I've always bought ahead when things were on sale since the first time I purchased groceries as a young bride, and I've always had a well-stocked kitchen since - and that was my foundation, and how most people start their home food storage on a small scale. That's what we did growing up in the country. You couldn't just run to the store when you ran out of something, so there was always an extra.

I did a modest amount of food storage for Y2K, but got serious about home food storage in 2007 during the economical downturn. When the manufacturing company my husband works for went from two shifts to one, and laid off 50% of the workers, I thought food would be better than money in the bank to have enough food for a year as an emergency plan, but prices of food was going up constantly, much more than the paltry amount of interest that money was earning sitting in the savings account. Having successfully done so within a budgeted amount, it got us through three major pay cuts.

Back then I had a $200/month food budget and it took me 18-months to complete my food goals. The next year I kept to a $150/month, and I increased the "Seven Survival Foods" (grains, legumes, sprouting seeds, sweetener/s, salt, oil, and powdered milk) to enough for 3-years and now I've been holding fast to $125/month food budget (for two adults). It's due to the food storage plan that I can keep to this seemingly low budget amount. I purchase food at rock bottom prices, some in bulk amounts. I literally plan my meals using food storage - I "shop" at home first.

The best tip is "to store what you use and use what you store".... There are all kinds of books and web sites on the subject, as well as food calculators that will tell you how much food you need, but you need to use those as guides only. Each family needs to make it work for them. I changed what I did a couple times during the process. I went from using hundreds of pounds of wheat each year to going gluten-free. Now the only thing I can use wheat for is growing wheatgrass and juicing it. If you are unfamiliar or unwilling to use whole grains, then that will alter what you store compared to me. Neither is right or wrong, just how you will choose what foods you store. I stick to whole foods, ingredients (pantry staples) over highly-processed foods, and make my own "convenience" foods. I even make all our cereal - both hot and cold varieties. Not everyone is willing to go this route, so you'll have those kinds of decisions to make.

It helps if you have a plan, even if you alter the plan. It's like Mary Wilde shares in her book "A Year's Supply In "Seven Days" when her husband came home from the store with an industrial-sized bag of baking soda, and after she got her storage organized, she discovered she had a 25-year supply of baking soda based on her menu plans for a year.

I have a three layer food storage. As I finished one layer, I worked on the next layer.

#1. 72-hour emergency kit (includes food that doesn't require heating or refrigeration)

#2. Pantry Foods - things I use everyday for meal preparation (6-12 months)

#3. Long-term food storage - includes a lot of dried grains/seeds/beans, freeze-dried foods, and lots of things in #10 cans

Bonus Layer - 3-years worth of the Seven Survival Foods

I'll have to put together some answers to your questions and post again tomorrow. I'll also have to locate a bunch of links for you to look at and pull my teaching plans for classes I teach on the subject.

-Grainlady

Grainlady is the expert. Many reasons to store food. The first question is what your fears are.

I easily have three months without a blink. For no reason other than i have garden harvest from last season. Always have grains and seed.

Some fears are political, others are extreme like the planets will collide.

To be honest, all are possible. My personal fears are storms having been through so many horrid ones... and my NYC kitchen window looked out onto the NYC skyline including the TradeTowers. Political.

Find your own personal reasons and search and solve it. No need to rotate certain 'bucket' foods. Many have 20 year shelf life.

Basics are just having a rotation of your foods that you like. Most keep a year or more anyway.

My issue in all disasters has been drinking water. (no longer...as it is on the top of the list now)

You are asking pretty basic stuff. So not sure what you are wanting or even asking...a bit of a big picture for a basic question. Not an easy answer.

A thousand web sites asking the same. A dozen are good for your questions.

A few forums out there are for pantry goods for long term food storage.

This is a 'cooking' forum. Not a long term storage forum.

Personally i can't stand dried, freeze dried, canned, preserved foods. Dried egg, dried milk, dried/ freeze-dried anything. Not a bit like the fresh. EVER.

But it is food and fuel for living if you think you might need it.

I could not live daily day in and out having to think about using powder storage foods in rotation so then i re-stock powder/can food again...just to eat storage food.

sleevendog, like you I don't care for dried eggs, dried milk, powdered peanut butter. I do, however, can a lot of vegetables, soups and meats and I use them and enjoy them.

I never thought of a "long term storage" plan, but I grew up on a farm and now I have a farm. So.....I grow beef and pork and chickens and a huge garden. Since I grow beef and pork and chickens, all which take up residence in the freezer, the garden stuff is just going to have to be canned, LOL. All the tomatoes, green beans, bean soup, and pickles of all persuasions, along with homemade jam, jelly, chile sauce, apple butter, pie filling, etc., have places on my pantry shelves. Everything I grow must be preserved through the winter and spring until I grow some more next summer, as I'd rather have tomatoes from a jar than those nasty things the grocery stores try to pass off as tomatoes in the winter. Eww.

