Setting Up An Emergency Pantry, Part 4: Keeping It All Fresh
Summer storm season is upon us. Whether it is hurricanes or tornadoes that threaten your area (or both), are you prepared to feed your family for an extended period without power?
The last major outage I experienced lasted almost a week, and after watching a freezer full of food spoil, we lived out of whatever canned food we had around. We couldn’t get new supplies at the grocery store. As a result of this experience, I put together an emergency food plan. In this series, I will cover how I implement my emergency pantry and cooking plan.
Keeping food fresh
Setting up an emergency pantry does no good if the food in it expires or goes bad. In order to keep on top of this, you will need to implement a rotation plan to use up the food you have and replenish it with fresh food.
I discovered that most items in my emergency stash had expirations of six months or one year. My first thought was to only rotate those items that needed replacing, but I found that didn’t work well for me. I was too scattered to be able to figure out what needed to be pulled when. So I took the lowest common denominator.
Every six months I take everything that is in the emergency area of my pantry and move it into the general supply area. I then replenish the emergency area with lists I have ready. For the next two weeks, we then eat our way through the old emergency supplies.
Last Minute Supplies
Since I live in an area where hurricanes are more common than tornadoes, I generally have warning before a storm hits. I make a single run to the grocery and stock up on bread and fruit that does not need to be refrigerated. At home, I fill up our camping water jugs (3 5-gallon jugs), and right before the storm hits I will fill up the two bathtubs.
Food Storage
If you have the pantry space, keep the food with your other supplies. However, I found it best not to mix the emergency supplies in with the standard supplies; otherwise you might go to use some soup just to find that another member of your household consumed it for lunch!
I hope that this series has given you a good overview of how I manage food under emergencies. Please feel free to leave comments!
Photo by lu_lu
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