The Year of Preparedness: Storing Food

or: in defense of stockpiles

Every time I write about preparedness, I struggle to find the right balance between expressing calm and urgency. I’ll likely never find exactly the right mix of the two. When I speak honestly about the urgency of our situation, I risk alienating some readers and freaking out others. Yet if I focus on spreading calm, I’m afraid that I’m not expressing the urgency.

Things are not fine. Every chart of global temperature, sea ice, and the like is being re-calibrated to accommodate the new extremes. We can handle these changes, but it’s going to take some work. Work that we need to start now. Work that we need to encourage others to start now. 2024 is the year of preparedness, if we make it that way.

From talking to people over the past few years,  I’ve come to the conclusion that the biggest impediment to people becoming prepared is not the cost, nor is it a lack of storage space, but instead the perceived social stigma attached to storing food and water and planning for contingencies. By being prepared and by showing enthusiasm and offering support to others (without spreading doom and gloom), we can break that social stigma.

Business as usual has already begun its long slow collapse. Our food systems are resilient, but that resiliency is starting to fail–shortages and price hikes have been common since 2020. It behooves us, then, to make our own pantries, apartments, households, and communities more food resilient.

Because I like grouping things into three, and thinking in triangles, we will divide food preparedness into three categories. Short term storage, long term storage, and food production. The pantry, the stockpile, and the garden. Today, we’re going to talk about the first two.

If you want to go no further, than I would recommend:

• Organizing your pantry to best rotate foods through it and developing habits to keep it full.

• Keeping at least one bucket of basics with an indefinite shelf life, whether you make this yourself or just buy it.

Why Store Food

Individual preparedness is an important component of community preparedness, and vice-versa. Storing food is largely an act individual preparedness, for your immediate household. Yet the more prepared that more people are, the less strain there will be on community preparedness infrastructure during times of crisis.

Storing food, water, and other basic necessities is one of the simplest ways to be prepared for all sorts of different crises–don’t imagine yourself storing food for the zombie apocalypse, or an apocalypse at all, but for a blizzard, a drought, or some other short term crisis. Being prepared smooths out the more chaotic times in the world and makes it so small crises don’t disrupt your life.

The Pantry

When we discuss “pantry foods” in this context, we are referring to foods that have a shelf life of a few months to a few years. We’re talking about frozen food, canned food, pickled food, fermented food, dehydrated food.

For most of human history, we’ve been preppers by necessity. The idea of eating fresh food year round is a fairly new development, and none of us have to look back more than a few generations to find a time when food preservation was as important as producing food in the first place.

Yet not all of us are going to become homesteaders. Not all of us will start canning, dehydrating, smoking, salting, pickling, fermenting, and freeze-drying our own stores. While those are good habits to develop, they’re not strictly necessary.

The basic idea of a preparedness pantry is to keep more non-perishable food on hand than you immediately need. If you eat two cans of vegan chili a week (my habit for years), then instead of buying two cans every time you go to the store, buy three. The new cans go into the back of the pantry, so that you’re always eating the oldest can. You continue to buy an extra can until you have a few month’s worth available (depending on how much storage space you have), then you go back to buying only two cans at a time–now you always have canned chili available. There are fancy First-In-First-Out (FIFO) dispensers for cans available, or you can make your own.

here’s my FIFO rack with the essentials: black beans and vegan soup. And Louis Lingg.

Your pantry can combine ingredients–pasta, rice, beans, canned tomatoes, flour, salt, sugar–with prepared foods–soups, packaged meals, frozen waffles, whatever. Food stored in the freezer is counted in this model, and for those with the space for it, chest freezers take remarkably little electricity to run and are a good place to keep a “pantry” of frozen food.

You can expand from store-bought pantry foods by learning to preserve your own foods as well. You can can your own vegetables and meats and sauces. You can dehydrate fruit before it goes bad. You can make soups and dehydrate them to powder. You can bake bread and freeze it. Me, I mostly make apple rings from cheap bags of apples and put them in vacuum-sealed mason jars, because they’re a nice snack to have around.

Be sure to research each food individually to figure out how long it is likely to last and be sure to label your food so it gets eaten in time. Unless it’s apple rings, because those will definitely get eaten in time. If you dry them long enough, you can turn grainy, gross apples into rather nice food. (Writing this made me go find apple rings to eat, sorry.)

In general, the secret to keeping food edible is to keep it away from light, heat, moisture, and oxygen.

The Stockpile

No one will look at you funny for keeping a well-stocked pantry. Your food stockpile, however, they might side-eye. But having emergency food on hand is useful for so many reasons–including just peace of mind.

Some foods can be stored for decades, or even indefinitely. While pantry food needs to be rotated, stockpiled food is food that you can essentially forget about until you need it.

The easiest food for a stockpile is honey. Stored properly (in a sealed container that moisture can’t get into), honey lasts forever. Salt, too, but that’s because salt isn’t a food, it’s a mineral. Hard liquor stores more or less indefinitely, and I suppose technically has calories, but I wouldn’t expect to rely on it.

Most foods don’t last forever, but stored properly, many can easily last decades. 

There are companies that sell prepper food that’s already packaged for longterm storage. There are also rightwing grifters who will happily sell you a stockpile to survive the apocalypse. Finding the non-gimmicky brands isn’t always easy. If it’s being sold to you by an influencer, then it’s likely overpriced–if not completely a scam. If it’s marketed through fear, it’s likely a scam. However there are reputable brands as well. Personally, I find myself recommending Augason Farms to friends. I have no affiliation with them, and I have not cracked open my buckets from them to test the quality of the food. I just find them to be the most no-frills, reasonably priced brand that’s readily available.

Stockpiled food is a Mormon cultural practice, as well, so an awful lot of the information–and less-scammy brands–comes out of Utah.

I personally stay away from the “30 day food supply” all-in-one buckets and instead keep the buckets and cans that have specific ingredients, like a bucket of rice, a bucket of beans, and a large can of powdered vegetarian chili. But I have devoted more storage space to a stockpile than most people are likely to, especially people in urban environments, so if you just want one thing, maybe a 30 day food supply bucket is right for you.

My favorite method of stockpiling food is to get together with your community and make and seal your own food buckets in bulk. This essay isn’t a how-to guide for the actual process, there are plenty of those on youtube, but the basic idea is that you get mylar bags, fill them with dried food, add oxygen absorbers, and seal the bags. It’s very simple. A five-gallon bucket can hold multiple smaller bags with beans, rice, oats, salt, sugar, or almost whatever you’d like, though each ingredient is likely to have a different shelf life.

The mylar bag keeps oxygen and moisture out while the plastic five gallon bucket keeps rodents and light out. These buckets are ideally stored in a climate controlled environment, like a basement, pantry, or closet, but a garage or shed (or buried) is better than nothing. 

Flour itself doesn’t last incredibly long stored in this way, about ten years. It lasts more or less indefinitely if it is baked into hardtack, however. Hardtack is a flavorless, bland, tooth-breaking biscuit that must be soaked in water, soup, tea, coffee, or the like before it is eaten. It’s what soldiers and sailors ate for centuries if not millennia. You can also store wheat berries themselves, though of course then you need to mill it into flour yourself.

Rousing Conclusion

Changing times call for changing habits, and the systems we rely on are less and less reliable.

So go put a bucket of beans and rice in your closet next to your 6 gallon water jug and then when people ask you about it, make uncomfortable eye contact with them and tell them you’re ready for the zombies.