Emergency Food Storage

Your emergency food storage plan should include at least a week's worth of food for your family stored in portable totes that you can quickly grab in the event you have to evacuate your home.

When we first planned out our portable emergency food storage, we had no idea what we were doing!  We found a list of food items in a book and went out and purchased them all.  However when we decided to do a test run and actually evacuate our house and use some of the food in our totes we learned several things!

Emergency Food Storage Lessons Learned

We learned that having random pounds of pasta, honey, canned beans, etc. was not really helpful for us. To begin with we didn’t care for Red kidney beans, and a 2lb box of spaghetti is great, but we didn’t want to eat it for the whole week.

After our practice run we sat down and re-examined our food storage plan for evacuation. Here are the following steps we recommend you take when planning an evacuation food storage plan:

1. Come up with a menu (see our sample evacuation food menu)
2. Store recipes with your food (recipes for our sample menu)
3. Store realistic amounts of food (a 5 lb. jug of honey is not necessary for a 1-2 week evacuation food plan!)
4. Store food your whole family will eat.
5. Plan recipes that you can use with the tools you will have on hand.
6. Pack a comfort food such a M&Ms or oreo cookies

Benefits of Evacuation Food Storage

“Why should I even bother to have portable food storage?”, you may ask and that is a good question!  To some it may seem like overkill to have a week’s worth of food to take with you in the rare event that you must evacuate, but in reality, it is very helpful to have!

• Should you ever need evacuate, thousands of other people will be as well. This will mean that roadways, hotels, and restaurants (if they are even available) will be overloaded with people who have not prepared.
• It will save you money because during a crisis prices tend to inflate and basic necessities, like food often become over-priced.
• You will feel more in control in a frightening situation to know that you have a plan and everything you need to survive. You will therefore be much calmer than those around you.