With full freezers and a full pantry, I could live easily for a year or more. My friends say that in the event of a zombie apocalypse they're living with me, LOL. We do have a well and are not dependent on any public water supply, but we make sure we have big coolers full of water when inclement weather threatens a power outage.

How do I use oldest first? I put the newest stuff on the back of the shelves, with the older stuff in front. Freezers get cleaned and "rotated" regularly, although I did find a package of ribeye steaks dated 2012 when stacking beef in the freezer this weekend. They were still vacuum sealed and tasted just fine in the beef stew, but I do try not to keep them that long!

I just have open shelves, like this, to keep my canned goods, and opposite are wire shelves with baskets of things like rice, dried beans, wheat for grinding, cornmeal, cereal, baking supplies.

If you want information about preserving food, including canning, dehydrating, pickling, fermenting, etc., there's lots of that discussion on the "Harvest" forum too.

Annie

I am a combination of the posts above. Living in the city, I started by purchasing sale items both shelf and frozen meats. (Who can resist chicken leg/thighs at .19 cents a pound?) I have two freezers out of a dire need when we were gifted some venison years back and no room in the one freezer. And having a large garden and growing veggie without freezer space, I had to learn to can (Thanks Annie!) Freezer space is still and issue, so now I also can soups, chili's and stews. Ready made 10 minute dinners for the days I don't feel like KP duty. I do have a vacuum machine but no freeze dried foods, they are not to my taste. And having city water, I only have a case or 2 of bottled water. Never thought about having more.

Why do I stock up? Nothing worse than having to run to the store for one needed item! And I like to squeeze a nickle until the buffalo cries. No political reason, but good to have with rising costs and it is good feeling to have all this if a paycheck suddenly stops. If a storm hits, I don't need to run out for supplies.

How to rotate is rather easy-FIFO-first in, first out. How much do I have? Probably 6+ months. Is it enough? I sure hope so!

BTW, the LSD had a large cannery near me that was open to the public but they resently closed it down. I never used it and was sad it heat of the shut down.

Resources:

Everything Under the Sun – Food Storage for the Solar
Oven by Wendy Dewitt

http://www.sunoven.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/EverythingUnderTheSun.pdf

She also has videos on YouTube.

Stockpiling Food for Small Spaces and Small Budgets

-
A Common Sense Approach

http://www.latah.id.us/disasterservices/Disaster_Pandemic_StockpilingFood.pdf

Food Storage – “Use It or Lose It” Utah State
University Cooperative Extension

http://extension.usu.edu/files/publications/publication/pub__6240605.pdf

Thanks for the links, grainlady. My biggest problem is lack of space, but the small spaces pdf has some very good suggestions.

Thanks everyone, and Grainlady for all the links. I appreciate the extra effort! I'll start looking through all this info this week.

writersblock-

Our first home was a 10'x50' mobile home, hubby purchased it when he went to college and it served us well when we were first married (ironically, we've never rented) and we can tell you about small spaces.

* We built shelves just deep enough to hold a canning jar, and built the unit to fit the space from the window to the corner wall (24" of unused wall space x 7' tall) in the living room. That's where I stored my home-canned foods and empty canning jars and extra commercial canned goods from the store. I covered the space with a contrasting drape (floor-to-ceiling) so it looked like there was a really large window in that room. Each shelf also had a strip of molding on the front of each shelf as a jar stop, so the jars wouldn't slide off. This type of storage would work great for freeze-dried foods with deeper shelves. I like shallow storage, not deep storage. We have similar shelves retro-fitted between studs in the basement of the same unfinished room we use for hanging our laundry to dry. We gained an enormous amount of storage space doing that.

* You can store enough food for one person for a year in the space of a single bed, and there was one family who did just that.... Removed the bed frames and placed the boxes of #10 cans where her children's beds were. Covered them with a dust ruffle and placed the mattresses on top. When she needed to rotate stock, she would replace a full box with 6 empty cans in order to contain the same amount of space. She had an awesome rotation system.

* In another home we stacked the boxes of #10 cans (6-cans per box) at the foot of the bed and covered it with a quilt and placed a cushion on the top and used it as a place to sit when putting our shoes/sox on. We made a window seat in our bedroom and used it for food storage. Glad we now live where we have a whole food storage room in the basement.

* There is so much wasted space in closets.... You can stack #10 cans in the back, sides, front of a closet, and even cover the floor with them and place a sheet of Masonite over them. Line the perimeter of the closet with recycled juice/2-liter pop/soda bottles filled with water. Behind a sofa is another good storage space.

