods. Another consideration would be the cost. The freeze dried, packaged foods are kind of pricey.

 I do use freeze dried foods in my food storage plan though, I just buy the freeze dried ingredients, instead of the prepared meals, That way I can control how much salt and other things go into the foods we eat and it just works better for my family.. Honeyville Grains has quality freeze dried foods, like organic sweet corn, organic peas, asparagus tips, and more. Plus some very good quality dehydrated foods like tomato powder, mixed vegetables, carrots etc. All their foods are guaranteed to be non-gmo (with the exception of a few of their soy products), and they have a growing number of organics available. Honeyville has the absolute best shipping offer of any online food supplier, $4.99 flat rate shipping, whether you buy one #10 can or an entire truck load! It just doesn't get much better than that!  I use the freeze dried and dehydrated foods in combination with my long term storage staples like wheat, rice and beans, for our long term storage pantry, but I also use them in my daily meal planning. This insures that our food supplies are rotated on a regular basis, but also makes sure that our storage foods are familiar to us so there is less shock  or balk about eating them should they be all that there is available.

  The stock piling of 5 gallon buckets of staples would take care of the basics, but how long would my family be willing to eat the same few items and really... how long would it take a family of four to eat their way through a 5 gallon bucket of rice or beans? It would probably begin to sprout bugs before it was all consumed. The cost is better and the foods that are stored are more wholesome than the prepared foods but for my family it would still leave a lot to be desired.

So this is what we do... For starters, I prefer to call our process, "Pantry Keeping" rather than "stock piling", since we are not just purchasing food and holding it in long term storage, but we are using it and rotating it onto our table and then periodically replacing what we use. Our method of pantry keeping has several layers, Layer one is an Open Stock, comprised of the staple items that are in my kitchen cupboards, large glass jars on my counters,  fresh foods and condiments in the fridge, plus spices, dried fruits and sprouting seeds.

   Layer Two is a Three Month Pantry, which has a 3 month supply of goods we will use in daily food preps, like home canned vegetables, juices, canned goods purchased from the grocery store, packages of coffee and tea, honey that has been dipped out of the 5 gallon long term storage bucket into 1/2 gallon Mason jars, bottles of tomato sauce and salsa, etc. We call this the Three Month Pantry, because it holds the 3 month supply of some of our most often used items, but it also holds our larger stock pile of olives, pickles, jams, jellies, maple syrup, almond butter, coconut oil, shelf stable meats, cans of salmon and tuna, as well as the medicinal herbs that are not in LTS. We use this as our "grocery store". When I make out my menus, I shop here first for whatever I will need to prepare the week's meals, then if I don't have something I need, I will mark it down on the list I will take to the grocery store.

Finally, There is the Long Term Storage, (known from now on as LTS), which is packaged to last 15-20 years or more, if stored properly and left unopened. Since we store what we eat and eat what we store, our long term storage foods play a daily role in our diet. Although LTS foods are able to be stored for 20 years or more, I try to keep my supplies as fresh as possible by using them to prepare our daily meals. I store supplies of staples that I package myself, in mylar bags that are stored in 2 gallon buckets with a gasket lid. The 2 gallon bucket size is optimal for my family. We can go through a 2 gallon bucket in a reasonable amount of time, so there is less risk of it going buggy or rancid. Since I don't have to focus on using up 5 gallons of something, I can have a variety of things open at one time, giving me more flexible menu options. We have food stores to last us several years, all packaged in mylar with oxygen absorbers to make sure the contents will stay viable for 15-20 years,  but I try to make sure that most of the things we store are cycled through to our table and replaced within 3 years. That way we can be sure to have a fresh, safe stock of food if the regular supply lines are not available.

  The fact that the foods I store are also the foods we eat on a regular basis, means that there will not be any major dietary changes made, should we have to depend solely on what we have in LTS. I also store herbs, seasonings, spices, salt, sweeteners, condiments, vinegar, liquor, (for tinctures and other medicinal purposes), home canned goods, home dehydrated goods, some quality freeze dried ingredients, (not prepared foods...), ingredients like freeze dried corn, peas, broccoli, asparagus, dehydrated tomato powder, dehydrated potatoes, dehydrated cooked beans, sprouting seeds, and raw supplies for making other life sustaining foods like miso and tempeh. We also store dried fruits, which sadly have a short shelf life, but we eat them regularly so the supply is rotated out in a year or less. If we couldn't go to the grocery store for a period of time, we would still have a fresh supply to last a year.

  Since the foods we store are the foods we use, I know that I can create meals that are healthy and that my family will eat. Since they have been rotated and replaced I know that they are going to be edible when I open them, and that they will have retained their nutritive value, and I am almost always eating at last year's grocery prices! A recent example of this savings is: in 2008 I bought three 60 pound buckets of honey, for $100 each. Since honey never goes bad, and it is one of the few sweeteners we use, I bought a large quantity when I found it on sale through my co-op. We just opened the last bucket the other day, so I ordered a couple more on my last co-op order, the price is now more than $200 a bucket. So for 5 years we were eating honey at 2008 prices, (while setting aside money each payday to purchase replacements when we needed to replenish our stock in the future.

  So that is the basic run down of our Pantry Keeping system. In future posts I will go into more detail about each of the levels of storage, outline how we decide what to store, how to calculate what a family would need for a give period of time, how to store foods for long term storage, and how to begin an LTS pantry of your own.