Store What You Eat – A Food Storage Cardinal Rule

I feel like many people make emergency food storage far more complicated than it really needs to be. One of the basic rules to follow is pretty simple. This is a two-part rule, and we’ll take each half one at a time.

Store What You Eat

In other words, don’t invest in a ton of food products you don’t normally eat on any sort of regular basis. There are a couple of important reasons for this.

A sudden dietary change can lead to all manner of intestinal distress. If you’re in a crisis situation, the last thing you want to do is add more misery to the mix, right? The whole point of prepping is to make life easier in a bad situation. Forcing down food your body isn’t familiar with isn’t likely to end well.

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Recently, I had someone tell me that he and his wife maintain a low/no sugar and carb diet and hadn’t eaten canned goods in a couple of decades or more, but they’d invested in several thousand canned goods to use in a long-term emergency. This is what we call a recipe for disaster.

Another reason to store what you eat leads us to the second half of this food storage rule.

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Eat What You Store

Your food storage should be an ever-changing, ever-evolving variety of food. The idea is to continually consume food and replace it with new food as you go along. This means you’ll always have the freshest possible food on the shelves if a disaster does hit.

Many of the foods we recommend for disaster planning, such as canned goods (whether store-bought or canned at home), will last several years on the shelf. However, there’s no downside to doing what you can to ensure you won’t have to rely on food that’s a decade old or more, right?

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Rotation should be a key element in your food storage plan. Keep track of what you use each week and replenish your supply when you go shopping. Yes, this involves some degree of organization, which isn’t always a strong suit with everyone. But if you make it a habit to keep tabs on what goes in and out of your food pantry, it’ll get easier over time.

One Size Fits All Food Storage Doesn’t Exist

Each home and family is unique, and no two food pantries will look the same. There is no ready-made plan that will work for everyone. But a good place to start is to look around your cupboards and cabinets. See what you and your family eat regularly that also happens to have a good shelf life.

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If you or a family member requires any sort of special diet, look into ways you can preserve those types of foods at home, such as through canning or dehydrating.

The key takeaway here is this. You don’t need to drop a ton of money on purpose-made survival foods. You just need to buy a little extra of what you use every day.