Food Storage, Expand Your Pantry for Preparedness

Food storage is more important now than it was 20-30 years ago. When I was a teenager I worked in a grocery store. We had a huge back room filled with stock for the shelves. Today, most grocery stores do NOT keep much, if any, stock in their storage rooms. It’s much cheaper and easier for them to use their computerized inventory system to order exactly what they need when they need it.

Food Storage, Expand Your Pantry for Preparedness

When the cashier scans your groceries across the laser bar code reader to ring you up, this data is tracked in real time directly to their inventory control and ordering system. They don’t have to keep perishable food in the back, pay someone to manage and rotate it or toss out expired products (and waste money). If you buy 3 cans of soup, their next delivery will replace those 3 cans of soup.

As you can imagine if something disrupted the data networks, electricity or even the fuel for the semis that deliver these goods, it would be a very short amount of time before the shelves at the groceries stores would be bare.

I don’t believe that you have to necessarily stockpile tons of foods, but you really should take your Food Storage to the next level. You know, Kick it up a notch!

My pantry is a tiny closet between the kitchen and door to the garage. I almost feel like it was a little coat closet when it was designed. Even after installing better, deeper shelves I really can’t keep any major amounts of food.

I found a work around. We had some extra space in our basement laundry room. I used this extra space as my food storage area. I tossed in a couple sets of chrome shelves, and now we have a pantry annex.

We didn’t have to buy bulk survival foods, we have the same brands and types of foods as before, just more of the canned and dry varieties. Having these extra cans made it essential to have some FIFO (First In First Out) can dispensers, which make thing so much easier.

This space also gives me room to store the extra foods we’ll be canning once we harvest this years garden crops.

We’ve all heard the expressions “save up for a rainy day”, so why not put up a little food in your food storage area, in case times get tough. As long as you rotate your supplies, this can be done with minor modifications to normal shopping habits.

This stored food can help get you though lean times, and not just survival. If you suddenly had to go without a paycheck or two, wouldn’t it be nice to have to the piece of mind knowing that you had some food to get you through?

“Be Prepared”, a million Boy Scouts live by this rule, it just makes sense.

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