Three Month Supply

The Family Home Storage pamphlet says to "build a small supply of food that is part of your normal, daily diet" by buying a few extra items when you're at the grocery store, Costco, Wal-mart, etc. Then, bit by bit you'll build up enough food to supply your family for three months.

Building Food Storage
The best advice I've been given is to pay attention to the sales at all the local grocery stores. One week, for example, Dole pineapple was 77 cents a can at Fiesta, so I bought a hole bunch because my family loves Dole pineapple and you don't get Dole pineapple in Houston, TX cheaper than 77 cents a can. This week Sellers Brothers is selling 8 oz tomato sauce cans 6 for $1. I don't recognize the brand, but that's the cheapest prize for tomato sauce I've seen.

If I had more confidence in my organization skills, I'd get into using coupons like some of my friends have. They usually pick up one or more Sunday newspapers on Saturday at Kroger or a dollar store and cut out the coupons. What's really cool is if you coordinate using coupons with the sales that are going on. There are also coupons you can print off online or put on your store cards.

Here's a list of websites to look at about coupons:

http://www.dealseekingmom.com/

http://www.thecouponproject.com/the_coupon_project/

http://www.couponsavinggame.com/

http://print.coupons.com/couponweb/Offers.aspx?pid=13306&zid=iq37&nid=10&bid=alk0114130150df14f8f5a15518


Organizing Food Storage
We keep track of the expiration dates on Excel. Ideally, we replace the item before we pull it from the food storage, but we're not perfect yet. We also pull and replace the expiring items out of the closet a least month (or how ever long it takes to eat them) before they expire. Again, we're not perfect, but we're getting better.

One of the most important things I've learned while keeping up a food storage is to only store foods in bulk that your family eats regularly. This might seem obvious, but one time we had 60 cans of something we thought we ate regularly that was expiring the next month. It was annoying to eat them and annoying to replace them all at once. Anyway, lesson learned. You can see we have 41 cans of Ravioli expiring in July. We need to start eating that.

How do you know you have 3 months worth of food?

It takes a little bit of time, but you have to sit down and calculate it out. You think of meals that your family likes, think of the non-perishable ingredients needed, and then decide how many times during a three month period you eat those meals.

It's easier for me to think of it in days. Because three months is around 90 days, you'll need 90 days worth of food.

That's a lot of food, and there is no reason to do it all at once. The best way to build a food storage is no different than accomplishing any other goal or assignment you have. Plan and set up weekly and/or monthly goals. Little by little, you can build up to 90 days worth of food. You can do it!

Where do you put it?

Good question. Wherever and in whatever you have that works for you.

Here's a view of our food storage. Not a pretty sight, but it works.