Food Storage Inventory: Fill & Download for Free

So far we’ve had to eat from our food storage (other than routine using and replenishing stock) a dozen or more times. Dam broke and we were evacuated from our apartment. Thankfully our food storage was in with my parent’s food storage. The flood that resulted from the dam breaking took out all of the bridges so my family ate from food storage then. (And we ate very well from our storage. Food storage doesn’t have to taste like crap.)The next time came when a business my husband co owned with his friend went belly up. (Basically all of the debts were in our names, not his best friend who kept all of the very expensive equipment.) We ate from our food storage for about six months then. At that time our family numbered six of us. We also lost all of our disposable assets like my wedding band, engagement ring, car, etc. We lived out of our car for three of those months. Having been a camp fire girl (like girl scouts) and a camper used to roughing it, transitioning to cooking over a stove wasn’t too horrible. I minimize what all we went through because it is in the past and should stay there.Then a total of five tornadoes hit, which took our electric lines to our house. The last three tornadoes hit on the same day but the food storage and house were safe. We lived on food storage and cooked over a tiny fire for a couple of months after that until the electric linesmen got power back to us. (AWESOME guys, a huge thank you and you guys are the best. Not going to catch my elderly backside going up an electric pole in a lightning storm and tornado to get the power back on. Nope, no how.)Another time we had to live on food storage was when the company my husband worked for went out of business without warning the employees. Basically the employees showed up and there was a note on the door saying something along the lines of , “So long and thanks but you’re fired.”We have never had to depend on unemployment thanks to our food storage. We’ve managed to eat healthy foods and stay in good health despite having to live off our food storage.One of our sons is disabled and still fighting to get on disability and his family of four are fed from our food storage, although they would much rather that I give them money so they could buy steaks and things. We are vegetarian by necessity.We have donated quite a bit of food to neighbors who had a need. I am a rabid gardener and grow sufficient vegetables and fruits to keep us fed. I garden year round from my wheelchair. I can our foods, freeze foods and dehydrate foods and none of us have had food poisoning from it.I have been doing food storage since I was fourteen. I am now 69 years old. We eat from our food storage daily and replace what we use with new stock. I keep meticulous inventory sheets on both computers and hard copy in the food storage room. I don’t buy the unbelievably expensive foods that are put out as being usable for 35 years plus. I rotate our stock, store what we eat and eat what we store.For what it is worth, the time to start putting food storage aside is now, not when there is a flood and the entire town is trying to crowd into grocery stores and grab what they can. Keep track of what you put in food storage. Don’t just buy a case of soup and some pasta dishes and consider yourself ready for anything. Trust me, you aren’t.My husband and I live in the south. Humidity can rust a can pretty quickly so I melt paraffin wax and paint a light coating of wax on each can, all sides before putting it into the food storage queue. I started doing this when I went out to the food storage room and found an entire case of tomato soup had literally melted through the can and the cans were covered in rust. Food storage isn’t going to help you at all if it is not stored properly.As soon as new food storage is added, it is added to all of the food storage inventory sheets. I also have a copy of the inventory list on my Kindle which goes to the grocery store with me.Tonight for dinner we are having multi bean/pea/lentil and cubed sweet potato soup and bread. I bake our bread daily.Hope this gives you an idea of eating from food storage on a daily or emergency basis.