* Convert plastic/metal trash cans into side tables in the living room and bedroom/s and use them for storage (off-season clothing and other things not needed very often, freeing up other space for food storage). Remove the lids from the trash cans and replace them with a round of ply-wood. Cover the whole thing with a round tablecloth, and place a sheet of tempered glass or plexiglass on top of the tablecloth to keep it clean.

* Under-bed pull-out drawers are a great idea, especially if you can raise your bed on those 6-inch risers.

* I figured my food storage based on the number of servings of food I needed each day for all the food groups and multiplied that by 350 days (discounting 16 days for vacation and eating out). I also had to figure the amount of fresh food from the garden, as well as the amount of fresh food I grow indoors in the winter. When the garden is in full swing, that's when I save those unspent food dollars for making large purchases of items I buy in bulk. Since I've followed the same eating plan since the 1970's, it was easy to figure for me. After a couple years I've got enough experience using home food storage I have it down to a fine art. Practice is the best teacher. If I would have read Wendy DeWitt's method I linked above before getting started, I might have used her system based on a set of menus, instead of figuring out my own.

* It also helps to know how much of certain items you normally use. Each month we use one 18-oz. jar of peanut butter (or the equivalent in powdered peanut butter or homemade peanut butter using roasted peanuts when I find them at the "right" price), 2 cans of pumpkin, or a bucket (25# of Country Cream = approx. 40-gallons of milk - or a 30# or 37# of Morning Moo's Whey-based Milk Substitute) of powdered milk each year, etc. You can start marking items you open with the date you started using it, and then note how long it took to use to gauge how much would be needed for a year.

* If you purchase something in multiples, like 24 8-oz. cans of tomato sauce, make sure you can use 24 cans by the use-by date. I normally purchase no more than 2-3 of any one item - but I'm feeding 2 people - so I want those use-by dates as far out there as possible.

* I store, and use, tomato powder and make tomato sauce, tomato paste, tomato juice, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce - all with tomato powder and water + a few seasonings from the pantry. The only other tomato products I have are frozen and dehydrated tomatoes from my garden, and fresh in-season. That one food item (tomato powder) freed up a lot of space.

And that's just the beginning of the tips....

-Grainlady

Thank you so much, grainlady. Yes, I was planning to do an in-wall pantry when I redid the kitchen here, but it looks like I may have to move in the near future, so those plans are on hold for now, so I have to deal with the very limited space I currently have. These townhouses were designed for people who would come down for six weeks in the winter and mostly eat out, so the storage and kitchen facilities are both very limited.

I do have one question for you: The PDF recommends using sterilite totes, which I think is my best bet (I can squoodge out some room in a bedroom closet for those), but I'm wondering about how best to store beans and grains in those. I live on the beach in FL in a very buggy area, so I don't think that just leaving stuff in plastic is good, but glass will take up significantly more room.

Any thoughts on that? I can just put lots of bay leaves in the totes, but they don't discourage all types of critters.

writersblock-

What is the ambient temperature you will be keeping your food? That's what matters. Here in Kansas it can easily be 110°F in the summer - and the humidity start out at 97% (without rain) in the morning and 29% humidity by mid-day, but our home is air conditioned (between 75-78°F), and the basement stays cooler than that (68-72°F). My sister lives in south Texas and I've had to discourage her from a lot of home food storage because she keeps her home temperature at 80-85°F in the summer. She has settled on keeping about 3- to 6-months worth of food on-hand and that works well for her. She uses her refrigerator and freezer for things she needs to keep longer. She has noticed canned fruit (like pears or peaches) will change in flavor and texture if she keeps them too long, due to the heat in her home in the summer (which lasts 10-months - lol).

Home food storage charts consider "room temperature" 70°F., and at that temperature you can expect to get "normal" shelf-life (+/- 2-3 °F ). Optimum food storage temperatures are between 40°F to 60°F. For each 10° below 70° you can store your food, it will increase the shelf-life, as much as double. So some things may keep better in a refrigerator or freezer if you keep the ambient temperature warmer than 70°F on a regular basis. Even MRE's (military meals ready to eat) are affected by temperature. Stored at 70°F they will store for 100-months. At 80°F - 76-months and 90°F - 55-months. Food is still safe to eat, but the flavors and texture will alter when store where it's warmer than room temperature.

Some stored foods also degrade quicker than others due to temperature. Dairy products and powdered eggs are the most sensitive groups and need to be kept cool, so even in the basement we place them on the lower shelves, close to the floor where the temperature stays a little cooler.

That takes care of the first enemy of food - HEAT. The other enemies are LIGHT, MOISTURE, OXYGEN, PESTS (insects and others).

