So you are new to preparedness and aren’t sure where to start. First, let me start by congratulating you on providing yourself and your family with the security preparedness brings.  That first time the power goes out and you execute your plan and get to use your preps, you know you’re doing the right thing. 

The first step most of us take when it comes to preparedness is food. It’s easy to do,  can be done affordably and you can stock up quickly which gives you that feeling of accomplishment.  It’s also easy to go to extremes too quickly and get burned out.  So a word of advice, don’t just run out and start buying. Take your time and plan your preps.

Take a month and write down everything you and your family members eat. Log every meal; breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as every snack. By logging everything you eat you can make sure your preps are what you will eat and not wasted on food that will just sit and go bad. As they say “Eat what you store and store what you eat”. While beans and rice are great preps and have a very long shelf life, don’t blow your budget on them if your family doesn’t eat them.

Once you have your log it’s easy to put together a shopping list. Look at how many of each item your family ate in a week. Go ahead and multiply those numbers to come up with what you would need for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year and so on. Then you can simply put them into an excel spreadsheet to track what you need and what you have purchased.

Let’s lay out an example for you. Say your family eats spaghetti once a week. You would want to store spaghetti sauce and spaghetti noodles. We are going to use 4 weeks in a month just to make things easy. I know that doesn’t come out to exactly once a week for the year, but when you get up to a years worth of storage, you can adjust your numbers.  Ok, on your spread sheet you would need 4 jars of spaghetti sauce for a month, 12 for 3 months and so on. Same goes for spaghetti noodles. Now if you include meatballs or ground beef or Parmesan cheese,  you will want to account for that also.

There are a couple options when it comes to meat. Obviously you can go with the fresh or frozen options and stock up the freezer. You could also go with canned beef. You can find canned beef at almost any store in the canned meat section. Another option when it comes to meat is freeze dried.  There is not only freeze dried beef, but a less expensive freeze dried meat substitute than could be used.

When it comes to storing Parmesan cheese it’s much harder to get a really long shelf life. One of the easiest ways to store Parmesan cheese is to go with the grated cans. These tend to have a shelf life of a year or better and can be stored unrefrigerated as long as they are not opened. There are some cheese powder options in the freeze dried realm, but not when it comes to Parmesan.

Speaking of freeze dried foods, there are a lot of options and a lot of brands. You can get everything from prepared meals to individual ingredients. The great thing about the individual ingredients like butter, milk or vegetables is you can use them to put together Mason jar meals that can be tailored to your liking. There are also already prepared meals that can store for many years which makes them great preps. Now they can get expensive and probably are not the best option when you are first starting.

That being said once you get your initial food storage set up I would recommend incorporating some freeze dried options. There are many really good companies putting out products like Saratoga Farms, Augason Farms, Mountain House, Wise or Legacy.

Just keep adding to your storage so it’s one less thing you and your family have to worry about in any emergency.

Peace, Love and All the above,                 

                 Barry