Ouch. Yes, this is a subject I know a lot about but it is also something that will take up more room than most people want to read. I will write a bit based on my personal standpoint and experience as being a prepper.The first rule of food storage is store what you eat and eat what you store. Most food charts you will find say to store X pounds of oatmeal per person for X amount of time. The problem with that is simple. If you or those you are storing food for do not like oatmeal, don’t bother putting it in your personal storage. Simple isn’t it.I will lightly go over potable water. Even among experienced preppers and survivalists hardly any of us have sufficient water stored. I know that our family of one man, one woman, one dog and a goodly quantity of cats (the inside family) goes through five gallons of water daily. That’s potable water.The hens and my future goats (currently onboard the nanny goat and will come to me once weaned and bred. ) take another five gallons of potable water, so that goes up to 10 gallons of water.For water that does not need to be potable, I have a 33,500 gallon swimming pool. That will flush the toiled and do a lot of laundry. After that goes dry (which has not happened in the past 30 years), there is a spring nearby and I have jugs and a wheelbarrow. (Hint: water weighs five pounds per gallon. A twenty five gallon jug therefore weighs 125 pounds.)Now to food. Again store what you eat eat what you sow. Number one on my food list is my pressure canner, a good supply of kosher salt, a lot of canning jars and lids and a massive garden. I won’t go further than that here, because not everyone is gong to need to or have to grow their own vegetables and fruits. I feed both of us on our garden and I do it from a wheelchair.We live in a humid area. Cans RUST. I recently went to the food storage room to get a can of tomato soup for dinner and found that, despite it being under six months in storage, that the entire case of tomato soups had rusted through.There is a solution. I melt paraffin wax (available online or in many grocery stores. Our WM store has it. I store quite a bit of it, about 10 pounds I also store a small pot to melt the wax in and a disposable paint brush. I dip the brush in the melted wax (NEVER leave wax on the heat source. It CAN catch fire.) and then I paint each can with a good layer of wax and put it on a metal shelf to dry and harden before putting it up for storage.Yes, it is an extra step and more work but how many hours did you have to work to buy those cans of food?As to food, I have a mixture of freeze dried foods and vegetables in number 10 cans. Those have a shelf life of about 30 years. They also get the melted wax treatment. The freeze dried foods are NOT cheap. However, they have better flavor than many of the dehydrated vegetables and food. The freeze dried strawberries are frankly my nibble food and I try to hide them from myself. Think of little strawberry candies that melt in your mouth. Sigh. At $22 for a number 10 can, that is an expensive candy fix.Advantages to freeze dried foods are incredible. Flavor, color, length of storage, availability, rehydrate to a good mouth feel and more. Disadvantage is they are not cheap.Also put up dehydrated foods. Good news, you can actually make some of your own dehydrated foods. I have a large Excalibur dehydrator with nine screens. Again, not cheap but worth every cent. If we have leftover vegetables from dinner, I put them on the dryer sheets, set the dryer and go to bed. In the morning I take the dehydrated foods and add to a glass jar and write the ingredients on a label, along with the date and put it on the jar.Keep All Food Storage In A Clean, Dry, Dark Place. Also Keep A Running Accurate Inventory. Store What You Eat, Eat What You Store.Please commit those things to memory. Get a small pocket sized or purse sized notebook and take it with you to the store at all times. That way if you get to the store and they have something you and your family like eating (nutritious rather than bags of candy), then buy what you can, take it home, paint with wax, add to the large inventory sheets and put in storage.I know, it sounds like a lot of work but I remind you that you also WORKED for that money so why throw it away? I store meats and vegetables on open stainless steel FSA (food safety act) grade shelves. Everything is stored according to what it is. Green peas go together, so does corn, etc. I also have quite a lot of meals in a can things like canned ravioli and spaghetti. When we had three tornadoes go through here we were without electricity for about a week and heated the canned foods over a very small fire away from where anyone could see, which brings me to another point.Do Not Tell Others About Your Food Storage. I know, this sounds terrible of me but how long do you think your food storage is going to last you and your family and loved ones if others know that you might have a few cans of beans set aside? I will share with others HOWEVER MY family comes FIRST. Terrible of me? I don’t give a darn. MY FAMILY COMES FIRST. So