LIGHT - store food away from direct sunlight, and anything stored in jars or glass, keep in a cool and dark place.

MOISTURE - Chose dry places. Avoid under sinks, where it can get both warm and humid. Run a dehumidifier in storage areas where there is high moisture.

OXYGEN - I pack all dry goods (10% moisture or less) using a FoodSaver (vacuum-sealing in bags or canning jars) or using Oxygen Absorbers. That will kill any pests that may be present, or their eggs from hatching, due to the low amount of oxygen (easy AND effective). Low-oxygen storage will also extend the shelf-life. I never really got into using mylar bags and oxygen absorbers and packing food into buckets, but I have used oxygen absorbers in canning jars. I've been using a FoodSaver for food storage since I purchased my first one in 1986 - long before I ever thought in terms of "home food storage" the LDS Church way. I especially like using oxygen absorbers when making "meals-in-a-jar" using freeze-dried meat in them (like these recipes from Chef Tess - http://honeyvillefarms.blogspot.com/2012/03/meals-in-jar-guest-post-chef-tess.html#.VqepW4-cH2c).

INSECT INFESTATION - Skip the bay leaves.... According to research done at Utah State University, "Bay leaves, chewing gum, 6-penny nails, and an assortment of other unscientific methods they tested, are not effective. The only instances where they have been effective are when no insects were initially present in the food."

If you have dry pet food (including bird seed) in your home, they are often the source for insects since they are treated differently than human food, so store them carefully as well - in an air-tight container and away from your food.

Use storage methods that actually work, such as removing food from the original package/box when you bring it home from the store, and storing it in an air-tight container. Don't leave any food residue on canisters/jars/containers. If you have your home treated for insects on a regular basis, that is also helpful. Regular cleaning will also go a long way to preventing a pest infestation.

As I open a #10 can of freeze-dried food, I divide it between canning jars (whatever size works best as a user-friendly amount) and I will vacuum-seal them with my FoodSaver and jar sealer (or you can use an oxygen absorber). I also like to keep an assortment of small (2-serving size) packets of freeze-dried items in my 72-hour kit so I can just add hot water and make a meal during a power outage. My favorites are Mountain House: peas, green beans, corn, chicken fajita filling.... I wish I would have known about freeze-dried foods when I had kids at home - so convenient. If you aren't familiar with freeze-dried food, buying the 2-serving packets will be a good way to try them out.

I have "umpteen" plastic totes filled with vacuum-sealed FoodSaver bags - filled with grains/seeds/beans/pasta/oatmeal...., all lined up on heavy-duty shelving. I've never had an insect infestation in all the years I've been using a FoodSaver for food storage (1986).

-Grainlady

Thanks for such a detailed reply, Grainlady. Average indoor temp here is about 80, slightly less during cold spells in the winter.

Grainlady is indeed a wealth of information on this topic! Due to her I've ordered some powdered tomato in a small quantity to test it for myself. (At the same time, I'm ordering some powdered spinach as a test -- figure if nothing else it can be good in soups.)

I like having the extra food around -- there's at least 3 months worth, but I need to do something about having fresh greens hanging about. (That spinach might help.) I will be focusing more on this when I move later this year, raising veggies and chickens and eggs (I can't eat powdered egg product without severe gastro-intestinal distress).

We've had enough power outages in the past, its just nice to have stuff around. Where I am moving they've been known to have a few weeks in a row of ice storms, and real grocery stores (I'm not counting the junk food 7-11 type thingies) are far away. Besides, if we do have the economic turn downs, it is nice to have supplies as well as the ability to can and dehydrate my own.

Honeyville is a great company for dehydrated foods -- I have their canned beans in #10 cans, for one. Rice and quinoa are also here, although I've never been a real big grain eater -- it just simply stores so well!

Water - Store some and drink it up, then refill. Better yet, have water you go through, with newer water in reserve, refill the first, then go through the reserve. (Unless you live in places like Flint, Michigan, I'd avoid the monetary waste of buying bottled water.) When we've had power outages, I had water in three categories -- potable and dish-worthy; cleaning worthy; and flushing worthy -- but right now I don't have the space to hold all that against need. (Where I will be moving there's a stream -- cleaning worthy and flushing worthy can be covered by that -- plus I'll have more space.)

Another thing -- non edible consumables I find handy to have a lot of around for power outages and all

TP. D-batteries (I store mine in the fridge). Kitchen matches. Cheap disposable gloves -- my local supermarket sells them in bags of 50. (I had chicken in the fridge when Hurricane Irene took out my power - I had water, but limited amounts considering how often I wanted to wash my hands while dealing with the chicken.) If you don't have a gas stove, charcoal for a grill or firepit.