There are two ways to build up your emergency food pantry. One way is to store extra of the non-perishable foods you already eat in daily life. This list covers that kind of food — the stuff you can find at any supermarket that’s great for your stockpile.
Another way is to buy special ‘survival food’ that you don’t crack open until an emergency but usually lasts much longer than supermarket food. Either way is fine, and most people end up doing both.
The beginner prepper guide explains the pros and cons of each method, plus basic concepts such as how much food to store for your family. And if you’re not yet familiar with the FIFO “store what you use, use what you store” model, check that out too.
What to look for when shopping
Although there’s a specific food list below — and you’ll be just fine if you only buy from that list — it’s worth understanding the basic differences between what’s good for your prepper pantry and what isn’t. The more you understand, the easier it is to customize or improvise.
Basic criteria:
Long shelf life. Even though you’re not trying to match the same kind of 20-30 year shelf life of freeze-dried food, or the 5-8 year shelf life of MREs, you still want to be smart about picking durable products. Try to avoid anything that doesn’t last at least a year.
Easy to store. Durable packaging, like a can or box, is much better than the kind of packaging you’d find with potato chips. Food that needs to be cold/frozen isn’t automatically disqualified, but be careful about relying on electricity too much.
Easy to prepare. In the kind of emergency where you’re relying on this food, you might not have utilities or other stuff that makes cooking easier. So we favor foods that can be eaten as-is, only need basic reheating or rehydrating, or are easy to mix and match with other ingredients.
Nutritional. Not everything needs to be “healthy,” and while mental/emotional comforts are valuable in a crisis, you don’t want to make things worse by trying to live off junk food — including Nuclear Twinkies 🙂
Calorie density. Some food (or how it’s packaged) gives you more caloric bang-per-square-foot than others, and limited space is often your biggest problem when building up a pantry.
Dietary restrictions. An emergency isn’t the time to be picky, but it’s okay to avoid foods that your family universally hates, are discouraged by your faith, or someone has a dietary problem with (eg. lactose or gluten.)
There’s an old canard about healthy grocery shopping: shop in the outer aisles, where fresh meat and produce are usually placed, and avoid the inner aisles, where processed, sugary foods live. When shopping for preps, you want to do the opposite: shop the inner aisles where shelf-stable foods are usually displayed.
The best items are found on the interior aisles. Skip the fresh stuff around the store perimeter.
Besides budget, space is often one of the biggest limitations when building your at-home food stores. So you want to cram as much nutrition as possible into your space. Most of the foods on this list are already dense (eg. a bag of rice), but even a bag of pasta that’s half food and half air can add up over time.
For instance, a large bag of potato chips is about the same size as a 20-pound bag of pinto beans. One cup of chips has about 137 calories, 9.4 grams of fat, 12.4 grams of carbs, and 1.6 grams of protein, while a cup of pinto beans has 240 calories, 1 gram of fat, 44 grams of carbs, and 16 grams of protein. Not to mention that the bag of chips is full of air.
Beans are a good example of thinking about things like ease of preparation, nutritional value and density, and versatility. For example, we recommend having both dry and canned (wet) beans because dry beans last longer, but canned beans can be eaten right out of the can without spending any fuel on heat.
Beans also pair well with other staple ingredients, not just for taste and variety, but as a powerful combo that levels-up your prepping game — that’s why USAID recommends pairing beans with grains in emergencies:
Beans are consumed as an affordable source of protein in most parts of Africa, Central and South America, and Asia. They are a good source of fiber, B vitamins, and antioxidants. When combined with a grain, beans provide complementary amino acids to create a complete protein meal.