remember OPSEC which is an old military term for OPERATIONS SECURITY.One thing I can tell you from actually living through times like tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes, and other life-challenging situations is that people who are nice before an emergency will do pretty much anything to feed their family and if that includes harming you or your family to get your food, they will.I have canned meats, fowl and fish on hand. Canned meats include ham in a can, called Spam, caned corned beef, canned chicken, canned chicken spread, canned ham spread, and a lot of tuna, which is my go to protein. I also have a good supply of TVP on hand which is textured vegetable protein flavored like hamburger, ham and chicken. Get hungry enough and it is delicious.As to canned meats, the freeze dried canned meats are very good. (also expensive). There is a home use freeze dryer on the market now, but it is more than I can buy at this time.Fruits and fruit juices are very important. Also treat those cans with melted wax. The jars of fruit and fruit juices are best kept on the bottom shelves so they do not fall off and break. (You would not believe how much sugar syrup I had to get up after one, one quart jar, fell from the top shelf and broke.)You can buy vegetable squeezers and make your own fruit juice and store it in canning jars HOWEVER follow the FDA instructions on how long to pressure can it, etc.Now to bread. Basic yeast bread is made of ground white (or wheat or a mixture of white and wheat) flour, shortening (I use butter flavor shortening), a small amount of sugar to feed the yeast, yeast and a small bit of salt. (Not too much salt or you’ll retard the yeast growth.You have more than one choice when it comes to how you will store your flour. BUT do NOT leave the bag of flour on the shelf and expect it to be usable six months or so down the road. It won’t be. I make all of our bread. For two loaves of white bread I store 6 cups of high gluten flour, dehydrated, powdered shortening, sugar, salt and yeast in a very large bag that holds more than twice the amount of flour mixture I have put in the bag. (Exact amounts vary. I’ve done this for about 50 years now so I don’t always measure but add flour according to how the dough feels. Good cookbook on baking breads is a HUGE asset, buy one.)When I need to make an emergency loaf or want to try out my bread in a bag method, I add warm water to the mixture (read above) and mush it around in the bag, kneading it without removing it from the bag. I then cover the bag with a tea towel and put it in a warm (NOT HOT) place to raise. After it raises, I mush it down again and let it raise again for about half the time of the initial raising. Then I remove it from the bag, cut the dough in half and put it in greased loaf pans, let it raise a third time and bake in the oven.Now let’s think of it from an emergency perspective and you’re doing this while bugging out or camping. Do as above but put balls of dough on a clean, peeled stick (do not use wood from a poisonous tree or a tree that will give its flavor to the bread, like pine. I have several metal “shish ka bob” metal things in our bug out bags to use for bread balls. You can also cook the bread in a dutch oven (they are beastly heavy so I’m not convinced many people carry them in a pack but if you are bugging in at home, this will work. If using the dutch oven, I grease the interior well and put the entire contents of the raised dough in it, let the dough raise the third rising, put aluminum foil over the top of the dutch oven, crumping it very tightly, then add the lid. I then bury the pot of bread in embers and use a shovel to put more embers on top. I let it bake about an hour.STORING FLOUR: Best thing for flour storage is to store wheat kernels, rye kernels, corn and so on, then grind them before making bread. I’m not going into that, but will cover how I have flour stored. My white flour is stored in half gallon sized jars. I store high gluten flour (none of us are gluten intolerant) because it makes incredibly good bread that lasts longer than other white flours. I store whole wheat flour, also in half gallon jars, along with rye flour and other flours.I buy active dry yeast in one pound blocks. They are hard until the block of yeast is opened, then soften, that is how well they have vacuum sealed those things. After opening the yeast, I will put it in a jar of an appropriate size and, like everything else, put it in a cool, dry, dark place and label it as to contents, date opened etc.I have several galvanized garbage cans which were never used for garbage. I put bags or jars of flour, dry whole milk powder (yes, you can buy whole milk powder, sour cream powder and cream powder online and YES it is worth it.). The galvanized cans are also treated with paraffin wax. I have several shipping flats (those wooden things that hold a lot of cases or other things that are picked up by a fork lift) and the PAINTED shipping flats keep the galvanized cans off of the floor.IN MY OPINION, the best bread book ever is Bernard