Prepper Food Supplies

At the first sign of any disruption to life as we know it one of the first things to happen is that shelves at your local supermarket are cleared by panicked shoppers. In some ways, it’s a reasonable reaction because having enough food in the house is one of the first thoughts to spring to mind when approaching practically any emergency situation.

We are currently experiencing empty supermarket shelves due to a lack of lorry drivers (with some being forced to self-isolate). This week, for example, it was reported that the Army are on standby to help distribute food and essentials including medicine.

While being stocking up on foodstuffs and other supplies makes sense, you need to make sure that you don’t end up with things you don’t use.

The answer – as always, of course – is to be well prepared. And here are our tips on doing just that:

Picture the scene

• preparing for any crisis means trying to picture exactly how things will change;

• if there is an emergency or crisis, supply chains might be disrupted and both the supermarket nor your local corner store will begin to run out of stock – what does that mean for the way you usually buy the food that you and your family eats;

• how much food do you have in the house now, how long do you reckon those stores of food will last, have you worked out any ways of rationing or making the stores that you have last longer, and do you have access to any alternative sources of food other than the shops you usually frequent;

• the answers will help you decide what you need to be buying now to store for later – so you’re prepared for the worst that might happen;

Long sell-by dates

• getting in good and early means that you can scoop up any cut-price, special offers and bargain deals– it’s just as handy to save money in the event of any emergency as any other time;

• what you’ll be keeping an especially keen eye open for are deals on tinned and jarred foods with long – if any – sell-by dates;

• the American website The Prepared insists that you need to aim to build emergency food supplies for longer than the once-suggested three days and instead have enough for two people to last for two weeks – because there have been plenty of disasters and emergencies where it has taken longer than three days for everything to recover and return to normal;

Long shelf-life foods

• if you’re planning to build up long-term stocks of food, you’ve already probably thought about the staples such as pasta, grains (such as oats), pulses (beans and lentils, for example), shakes, energy bars, and whole-grain biscuits such as Ryvita (which are high in fibre and especially healthy, says the UK website Be Healthy Now);

MREs, ration packs, and freeze-dried food

• if you’re keen to build up food stores that will last even longer, you might even consider the various Meal Ready to Eat (MRE) packs you can buy these days – these originate from the needs of the military in the field (where they are still used);

• you might also want to think about packets or tins of freeze-dried food – provided they remain unopened, these can last for 25 years or more according to UK manufacturers Emergency Food Storage, and a further two to six months even after they’ve been opened;

• if you are going to be experimenting with what are likely to be previously untried foods such as these, it’s probably a good idea to taste them beforehand since the last thing you want is to be ill – even with an upset stomach – during any disaster or crisis;

Grow your own

• for the purist prepper who has really mastered the art of preparing for whatever the future may hold, of course, then growing your own food could be the answer;

• in our blog on the 16^th of June 2021, we gave it the fancy title of tactical gardening – but, if you got the message, it simply means growing whatever you can as quickly and as conveniently as possible;

• even if you have a lack of space, you can still invest in a vertical planter to and start growing your own food. Even the basics like spinach and rocket can be easily grown with little effort;

• that blog included a few suggestions about the kinds of food you might want to try growing – but if none of those whetted your appetite, you might also want to practice another of the prepper’s arts, foraging.

Summary

All in all, you’ll find that you have quite a few options when building up any stores of food with which to weather any kind of disaster or emergency. All that’s required is a little forward-thinking, an eye on the expiry dates of some foods, the long-life nature of others, and plenty of dry storage space for the supplies you are assembling.

Keep an inventory of whatever is kept in your stores and make sure to rotate the use of any approaching their expiry dates – even if there’s no emergency for them to be used, at least you should be eating the food rather than seeing it going to waste.