The first time I tried to put together a year’s supply of food, I used a chart I found on the internet. It listed various food groups and how much of each the average adult could be expected to use over the course of a year.
27 pounds of cornmeal. 2 pounds of pearled barley. 11 pounds of flour.5 quarts of cooking oil. 1/2 pound of yeast.
So, I dutifully went out and bought 27 pounds of cornmeal. (I figured I’d buy the rest as I went along.)
Three years later I threw out 26 pounds of cornmeal.
The fact is, at that time of my life I just wasn’t into cornbread, which was the only thing I knew to do with cornmeal. Even now, with three children (one of them a teenager who eats everything that isn’t nailed down), I can’t see using 27 pounds of cornmeal in one year.
Obviously, what my family eats isn’t found in a standardized list of food storage items. What your family eats isn’t going to be found there either. Which might leave you feeling overwhelmed. How are you going to determine how much food to store for your family?
It’s easy. All you need is a permanent marker.
Every time you open a multiple-use package that contains something you’re thinking about storing long-term, just write on the package the date you opened it. Every time you bring a single-use package into the house, do the same thing.
For instance: when you open a bag of flour, write the date on the side of the bag. When you use up the last of the flour, note the date you opened it. Was that a month ago? Two months ago? If you took two months to use up a five pound bag of flour, you can figure on only needing 30 pounds of flour (six five-pound bags) over the course of a year. If you only want to store three or six months of food, then keep only 10 or 15 pounds of flour on hand.
If you buy two cans of peas, write the date you bought them on the top of the cans. When you open the second one, again, note the date. Did you use them up in a week? Then a year’s supply of peas for your family would be 104 cans of peas (assuming you had a week of normal use.)
This system works best, I’ve found for larger amounts of food. I get a better idea of our usage by looking at what we use over the course of a month or two. (In other words, see how long it takes you to go through a case of peas, instead of 2 cans.)
This method lets me know that my family eats about five pounds of rice/month, not the 25 pounds recommended by the standardized charts. We use a pound of yeast a month, not .2 pounds. All of which makes my food storage a lot more useful and keeps our landfills free of rancid cornmeal!