Build Short Term Food Storage
Just this week we talked about why we need food storage and the differences between short term and long term food storage. Today I wanted to talk about short term food storage. I hear that building food storage is just too hard of a task, that it costs too much or there have no place to store it. The best way to start to put these fears to rest is by focusing on your short term food storage.
A three month’s worth of short term food storage should take you through any type of emergency. I couldn’t imagine trying to buy an entire three month’s food storage all at once. This would break my bank. In order to build my three month’s food storage, I had to do it in baby steps. Here are some of the tips I used in building it:
• By one extra day’s worth of meals when you do your grocery shopping for the week. If you did this you would have an extra week’s worth of food every 2 months.
• Be patient and build your food storage without hurting you financially. A really stupid move would be to buy food storage on credit. You essentially are prepared, but now you are paying interest on that food storage.
• Buy items that you regularly eat. If you and your kids won’t eat it, don’t put it into your short term food storage.
• Look for sales at grocery stores. The grocery stores will do case lot sales a couple times a year. Some of these provide great deals in getting large quantities of items at a lower than usual cost. Pay attention to the price.
• Do not buy food storage so you can have longer times between visits. The purpose is to have it in case of an emergency.
• Have a place to store your short term food storage. This needs to be a cool dry place. Remember to keep the items off the ground. We had our basement flood a few months back due to the kids leaving a hose on in the window well for 24 hours. Because our food storage was in shelves about 2 inches off the ground we had no issues. You can go to Home Depot and buy standing shelves for less than $20.
• Use it. I know this contradicts what I just said about using it for an emergency. Each item has an expiration date and must be used before that date. I have reached a point where I want to be with amounts. We now use the food storage every day. We will refill it as we use it. This ensures that we are storing items we eat regularly. It also rotates the food.
Don’t make starting your food storage a hard thing to do. Build it based upon your financial ability, but do build it.
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