by St. Funogas, Survival Blog:
Priorities in Food Selection For a JIT Food-Storage Program
The following list is a one-year supply for one person so multiply it by however many people you’re buying for. If a year’s worth doesn’t seem practical divide it by how many months you want to prepare for.
Any kind of food-storage program should be primarily based on daily calories. For those without much money to spend, you want the most calories each dollar can provide you with. High-calorie foods also take up less storage space than low-calorie foods.
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Calorie information is provided on my list. For other foods you want on your own list, the calories can be calculated easily enough from food-package labels. My numbers are based on the recommended 2,500 calories per day for adults. When our daily lifestyle includes a lot of physical labor, more calories are required of course.
Total calories per food type are easy enough to figure out. You can check online for calories per pound for each food item. Another method is to look at the nutritional information found on every food label. A two-pound bag of rice for example, indicates there are 160 calories per serving and 20 servings per 2 lb bag. Multiplying those two together, 160 calories x 20 servings = 3,200 calories per 2 lb bag, or 1,600 per lb. The program I’ve outlined here calls for 120 lbs of rice. 120 lbs X 1,600 calories per lb = a total of 192,000 calories. Divide that by the 2,500 daily calories we’ll need and we’ll see it will give us 77 days worth of calories. Those will be spread out over time of course, not all eaten in 77 days. Now keep adding different items to your shopping list until you reach 365 days’ worth of calories. The total calories an average person needs per year is almost 1,000,000, so use one million as your target for total calories your list will have. The majority of these will come from grains and rice, making the calculations easier.
Recipe Books
Think about how important hard copies of recipe books will be for a grid-down life, or three months of havoc caused by supply-chain breakdowns. If we end up living off our food storage, recipe books will spare us from the monotony of eating the same foods prepared the same way all the time. I didn’t realize until I was writing this article that in my library I only have one general cookbook and a few specialty ones. General cookbooks will be essential when we can no longer go to allrecipes.com. Next time I’m at the library book sale or an auction I’ll be looking for cookbooks that have more recipes for the basic storage items.
Most of us will be eating a lot of the same foods in quantities we’ve never eaten before, over and over again. It won’t take long before we’re wishing we knew more ways to cook rice and beans. If you don’t yet have the SurvivalBlog USB Archive Stick I’d strongly recommend getting one when they become available again in early 2025. It’s going to be one of your most valuable tools to help you get through a grid-down world. It has a huge library of PDF books including the Butterick Cookbook. That has 788 pages, a 47-page exhaustive index, and 22 recipes for rice including unexpected ones like rice pudding. My general cookbook only has 7 rice recipes.
Currently, most of us use beans, rice, and other basic foods in a limited number of recipes. For example, all my dry beans end up in chili and my garbanzos in hummus. There are dozens more recipes for beans that are easy enough to prepare.
Since most of us won’t have access to much meat if we’re living off our food storage, a vegetarian cookbook is also good to have with its recipes for meatless dishes. I have a recipe for sausage that uses rice, oats, and flour. The spices are heavy enough it has a lot of flavor and it’s a good imitation for pork sausage. While I’m not a vegetarian, some of their recipes are well worth having when meat becomes a distant memory.
Use-by and Best-by Dates
When putting together your JIT shopping list, ignore use-by and best-by dates. They’re purely and simply a scam. Even the USDA suggests ignoring these and using your senses to check food for edibility. Look for obvious issues like mold, smell for any off odors, taste a small amount to see if it’s okay, and touch to feel if the texture is different. Listen. If your hear anything you’ve probably eaten ergot of rye and are hallucinating.
Here’s the best article on the subject of best-buy dates. The founder of Mom’s Organic Market and his family ate nothing but “expired” food for a year.
Like all companies, food companies are in business to make money. If they can get us to think that “best-by” and “use-by” means the food is no longer good after that date, they’re using our fears to get us to throw away perfectly good food so they can sell us some more. Brilliant marketing but predatory. Don’t fall for it.
When checking the shelf life of any foods including those on this shopping list, it’s best to check prepper websites rather than websites that are regurgitating useless information from the canners and manufacturers.
Walmart App
A helpful tool for planning your JIT food-shopping list while sitting at home is the Walmart app. Even if you don’t shop at Walmart it’s a good tool for a project like this. You can do a search on various items to see what’s available, get their price, and get calorie information from the label. One of the things I like best is the bar-code scanner the app has. Not only can you check prices of any foods currently on your kitchen shelves, but can also use the scanner while you’re standing in Trader Joe’s or your local grocery store to compare their price with Walmart’s. You’ll be surprised how often they’re cheaper than Walmart, especially on sale items.
My Personal JIT Shopping List
I’m adding commentary to each of the foods on my list to cover a few things not generally covered when food-storage items are discussed.
While beans and grain sound like a boring meal waiting to happen, there are many more ways to use them than you’d imagine. Do yourself a favor and do an internet search (if it’s still up and running when you need it) and print some recipes which sound good.
Hard-copy cookbooks, or the Butterick Cookbook on the SurvivalBlog USB Archive Stick also have plenty of ideas. For an example on variety, there’s more to corn that canned corn, corn on the cob, and cornbread. That’s how we eat 95% of the corn we consume but when the SHTF we’ll need more variety.
