Alright, so I am just starting prepping...

[Svothe]

As the post title says, I am just beginning prepping. Now although it appears to be common sense (a department I am no doubt lacking in) what is the best foods and such to prep. So far we have a couple of the basics such as tinned beans, beans and sausages, meatballs, new potatoes, mixed fruit and about 15kg of Pasta/Spaghetti. I then grabbed myself 20 litres of bottled water but now i'm a bit stumped. I want to put together a shopping list, which I can buy bits off of each week to then add to my food storage so basically I just want ideas of what foods are good to get and why. I am trying to do this as cheaply as possible, and I'm limited to purchasing from a main supermarket such as Tesco/Morrisons/Asda and can't really buy in bulk.

Thanks,
Svothe

Images of current preps: (Sorry about picture quality its quite dark up there, and taken on an Iphone without flash. oh and just using links as don't have time to resize at the moment.)
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... G_0442.jpg
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... G_0443.jpg
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... G_0522.jpg
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... G_0523.jpg

[the_alias]

Iceland does 5 litres water for a quid or maybe two now. That is what I used for water prepping.

The best food to buy is food you and your family already eat. No use buying rice and beans if they prefer pasta (but rice and beans is very good so get them on it if they don't like it.)

Don't forget some 'treats' as well - odd pack of biscuits or tinned fruit.

[Svothe]

Yeah got some fruit, I accidently mentioned that rice looks kind of like maggots once and for some reason it put most the household off. However got a fair bit of pasta and still working on building that up better. Mostly Spaghetti as it takes up the least room, but have got regular pasta and also four or so 500g packs of Lasagne Sheets as they take up no room at all and you can make some decent meals with it. Everything is dated 00/06/2012 or further and trying to make sure everything last the same kind of time. What biscuits do you think are best for prepping, I can't imagine the usual chocolate digestives lasting too long.

[maldon007]

I dont know if its the same everywhere, but Spaghetti (or any pasta I buy) seems to have a longer sell-by date if packaged in air-tight plastic bags, as opposed to the square long boxes. Also, the boxes seem to get bugs in them from time to time, and I have never had that problem with the bagged stuff.

[Svothe]

Yeah I think it does here also, I will try to avoid getting the boxed stuff.

Thanks,
Svothe

[TacAir]

Somethng I can eat.
Something I can use to cook it.
Something I can use to eat it (plates/forks/etc).
Something I can use to to clean up.
Someplace I can store it safely.
Someway to track the age and location of my food so I can rotate it.

Then
Something I can drink.
Someplace to store it.
Someplace to obtain, purify and transport more water.

Then on to shelter, heat and so on.

When starting on any journey, it can seem overwhelming.

Don't - get overwhelmed. Break each set into smaller bits (as above) and work the bits that you are able to as time/money/space allows.

Just thinking about this puts you ahead of many of your neighbors. HAving food and water now is even better.

Best of luck on your new journey. I think you will soon find it is a lifetime long journey.

[Svothe]

Alright thanks, I'll try and break up my wishlist into either of the categories. Hopefully then I'm better covered for whatever happens

all the tips and such are much appreciated so do please keep them coming.

Thanks,
Svothe

[Dawgboy]

As far as some treats go, I recently opened a 4 year old tin of Dak Danish Butter cookies and they were just as stale as the day they were made! They got scarfed by friends in short order with no complaints. So there's one idea. I also have some 3 year old Nutter Butters that I'm thinking about... Not sure if i want to eat them...

[Maast]

TacAir makes a very good point, break it down and start working on the list - most important to least important.
If you start buying anything that just catches your fancy that can get expensive and wasteful.

I'd recommend a "ready reserve" of your regular food you eat of up to a few months worth that you rotate through, and then a bulk "Long Term Storage". Personally we have about 1 month on hand.
You might also want to keep a weeks worth of "open and eat" meals on hand like MREs or the hormel ready meals that you can grab and go in an emergency.

For your Long Term Storage start with the basics in bulk: Carbohydrates, Protein, Fats, bottles of vitamins, sugar, salt, and powdered milk. Then start on your micronutrients to add variety; beef/chicken bullion, veggies, fruits, spices, powdered garlic, dried onions, etc. Then your "treats" such as peanut butter, nutella, coffee, powdered lemonade, etc.
BTW, pure honey and corn syrup dont go bad, they might crystallize but a dunk in a hot water bath will take care of that.

Whatever you store will need to be kept cool, for every 11 degrees above 70 shelf life is halved, conversely for every 11 degrees below 70 shelf life is DOUBLED. Unless you get to freezing temps, then extreme care with moisture content has to be taken.

