How Much Emergency Food Should You Keep at Home?
Calculating How Long Your Food Stockpile Will Last
To get the total number of days your stockpile will last, you need to take the:
Total calories in your stockpile ÷ Calories your family needs per day
Let’s start with the top half of the equation.
Calculating How Many Calories You Have
Ideally, your pantry is well organized, making the process much faster.
But if it’s not…perhaps this will allow you to do so…?!?
Because you’re about to take inventory.
Yup. Just like ALL successful retail businesses do regularly.
Now you may ask, “Should I count EVERYTHING” on my shelves?
If it’s shelf stable and you replace it regularly, then YES, count it.
Sure, some items will fluctuate as you use them up and then buy more.
But a snapshot of the shelf life stable calories in your pantry is “close enough” …
Obviously count all freeze-dried foods, MREs, canned meats, and #10 Cans.
Also, don’t count ANY calories in your refrigerator or freezer.
Power outages make freezers highly vulnerable disaster appliances.
The only exception is if you have a robust backup energy plan or you are already living off the grid.
A robust backup energy plan means having a Power station (or a generator with a few weeks of fuel).
Otherwise, I DON’T count your refrigerated and frozen goods.
I used a simple spreadsheet for this to help make the calculations easy. Plus, I can sort and filter as needed later with a spreadsheet.
Start by making a few columns titled:
- Food – Brand
- Number of items (pouches, bags, containers)
- Servings Per Container
- Calories per Serving
- Total Calories
Once you fill out an entire row with that info, multiply the “number of items” by the “servings per container” by the “calories per serving.”
This will give you the number of calories you have in your inventory for THAT specific food item.
Now, you need to be careful here.
I added the Brand to the first column because not ALL bran
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
