Food Storage is Half The Solution

Food storage for the long term takes thinking about.

The other half is assuring that the food you stored is actually edible (even appealing) when you need to use it. Preparedness means more than simple stockpiling.

Virtually everyone should have a stock of emergency food supplies. Even a food storage stock of a few canned goods and a jug of water will hold you and your family over for a night or two. Let’s face it, you’ll never know when you need them for any reason. Whether you are hit by a tornado, flooding, or any natural or man-made disaster, you’ll be glad that you had a stock of emergency food stored.

How long is the stored food edible?

Of course, the most important aspect of food storage is the expiration date, or a time frame when the food becomes inedible. Even commercially manufactured canned and jarred goods have an expiration date on them, and although it has been proven that the food may be edible for years afterwards, the taste might not be very appealing.

So, what can you do about this? The obvious answer is to rotate out your food, replacing it with fresh stuff on a semi-regular basis. And the best way to do this is to eat it.

Why? Well, there are a couple of reasons for this. The first being that there is no reason to waste good food, even if it has been put away as an emergency food supply. The second is that by eating this food after it has been in storage for a while, you’ll gain first hand knowledge on the taste of it, plus, you’ll know, literally, how long it lasts before it actually begins to show signs of deterioration.

How will the stored food be prepared?

But that’s just the beginning. Sure, everyone knows how to eat out of a can. Take off the top, heat or no heat, and eat it that way if you need to. But that process doesn’t work with other types of stored food.

Take for example the tried and true MRE (Meal Ready to Eat). Many people use these for long-term food storage, and they work well. But if you want a hot meal here in a pinch, you’ll have to know how to cook it with the items included. And the best way to do that is with practice.

MRE’s are easy, but what if you have stored a lot of raw food like grains and oats? Granted, they are simple foods to store and kept dry, they’ll last a long time. But, and here’s a big but, you’ll have to cook them to get any real use out of them, and you’ll need drinkable water too.

In that scenario, you will also need to keep a camp stove, or other portable stove with fuel, and you’ll have to make sure there is plenty of fresh water. Water stores should be changed every 6 months, and as a back-up, get a camping water filter to ensure you’ll always have drinking water available from virtually any source.

Don’t just store the food

So, rotate your stored food out, eat it as you go, learn how it tastes and how long it will last in the process. Doing that just makes you a better survivor under any circumstance, period.

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