Food storage, simply put, is extra food in your house. It can be as little as a few extra days’ worth of food to several years’ worth of food. It can contain any type of food you want: canned goods, baking staples, frozen foods, and so much more. When some people hear the words “food storage,” they think it has to look something like this:
Wheat
Or this:
Beans
And it can, but it doesn’t HAVE to! You can store whatever you want and will actually eat!
So buy some chocolate! Buy some enchilada sauce! Buy some frozen chicken nuggets! Buy what you want to eat!
What about you? Do you have questions about food storage? Or tips you can share? Please comment below!
Laurel Laurie Staten Nguyen Newhall, CA
My Foray Into Food Storage 
February 8, 2014 at 11:26 pm
I could feed a squadron for a month with the food I have stored at home. I’ve lived in remote parts of the world where I learned to buy up big and store. Here’s a good tip. You can keep a freezer full of food from going off for up to three days without power. When the power goes out, don’t open it, or open it only once to retrieve what you think you’ll need for a few days. Then wrap the freezer in blankets. We had to do this often when we lived in Burma and had regular, and lengthy, power outages.
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February 9, 2014 at 12:43 am
Thanks for sharing your expertise! I hope to “see” you again!
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February 15, 2014 at 7:03 am
When I read your about page I was thinking, yep, she sure has to store food she has 4 boys!!! I had two daughters + my youngest was my son + he would bring all his friends home from his sports teams, so i ended up with at least 3 boys/more extra a meal for years!
I have only one son, and when he comes home from college my grocery bill doubles-lol. He just moved out this year to attend graduate school. We are empty nesters, but I am learning to store food in a different way.
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March 2, 2014 at 5:11 am
Yes, like you I believe in food storage. When I bake or maybe I pre-cook for guests, I make double the recipe. The extra food goes in the freezer.
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March 12, 2014 at 8:38 am
What a wonderful blog! I am looking forward to reading through it more thoroughly to get some great tips.
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March 13, 2014 at 11:40 am
Hi! Thanks for stopping by my (extremely) new blog. It’s so encouraging to have some one show interests. I have dozens of posts waiting for editing and pictures and time :). You’re blog looks really interesting. I’m sure I’ll be stopping by some more! Thanks again, Lia D.
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March 17, 2014 at 7:27 pm
Hi Laurie,
Thanks for following! I hope you find valuable information that brings only joy and fulfillment in your life. My food storage is small but I enjoy experimenting when all my perishable foods have perished:-). That’s how I fell in love with raw protein bars!
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March 17, 2014 at 7:42 pm
Thanks for stopping by my blog! I’d love to hear more about your food storage experiments and raw protein bars. 🙂
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March 18, 2014 at 7:32 am
Thank you for your blog on food storage. In any quest to be self-sufficient food storage know-how is a necessity. Of course as you probably well know, food storage was part of ours and most other cultures for most of human history. I only hope that such necessary traditions become more the norm than the odd exception. Any movement away from corporate consumer food is a step in the right direction to me!
best, m
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March 18, 2014 at 8:57 am
Fantastic idea for a blog, Laurie! People often wonder how I am able to “throw together dinner” without having to shop all the time. I am constantly extolling the virtues of a well-stocked pantry of staples. Cheers!
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March 18, 2014 at 9:13 am
Thank you so much! A well-stocked pantry is a lifesaver, isn’t it?
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April 6, 2014 at 4:04 am
Hello Laurie, thanks for stopping by our blog. Yours is very interesting and give us here in France a lot of good ideas!
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July 2, 2014 at 12:07 pm
I found a farmer friend that would sell me 5 gal buckets of wheat at avoided cost straight from his combine. This made spending money on a wonder Jr mill and all the time & energy necessary to make 100% whole wheat bread reasonable. I found the Millers Grain House bread book to be exceptional. It has developed into a very enjoyable hobby. It also makes it easy to share what I have with anyone that shows an interest. The wheat I got the first year was quite clean, with contaminants consisting of stems, leafs, wheat berries still containing the outer sheath. This last year was a very damp year and they did have a bit of a problem with fungus. They knew they had the problem but it wasn’t pervasive enough to dock what they got for their wheat. The information I got from the internet was that it has Black Point and Scab (Fusarium head blight). I have sent questions to a number of Extension Q&A sites and get the normal warnings but the real question I had was “if I store this wheat in sealed 5gal buckets, using dry ice to fumigate it for insects and remove oxygen, will the Fungus continue to grow?”
I normally pick through the wheat berries before I grind it. I try to grab stems, leafs, and any fungus showing berries. The rejected portion is usually less than a table spoon of rejects for a cup of wheat berries inspected. The detail that makes it easy for me to continue to making bread is that almost half of what I make goes to the farmer friends and they always rave about it. (Even the loaves that were a part of the learning curve.)
I would appreciate your thoughts on the potential impact if long term storage of this fungus contaminated wheat? Will the fungus continue to propagate in the absence or oxygen and in wheat that is quite dry? Can you suggest who I should contact to get this question resolved?
Jay Morgan
PS: Getting the wheat straight from the combine seems to yield very low (NONE) insect (weevil) contamination. If you think about it the weevils need a year round supply of starch which is not available in the field and if the combine is reasonably cleaned between uses it will not provide such a year round supply. As I sift through my wheat the only insect contamination I see is occasionally pieces of a grasshopper or blue bottle or normal house fly. They don’t live on wheat. They were there when the combine went by and got killed when they went through the combine.
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