Clayton’s Complete Book Of Breads. I am not certain it is still in print so you may need to find it on an online auction site. It is worth its weight in gold and if you are not already a bread maker, that book will turn you into one.Lots more on prepping food in the field online and in books, I’m just hitting high spots based on personal experience.You will need things like spices, salt, pepper, canning salt, yeast, nonfat dry milk (yuk) or whole milk powder (yum), dried cream (not totally essential but it is to me), ketchup, mustard, pickles, vinegar, mayonnaise packages (I use packages to reduce the possibility of food poisoning since mayo has eggs in it. Some people say it is ok to use opened mayo that has been sitting in storage or the kitchen counter. I don’t agree, based on how quickly it can make me very sick.) You will need syrup, corn syrup, white and brown sugar, honey, molasses and other sweeteners.Unless your food storage need is a one time only (let’s hope) like power outage, job loss), you will need to find a way to resupply your food storage. For us, that means a large garden. For us, if no one else on the planet, two acres is enough to grow sufficient foods for ourselves, the livestock (hens, goats - note: cows take a lot more feed than an acre of pastureland can supply. Goats are good for milk, cheese and when they are past time for producing milk, meat. One billy goat is sufficient to keep a lot of nanny goats happy and producing kids. Goats and cows and other mammals need to get pregnant and have a calf, kid or other live young in order to produce milk.)Note on chickens: Hens WILL lay eggs without a rooster handy. Those eggs are perfectly fine for eating but will never hatch chicks. In order to grow your flock you need a rooster. ONE ROOSTER. ONE. Get that O N E rooster. More than one rooster and the roosters will fight until the strongest, meanest one is triumphant.A funny: My mother was a city woman all of her life as was my father. He had a job change and they bought a farm. (oh Lord.) Now these wonderful people were awesome in the whole embassy party, la di da type parties and things but had never grown as much as a tomato before. (I’m the black sheep of the family, I grow food and often have a lot of dirt under my nails.) So there they are with a small farm. Mother promptly buys a small tractor and plants a garden. (I had great parents, even if they were city people). She also bought hens. All farms have hens, right?Well, one evening about 9, Mother called my country farm boy husband and she was sobbing. He got her calmed down and finally found out why she was crying. It seems all of her roosters were killing each other. My husband bit his lips to keep from laughing and calmly asked her how many hens she had bought. She had bought twelve hens. He then said, “Mother how many roosters did you buy?”She had bought twelve roosters, thinking each hen needed a rooster for eggs. Now more than one roster in a flock that is kept together, you’re going to have fighting, and they fight to the death. So he got Mother calmed down, told her to get rid of all but one rooster and to never again have more than one rooster in the flock.Then she got sheep. *sigh* Yes, she also got more than one ram. Mom wasn’t a farmer. My husband and I are.Unless you are well off financially you will not be able to get all that you need for your food storage immediately. At first, I bought an extra can of something for our food storage every time we went shopping. Now I usually buy an extra case of something like tuna, corned beef, corned beef hash, green peas, etc.If you start home canning, first get a copy of the home canner guidebook from the USDA or other canning guides. (I am in the USA so I have no knowledge of home canning out of the USA.)I have a dehydrator and large pressure canner and a good number of canning jars and many boxes of replacement lids and bands. I don’t have enough canning jars and I don’t know anyone, even experienced long term preppers or survivalists who do have enough jars.The pint sized jars I use for jams, preserves and jellies. The half quart sized jars are for pickle relish and small sweet or dill pickles or pickled vegetables. The quart sized jars are used for vegetables, spaghetti sauce, whole dill pickles. The half gallon sized jars are used for ground flours, though I do have one plastic bin that is air tight and is on wheels. I keep high gluten flour in it and plan on buying more. The bin fits perfectly under my stainless steel work bench that I use for food prep and making bread,I grow what we eat. I also grow only open pollinated heirloom vegetables and fruits and reserve at least one of the best plants to let their seed pods dry on the plant and then harvest the seeds for the next garden. The harvested (VERY DRY) seeds are kept in manila enveloped, sealed with tape and marked as to what the seed is, date of planting and date of harvest of seed. The envelopes are rolled up and stored in a large one gallon jar. Suggested book is Nancy Bubells The New Seed Starter Handbook. I’ve gone through three copies