Food and Water

Let’s continue with our series on prepping. As you recall, I am using a prepping pyramid to organize my preparations.

So far, we covered energy with the solar project. We touched on medicine. Let’s talk about food and water. There are three considerations for food and water: short term, intermediate, and long term.

Short Term

For the short term, I am talking about food and water to get you through three days. This is easy, and most of you have that already. If you have a few cans of tuna, canned soup, and other nonperishable foodstuffs in your pantry, along with a case of bottled water, you likely have enough for the short term. You aren’t going to starve to death in a couple of days, so the real struggle here is going to be water. You need at least 3 gallons of water per person for your short term needs. That works out to 24 bottles of water per person. If you are looking at short term foods, I recommend things that don’t require cooking.

A great example of this is hurricanes. When we know a hurricane is coming, we grab a couple of Sub sandwiches from Publix, a bag or two of chips, and a box of toaster pastries. The idea being that you can ride out the storm and have food to eat that doesn’t require cooking, with the understanding that the food is there more for comfort than it is for nutritional value.

Intermediate

Intermediate is from three days to about the first three months without services. For that, you need to have a good mix of foods, with some of them requiring preparation and some not. This is what I have, and I am planning for 4 people (even though there are only 2 of us):

• A freezer with a good stash of food. Meats, frozen vegetables, frozen butter, etc. The advantage is that this is exactly the food you usually eat. With this and what is in our pantry, we can last a couple of weeks. Most Americans can, as we tend to keep both the pantry and the refrigerator full, unless you are one of those people who shops every day.
• A case of MREs for those times when you can’t cook or need portable food that won’t spoil. There are 12 meals in a case, and you can easily get by with only eating two per day, per person.
• On top of that, we have cases of #10 cans and some pouches of freeze dried foods, a good mix of Mountain House and others.
• We also have some portable water jugs like these. I would like to have more water storage, and I have been looking at something like this. Having a 55 gallon barrel of drinking water would be sufficient for four people for a couple of weeks.
• We also have a water filter like this one.

Long Term

For long term food and water needs, you want to start thinking about services not coming back for the foreseeable future. Here in Central Florida, we get a good amount of rain. From an inch and a half per month during our dry period in December, to six inches in June, on average. A nice rain barrel coupled with our filter and some boiling should give us potable water for the long term. If you are in an area without appreciable rainfall for at least part of the year, you may need to think about something else.

This is an upcoming project for me.

For long term food, you need to think about planting vegetables. After a week or so without food, you should be planting.

Three months without food should mean that much of the population is now gone, and the ones that are left are going to be ruthless, hungry, and resourceful. This will complicate your security situation. That talk comes later.

At a minimum, everyone should have short term food and water stored. Depending on your locale, you could be facing a hurricane, a blizzard, or some other relatively common event that means the stores aren’t open. Be ready for that.

Build up an intermediate storage capability slowly. A couple of things bought per month, and you will quickly have a couple of months’ supply. That will put you ahead of 95% of Americans for preparedness.