

Mac & cheese, pasta, canned soup, boxes of cereal, oatmeal…anything your family likes that you could quickly prepare. Do you have enough food for everyone in your family to eat for 3 days? If not, make a plan to buy some quick and easy meals to store for an emergency. Just look at the food you have at home in your pantry, fridge and freezer. If you couldn’t leave your home for the next 3 days, what would your family eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Do you have enough food to cook from, in case of an emergency?Īt this point, I wouldn’t worry too much about losing power or your freezer. This is the absolute bare minimum everyone should have stored in their stockpile.Īs for food, look around your pantry and kitchen. It shouldn’t take you too long to do this, so just get it done! You can store water in gallons of water or a 5 gallon water jug or even cases of bottled water. Recommendations are 1 gallon of water, per person, per day. If not, you should be able to accomplish this baby step quickly! The goal here is to also store water (in case of an emergency). This is a pretty basic recommendation, and I would hope that most of us have at least this much food. Baby Step 1: Begin by stockpiling 3 days of food and water. You can read more in my disclosure policy. It’s the same as when using Dave Ramsey’s baby steps, because your progress will help you snowball into the next step. If you focus on completing one step at a time, your stockpile will grow more quickly. That’s how I came up with these simple baby steps. Trust me! I’ve had a stockpile for years, but as I look at increasing my stockpile (with everything going on in the world right now), it is still overwhelming. Let’s make stockpiling manageable so we don’t get overwhelmed with all there is to do. If you are asking yourself, “How much food storage do I need?” Then let’s start here. This … You need to start with the baby steps of stockpiling. If you want to build a long term food storage system, those calculators might have a time and place for you. Yes, you could use food calculators to tell you how many pounds of food to store per person for a year, but building a stockpile is so much more than that.

You need to look at your family and make those stockpile decisions. We may be comfortable with a month’s worth of food or maybe 6 months is still not enough for you. We have a different number of people, at varying ages. Unfortunately, there is no good answer because there is no one size fits all when building a stockpile.Įvery family is different. I wish I could give you a simple and clear answer to how much you should stockpile. You don’t have to do it all at once! Look at what you have already and make a plan to start building on that. You can build your stockpile in gradual increments.

You are building a practical emergency fund of food to help see you through whatever may come. If you follow these 5 important rules of stockpiling, the process will be much easier.īy building a stockpile of food, remember that you are taking care of your family. Remember that everyone’s stockpile is going to look different, due to practical choices and personal preferences. It’s a difficult question that requires a lot of thought, and I admit that it feels overwhelming – to all of us! The best way to figure out how much you should have in your stockpile is to make a plan for your family. When you are working on building a stockpile of food, the question comes up again and again, “How much food do I need to stockpile per person?” It is a very important question, and one that I am going to attempt to answer.
