Disaster Skills: 8 Great Staples To Stock

These simple staple foods are cheap, versatile and sustaining. Grab them and package them for long term storage (while you can).

White Rice
Most of the following supplies are nicknamed “forever foods”, as they will last for decades when stored in airtight containers with oxygen absorbers to keep them fresh. These foods should be kept in a cool, dry, dark location and protected from pests. One of the crown jewels of the collection is white rice. This carb rich food provides almost 1700 calories per pound (uncooked), and can be prepared by simply boiling it in water. Don’t try the healthy route, by storing brown rice. This will only last a short time before it goes rancid, due to its higher fat content. Stick to the white rice, and you’ll have food for years.   

Enriched Flour
No, it isn’t wholesome like whole wheat flour or whole kernel wheat seeds (aka wheat “berries”). But do you really want to choke down “health food” during doomsday? Not me. I’ll take the bleached and enriched all-purpose flour (for it’s familiar flavor and long shelf life). Just shy of 1700 calories per pound, this stuff can be turned into gravy and dumplings, if you only have boiling water for preparation. If baking is an option, try bread, cookies and other baked goods. (For the average person) the hardest part about working with flour is learning to cook “from scratch” with an uneven heat source (like a fire). It’s worth the trouble, though.

Pasta
There’s no need to cobble together some kind of post-apocalyptic oven when the grid goes down. Not if you have water, fire, a big pot and some pasta. Comparable to the other staples here (at almost 1700 calories per pound), dried pasta is a great long-term storage food. Choose varieties that pack down tightly. A pound of squiggly noodles will take up a lot more room that a pound of spaghetti or couscous. Make the pasta taste good by storing oils, jarred sauces and herbs that will make the pasta tasty and familiar. Don’t store these flavorings in your food buckets, and rotate these extras often for freshness.

Powdered Milk

While it isn’t the best tasting beverage, powdered milk does provide good nutrition. Some companies produce a powdered whole milk that is packaged for long term storage, but when shopping at the local grocery store – choose powdered non-fat milk for the longest storage life. Use it to make plain milk for drinking, add chocolate milk mix to make it taste better, or use it in recipes where milk is needed. For the diehard prepper, pack a five gallon bucket with little Mylar bags of powdered milk with oxygen absorbers – rather than using one big Mylar bag. Powdered non-fat milk is 1600 calories per pound.

Honey

Honey is a very strange food. Most people love it (though it’s not recommended for babies, as it can cause botulism). Most people know that honey comes from bees, but few people actually know what this odd substance is. Through a careful series of processes, bees suck up flower nectar, digest it, regurgitate it, and evaporate it to make honey. That’s right, honey is bee vomit. That aside, honey is also a superfood, with an indefinite life span. One pound of honey provides 1360 calories. It can eaten as food, applied to wounds for infection prevention, or it can be turned into mead (a sweet honey-based wine).

Potato Flakes
Often forgotten and remarkably versatile, instant potato flakes can be transformed into many delicious comfort foods. By adding boiling water, potato flakes can become mashed potatoes or potato soup. By blending them into flour you could make dense and tasty potato bread. Add some water and onions to make stiff potato “dough”, pat it out into flat disks and you can sizzle up some little fried potato cakes like mom used to make. While dry potato flakes contain about 100 calories per ounce, comparable to pasta, sugar and flour - potato flakes are a very fluffy staple food (meaning that you won’t get too many pounds in each storage bucket). But this staple is so useful, why not stock additional buckets of it?

Salt
Today, salt is very common and cheap. It’s so cheap, in fact, that restaurants put out salt shakers on the tables and you can dump as much as you like on your already salty restaurant food. But long ago, certain cultures traded salt for an equal measurement of gold (yes, salt was worth its weight in gold). It was so valuable in fact, that Roman soldiers were paid with salt and it’s from this custom we still use the word “salary” for payment (“sal” means salt). In modern times, iodized salt is useful as a flavoring and for necessary nutrients (specifically, sodium and iodine). We can also use salt to preserve many foods, like meat and vegetables. You may also want to stock some non-iodized salt, if you want the option to make fermented veggie food like kraut. Iodized salt will kill the organisms you need for lacto fermentation, but non-iodized salt (like sea salt) will help the fermentation process. For those who know how to cure meats with salt, you may also want to stock some curing salt to make bacon, sausage and similar animal foods.

Oil
The salt and honey on this list will last indefinitely – without any oxygen absorbers or desiccant. Even if the salt solidifies into a brick, just chop some off. It’s still good. Similarly, the honey can get hard and crystalize, but it’s still safe to use (just heat it to melt it into a familiar form). The other foods listed can last for three decades or more, packed in Mylar bags with enough oxygen absorbers (1500 to 2000 CC’s in five gallon volumes). That brings us to our last staple, which is oil. You’ll need to rotate your jugs of oil annually, but they are too valuable to ignore. A gallon of veggie oil is almost 32,000 calories! Fry things, make salad dressings for home grown salads or use the oil as a cooking ingredient.

Want to learn about more shelf stable foods that will feed your family through tough times? Or how to package these foods to last 30 years? Check our my Food Storage and Preservation class.

Written by Tim MacWelch First draft published in his book Beat The Odds