so far due to my habit of keeping it on the work bench in the greenhouse (which was destroyed thanks to a recent tornado.)Each can or jar of food is also checked on a weekly basis. I practice can rotation which can be summed up as Use The Oldest Cans First. When a new batch of cans or jars is stored, it is stored in back of the current cans or jars.There are lovely can storage things that make doing this a breeze because as you take one can out of the storage, the next rolls down into place. I don’t have any of those because I’d rather put the money into the actual food storage.I have a LOT of dried beans, lentils and peas in my food storage. I cook with dried beans, etc, at least once weekly. I also have several books (will need to look them up as I don’t want to switch wheelchairs to go to the food storage room this minute) that have excellent recipes for using dried beans, lentils and so on. Beans are an excellent source of protein. Your body needs protein to keep healthy. Beans are also CHEAP, much cheaper than meat, and require no special storage like canning, refrigeration or freezing.Off hand, I know that I currently have just under one hundred pounds of pinto beans, about fifty pounds of black beans, yellow lentils, red lentils, green lentils and split peas. To pump up the flavor I also have dehydrated and freeze dried diced onion, garlic, celery powder, dehydrated chopped sweet peppers and hot pepper powder (jalapeno, habanero, etc.) Sugar, white and brown, syrup and HONEY are very important to keep on hand, even if you are prepping for a diabetic or hypoglycemic.You can also buy freeze dried cheese. It’s not half bad tossed in casseroled or made into a cheese sauce. It doesn’t work well for a grilled cheese sandwich but you can’t have everything yet.An excellent, nutritious soup can be made from dehydrated beans, cooked, then dehydrated diced potatoes, TVP or freeze dried meat or fowl, dehydrated diced tomatoes and dried tomato powder, dehydrated sliced or chopped carrots, dehydrated corn, salt, pepper and other spices. It can go a long way and is actually pretty good. (We’re having it tonight for dinner along with cornbread also from food storage.)The Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) has an AWESOME online food storage section and you can buy from them. The site is incredible and I consult it every time I have something to can or put in storage.Potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, carrots, beets and other root crops are stored in open baskets hung from the rafters. They need air circulation to keep from rotting. Every vegetable is checked on a weekly basis.Raised beds work very well for me since I do all the garden work from a wheelchair. I have a chair I use only in the garden.Don’t forget- DARK, COOL, DRY and OPSEC My food storage shelves are covered by sheets in the event someone other than immediate family comes into the food storage room. Boxed canned goods are marked “Christmas Decorations, lights, Christmas decorations, house, Christmas decorations, tree and so on.Drink wise, I keep whole coffee beans and a grinder along with canned ground coffee and instant coffee. I also have air tight blocks of tea leaves, tea bags and instant tea. I keep packets of fruit flavored drinks and dry orange juice powder.Even if you don’t use sugar you will need it for making jams, jellies, preserving fruits and even as a bargaining item. I have fifty pounds in storage. The figs I harvest from our three fig trees uses up about twenty five pounds of sugar. Other fruit trees take more sugar for preservation as do fruit bushes like strawberry plants, blackberry bushes, raspberry bushes, currants, and other fruits.Please note: In an emergency situation even so little as a spoon of preserves on a biscuit can be enough of a treat to make you feel better. Same thing with a piece of candy (or lollipops if you are prepping for small children.)Our animals are important to us. Cat and dog food kibble is stored (I use a vacuum sealer and very heavy plastic) per serving. For the cats, that means a gallon sized bag. For the dog, that means a half gallon sized bags. Hen scratch is stored the same way. Once the goats arrive, their food will also be stored that way. The sealed heavy duty plastic bags are stored in a galvanized trash can. (Mice can easily chew through plastic. So can the palmetto bugs so prevalent down here in the South.) They have trouble chewing through metal. Our cats like patrolling the food storage room and one in particular, Luna(tic) the Second, is a champion mouser. I know this because she likes bringing the still living mouse and putting it on my chest while I am sleeping or she’ll line them up on the floor in front of the freezers.I have two chest type freezers and every penny I can put aside for bulk sales of meat or vegetables goes to the freezer food fund. Most of the food is NOT frozen food because in an emergency when the power is out, the food in the freezer will go bad unless the freezer has a sufficient layer of ice in it (I use freezers I have to dehydrate just because of