How to Create An Emergency Food Supply

After Water, Food was the next priority. A few years ago in my housemates and I put together an emergency food supply. We bought a whole load of tins and rice and pasta, put them in bins and then forgot about them for a few years. So as you can imagine all the food had expired and was wasted.

One valuable thing I learnt from this experience is that you have to try to deal with people with where they are at. People are often enthusiastic to start with, make all sorts of promises to go into action and change their lives and so on but then events take over and before you know it you have 6 bins full of rotten food. So this time around I tried to create our food supply based on our collective regular eating habits. Having 2 months of freeze dried food sounds great but unless you live with arch survivalists, or em preppers then getting them to lay out the cash for such an investment can be really challenging.

Step 1

Was to look at the non perishable food we as a house and people in general eat on a regular basis. Cornflakes every morning, pasta once per week, pinto beans, refried beans once per week, almond milk every day and so on.

Step 2

I created a meal plan for one month based on that list of food. So 3 types of breakfast, 3 types of lunch, 3 types of snacks. I also broke down each meal into the individual items ( tinned salmon, rice etc) and the size of each portion needed for one person I then wrote up a plan and rotated them throughout the month. Below is a link to the meal plan I created.

Meal Plans For Emergency Food Supply


I have to admit that I am no Michelin chef but I figure the meals I have created would be welcomed during an emergency.

Step 3

I then broke down each meal in terms of portions. So how much rice per person per meal, how much almond milk per person per meal etc. I then calculated how much of each ingredient I would need per person for one month