Prepper Food Storage Tips
The prepper food storage plan is the first step in making sure you’ll have enough food to last through an emergency. Without preparation you’ll be scurrying around in a panic, grabbing any and every food related item you can get your hands on when the emergency hits.
You need to be smart about having your prepper food supplies set aside for your long-term survival. Start early; make your list; go shopping and build up your supply over time.
For food to keep for any length of time, it has to be properly stored. Not all foods are appropriate for long-term storage, but many are. So it’s important for you to choose the right food.
The following list details prepper food storage items that you should buy and put aside for a future emergency.
• Beans. You want beans because these will give you a supply of protein.
• Grains. You’ll want to have oats, rye, cornmeal, wheat, brown or white rice and flour, wheat flour, barley.
• Powdered milk. This doesn’t taste the same as fresh milk, but this type of milk can last at least 20 years and you need milk – not only for cooking, but for children as well.
• Fruit. You’ll need to buy dried fruit or freeze dried fruit that you can reconstitute by adding water.
• Make sure dried corn is also in your food storage supply.
• Sugar, honey, tea, coffee, peanut butter, nuts and seeds.
• Sale and canned goods, including canned meats. Though these don’t keep as long as other survival foods, canned goods can often last many years.
• Pasta.
• Oils — oils like olive oil and fats like lard.
• Baby formula, if you have a baby who’s on formula.
Still, just buying the food isn’t enough. If you don’t know how to store it, the food will go to waste. Foods that are put back in storage are susceptible to oxygen, light, moisture and temperature changes – especially heat.
You want to store the food in a cool room where the temperatures are less than 60 degrees.
To properly store your food, you can use food grade containers. You can get food buckets with air-tight covers like these from Amazon. Or you ask at some grocery stores and restaurants if they have any available for free.
Some people put a Mylar bag into the container first and put the food into the bag. Then, using a heat source, they seal the top of the bag. The Mylar bag helps keep out what would destroy your food source and makes it last longer than it would last just in the container alone. To help absorb the oxygen, you can put silicone gel packs into the containers or you can use salt.
Make sure that you date stamp the outside of the container so that you’ll know the month and year that you put the food into storage. Rotating your food stores is one key to maintaining a healthy food supply.
This preparation doesn’t need to be hard. You don’t need to go out of your way to make this happen. You can start your prepper food storage by simply buying a little more of the non-perishable foods that you already buy on a regular basis, and take it from there.