that lovely layer of ice as a second level of food defense,)I have about twenty bags of hard candy in food storage. I am hypoglycemic and married to a diabetic and if our blood glucose levels drop fast, I have enough time to grab a piece of hard candy and start chomping it as I get an ounce cube of cheese or a tablespoon of peanut butter. Even if you don’t eat candy, you could use it as a barter item.I keep about fifty pounds of protein supplements on hand in the form of protein shake powder. My go to protein shake powders (Champion) are vanilla chocolate and strawberry. In the event of emergency, some protein powders (you can also get unflavored) can supply your body with sufficient protein to keep going.Another OPSEC comment: The odor of cooking food goes a very long way. Think of it like this, in the event of an emergency do you really want everyone within smelling distance to smell what you are cooking, therefore letting them know that you have food that they want and will take? Think about that a bit.For those who say I am a terrible person, yes, I am, but my family and extended family are my prime concern. That means that I am not only prepping for myself and my husband and our livestock and pets but I am prepping for all of our children,their spouses, children and our great grandchildren. Anyone else I will feed had better be very ready to work in the garden and in the stealth gardens I have planted over the place.The equipment I have on hand is storage shelves, hand operated grain grinding mill, electric grinding mill, coffee grinder, hand operates, two large pressure canners (not the same as pressure cookers!) two large water bath canners (for jams, jellies, other things that don’t require pressure canning), a large list of pressure and time for all of the things I grow, the usual kitchen things like big spoons (but my spoons are very large and long and get to the bottom of the water bath caners), excellent quality knives and sharpener (I’ve used the same wet stone for 50 plus years), a hot plate and small crockpot used only for melting paraffin wax. I also keep an electric hot water kettle on the workbench.This isn’t everything but hopefully it will give you a few things to start with on your food storage journey. I must caution you again about OPSEC. In the past, a member of the family accepted a large order of several boxes of long term storage food and the UPS guy asked why the food, etc. and the family member said it was for our food storage.The UPS guy said “Well, I know where WE’RE coming if we need food.”Keep Your Mouth Shut. Unless, of course, you want to feed everyone who takes your food storage and leaves you with nothing for your family.Sorry I went on so long but this is an area I am expert in and I have helped a lot of people with their food storage and when I have a question, there are people on my go to list who will have the answers or at least a direction to point me into.This is by no means everything there is about food storage, just what is on the top of my brain and dribbling out through my fingers. I hope this helps.

If you look at the world right now, this past year, you can see why food storage would be a great thing to have.If you had food storage done right then the toilet paper shortage wouldn’t have bothered you at all. You would have had several mega packages in your food storage already. We had 23 packages of the big packages from Walmart in our master bathroom on top of the linen closet. We take one down to fill the bathrooms and then buy another one to replace it. Every month. If we find it on sale we buy another one. We are never going to run out of toilet paper.Here’s some ideas. By the way, welcome to my soapbox.Get Peggy Layton’s books. My local public library has most of her books and they can get the others through inner library loan. If you like them then you can order then online.She was a Home Ex teacher and she has made a study of food storage. Her food storage area looks like a grocery store. She has slanted shelves for her canned good that are amazing. She goes shopping for every meal in her food storage. She buys/replaces what she used to make her meals then puts the new stuff at the back of the shelf. That way it is constantly rotating old is used first.She has you take an inventory of all the items you buy for several months. Then you tally up what you bought. How many gallons of milk, how many eggs, how many of certain canned goods did you buy during that time? Once you count up how many then you divide it by how long you kept track.Home - Peggy Layton - Online StoreFor instance. If you bought a gallon of milk every other day for 3 months then you bought 15–16 gallons of milk per month.Then you multiply that month’s supply times 12 months. 