Longer Emergencies and Rotating Your Food

Family Having Lunch (ca 2007)
photograph by
Bill Branson

For longer emergencies (more than two-week), you and your family will want a little more variety in your meals. Just like before, all you do is prepare the meal, record the quantity of food needed for the meal, and buy the food at the local market. Lastly, you place this extra food with your other stored food.

Now, you and your family are going to have to rotate this food. If you eat the meals you have stored, you can easily rotate the food.

To rotate the stored food:

First, choose the meal you're planning to eat. Go to the local grocery, buy the food, and bring it home. Next, take this food, you just bought, and take it to your food storage area. (For me and my family, it is in the basement)

Place this new food in the back of the shelf, then take the ingredients (the older food) off the front of the shelf. Take the food from your food storage area (mine is the basement) to the kitchen and make the meal.

This method insures you and your family have fresh food and that you are eating that food.

When my wife decided to become a vegetarian, we had to re-plan our food storage. We redid our menus (taking out the meat and adding new meals) Next, we went to the store and bought the "new" types of food and started using the "new" food in our "new" meals.

Most folks ask if this was/is a big deal because the kids and I still eat meat. It isn't. I add canned meat to our plates after we have cooked the main course. I also do this when the family has eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the last three days.

I like PB & J for about three days straight. On the fourth day, I have to have something different, so we plan for this in our menus. For me, we have a very small canned ham in our food storage. I slice it up and have ham sandwiches for lunch as the kids and my wife eat PB & J, again! Any extra ham is used in the next dinner, so we don't have to refrigerate it.