Step by Step Guide to Building and Maintaining a 6 Month Food Supply

Today we are going to continue with our prepper basics series and discuss food storage for beginners. Specifically, we’re going to go over a step-by-step plan that can help you build and responsibly maintain a 6 month stockpile of food.

Step 1 – Planning

As we discussed in yesterday’s article, planning is the key to all areas of preparedness. I mean, planning is kind of the definition to preparedness to begin with right? So first and foremost, we need to make a definitive plan on how we are going to get to our 6 month goal of stored foods.

What I’m about to ask you to do over the next 30 days may seem silly and unproductive at first, but it’s actually the best way for you to lay a solid ground work and foundation for your food storage plan. You’ll see why as we get farther into this.

First off, if you don’t already have one you can use, go out and purchase a cheap spiral notebook, you’re going to need it.

Over the next 30 days I want you to write down every single thing that you eat when you’re at home. This doesn’t include restaurants, fast food etc… just what you’re eating at home. Simply write out every ingredient to every meal that you make in your notebook. By the end of the 30 day period you should have quite a large collection of meals and the ingredients to make those meals.

Now, put a checkmark next to every non-perishable ingredient in your notebook. A non-perishable ingredient would be anything that is shelf-stable for at least a year. Canned vegetables, pastas, packaged or boxed meals are all good examples.

After doing this, everything that’s left on your list should be perishable food items. These are usually things like meats, dairy items and fresh produce. What we want to do now is determine if there is a way to either make these ingredients shelf stable or if we need to find a substitute for that ingredient.

There’s an easy trick to do this. Simply go to Google and type in “How to store [ingredient] long term” and if there’s not an affordable or easy way to do so, do another search and type in “[ingredient] substitutions”.

My suggestion starting out would be to focus more on substitutions. Although you could very easily at this point start looking into things like canning long term foods at home, freeze-dried ingredients and other alternatives to extend the shelf life of some of your ingredients, it’s much easier to look for substitutions like canned vegetables, powdered dairy products, meat substitutions or even canned or dehydrated meats when you’re first starting out. Once you have your 6 months of food stored up, getting into canning and other alternative ways of storage is definitely something I would suggest.

Another thing you should be doing during this phase is experimenting with the changes you made to these recipes with the various substitution ingredients you’re going to store. The last thing you want is to end up buying a lot of these substituted ingredients just to find out that they don’t work for the meal you’re trying to make.

If you have to substitute something, go out and buy the substituted ingredients and try making it for supper one night. You’ll quickly determine what works and what doesn’t. If it doesn’t work, either try another ingredient or come with a new recipe that follows our shelf-stable guidelines to replace the one that didn’t work.

After this is all done, you should have a notebook that has around 30 days of meals and ingredients that should store for at least a year if not significantly longer. These meals are going to make up at least half of your 6 month food storage supply.

Congrats! The hard part is pretty much over.

Now I’d like to tell you why we did this. I’m not sure who originally coined the phrase but there’s a phrase that’s fairly popular in the preparedness community called “Eat what you store and store what you eat.” This means that your food storage plan should be mainly comprised of foods that you’re already eating every day.

Yes, you could technically go out and buy a pallet of MREs or Mountain house meals and yeah they’d probably get you through 6 months in a serious disaster. However, a big chunk of your stored food isn’t just going to be put away for SHTF disasters, you’re going to be using and revolving this food out regularly so that it doesn’t just sit around for a year until you have to get rid of all of it when it goes bad. It will become a very integral part of your day to day lives and diets.

Step 2 – So now we bust out the credit cards and buy a bunch of food right?

ARGH! NO!
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