189–192 gallons for 12 months. You can see why you need to start integrating powdered milk into your daily diet. Start small and work up until you are using canned milk or quality powdered milk more.Peggy teaches that you buy food storage but it’s the food you eat. It’s NOT food from a list that you will never ever eat even if you have nothing else.Let me tell you a huge secret..shhhhh. I don’t have any wheat in my food storage. Why? I don’t like bread. My husband’s docs have told him to cut way back on it. My girl uses flour to make homemade pizza crust several times per month and I use flour to make Texas Sheet Cakes a few times a year. We can get a large bag of flour and we’ll still have some at the end of the year. I have NO NEED for wheat. I don’t have a wheat grinder, I don’t make break nor do I plan on making bread, so I don’t need wheat.Another secret…I don’t store beans. I am the only one in my family that will eat beans and I am not going to make a big pot of beans with cornbread and fried potatoes with onions in them. It would all go to waste once I was done with a couple of meals out of it. I have a couple of gallon cans of Thrive dehydrated pinto beans. I can make a small portion and eat them in less than an hour. They’re very good too.The lists that the church wants to go by if from a different era in life. The wives used to make everything from scratch. They spent hours in the kitchen making bread by hand and so many other things. I’m 61 and I know what foods we eat and what we don’t.I can buy a couple of large bags of rice each year and we’ll have that rice used up in the year. I make Lion House Sweet and Sour Meatballs a couple of times per month and I serve it over Oven Steamed Rice. We freeze what we don’t eat and then heat up the individual servings I froze when we want leftovers.What I found when I tracked all our purchases for 3 months is that I spend way too much money on junk food. So we’ve cut down on that some. But I like nachos made with Tostitos. I like to make cooked chocolate pudding and serve it over buttered toast, like chocolate gravy, for breakfast. We live in a world where we can buy 24 boxes of brownie mix for $30 and keep a few bottles of veggie oil along with individual servings of applesauce if we want to use that instead of oil. Eggs are a little harder to figure out. But I can stop today and have brownies from my oven every other week or so if I want.You need to take inventory of what you have, what you haven’t used in a year (lots of my spices), and track your purchases for a time to see what you buy.Your family needs to eat the foods they’ve been eating. You can add things out of food storage a little at a time until they’re eating new things.Such as TVP, Textured Vegetable Protein. One of my friends serves her family taco flavored TVP every Tuesday for Taco Tuesday. They don’t know it’s not HB meat. It’s better for them since there’s very little fat in this meal. Lots of nutrition. She uses other flavors of TVP for other meals. She also uses powdered milk in all her cooking but they drink 2% milk mixed with a bit of powdered milk. So they get used to the flavor. If they ever have a crisis where they can’t buy liquid milk her kids will probably not even notice the milk is powdered because they’ve been drinking it mixed in for so long.One of my missionary girls told me the story of her father falling out of the family barn loft. He broke his neck. In a halo for a year. Her mom worked hard on their “food” storage. This sister told me that for that year her mother didn’t have to enter a grocery store. They had a year’s supply of laundry supplies too, a year’s supply of everything they needed. On hand. She said every time her mom had gone to the store since she’d married she’d buy an extra something that was on sale. Then store it away. She had shampoo, conditioner, bar soap, razors, toilet paper, everything.Personal opinion time. I do not think it’s okay to buy a bunch of boxes of stuff and store them under a bed or in a closet or somewhere then when you die they get pulled out and passed on to someone else. Where they’re stored for 30 years then passed on. If you suddenly have no food and start eating nothing but MRE’s you’re going to have stomach aches and exploding diarrhea. It’s too much of a shock to your system. You need to store the foods you already eat.Want to store some MRE’s? Go camping once a month and eat MRE’s for your dinners. That way your body is used to processing the food in them and you can eat more of them if needed. Fill in the foods you’ve eaten with new foods and keep the older stuff rotated to the front.The final thing I have to say is this. Food storage is personal. You have to stand before God in the end. He’s given you some “advice” on how to plan ahead and take care of your family if you find yourself needing to support your family for a period of time without a grocery store.It’s up to you to decide the best plan to do that. If you don’t need wheat and rice and beans and other stuff then don’t buy a year’s supply of them. Maybe buy a couple of Mylar pouches of it so you have it in case you decide to learn how to use it better.It’s up to you which style of food storage you use but don’t go out and buy 50 lbs of wheat if you don’t currently use wheat nearly every day in your cooking. Buy other foods first and add wheat if you decide you want to start using it in your daily/weekly meals.