You'll also need to decide if you will be grinding wheat/corn/etc into meal or flours, if you will you'll need to get a hand powered mill, there are cheapies at around 70 bucks, the good ones that'll last run about $300-500. Personally I went with storing flour and meal, I didnt want to futz with a mill, however poundage-wise you can put more wheat berries and corn into a 5 gallon bucket than you can flour/meal.

I'm not a fan of wet pack canned goods, mainly because compared calorie to calorie they dont compete very well with weight and cost vs dehydrated/dried food. The best bang/buck is dried goods stored in a aluminized mylar bag w/ oxygen absorbers protected inside a 5 gallon bucket or rubbermaid containers.
There are two exceptions to this though, canned meat, and canned fats: Those are rather difficult/expensive to store in bulk in a freeze dried or dried form in a manner which they'll last for years.

Carbohydrates can be dried rice, pasta, wheat, some types of beans, couscous, cream of wheat, etc. They're plentiful, varied, and cheap. You're also going to want leavinings like baking powder. Depending on what you get some will need close attention to how they're stored.

Proteins can be tougher; dried beans are the best value along with vital wheat gluten (very versatile), but folks'll get tired of them so you'll need SOME actual meat for flavor: beans/gluten will still be the bulk of your protein store, the gluten can be made into a meat subsitute, or just eaten in a bread stick type form - its atually pretty tasty, especially if you add some beef bullion in.

You can buy freeze dried meat but thats expensive per calorie, here the value tips back over to canned meat, hormel and yoders meats have an indefinate shelf life, the "best by" dates are for flavor, they dont actually go bad.
BTW, Spam has a lot of water in it - much more than regular meat, you're far better off with meat chunks.

There is one problem with wet pack canned goods though, they undergo a process called hydrolysis in which a molecule of water inserts itself into the middle of a protein molecule and cleaves it, this process doesnt make the protein go bad exactly - but it does reduce the nutritive value of the protein. From what I've read this process is slow so it takes just over a decade to reduce the nutritive value by half.

Fats are tough, if oxygen can get to it any fat or oil will go rancid - and by the time a puny human nose can smell it, its REALLY rancid. Powdered whole eggs have this same problem as the proteins in powdered eggs oxidize very rapidly, eggs also have about 4g of fat in a 100g serving.

I've only found two ways to store fats: One is to buy canned cheese or butter made for long term storage (NOT the powders, they're just dehydrated and defatted flavorings).
The other is to store crisco or peanut butter in a bucketized 7mil aluminized mylar bag with a dessicant and lots of oxygen absorbers. You can probably store cooking oil this way too, as long as there isnt ANY oxygen in the bottles.
If you can find these or other fat items in completely sealed metal cans you can probably long term store those too, but you'll need to do research on them to be sure.

The only freeze dried food I recommend now is veggies and fruit, its just too dang hard to long term store those and keep the nutrition in them any other way.

The key to long term storage is lack of OXYGEN, COOL, and DRY.

Hope you find this useful

[Pondo_Sinatra]

Budget, budget, budget.

Sit down and take a hard, honest look at how much you normally spend, and how much you can reasonably afford to spend on stocking up.

Then as was mentioned previously, take a look at what you and your family eat normally.

Add (let's say) 10% to your weekly/monthly food budget. Use that 10% to buy a little extra every time you go shopping.

And don't go crazy and spend $1000 on Spam in one trip. In two years, you're going to have to eat a lot of Spam before it goes past its expiration date. By buying a little at a time, you will regularly be rotating newer foods into your pantry, and rotating out (and hopefully eating) the oldest foods.

[Bubba Enfield]

Lots of good advice so far. Here's how I did it. Figure out what you can afford each pay, to get a little extra. $10, $5, even $2 at a time will add up. Then when you get groceries, spend those few dollars on something that's on sale. (Oh yeah, start reading the sales flyers every week. You'll soon know what the bargain prices are.) Around here, tuna goes on sale for seventy-five cents, pasta for eighty-eight cents, pasta sauce for less than $1, case of water for $2 ($1.50 occasionally). Those few extras, stored down cellar, add up before you know it. Never put your 2-liter pop bottles in the recycling; rinse them out and fill from the tap. Stored in the dark, maybe a couple drops of unscented bleach, adds a lot to your water stores- a VERY important item. Store your water in the basement- that weight adds up fast! Once every month or two, buy a large pack of toilet paper. Store things out of sight, and don't tell folks about your stash.

Little by little is how things happen.

[Svothe]

Don't have quite enough time to reply to everyone right now as I'm on my way out to the supermarket (grocery store).

@Bubba,
Sadly being a poor Englishmen living in a small country home we actually don't have a basement so at the moment I am storing everything in my loft. The entire loft has been boarded out so it doesn't go straight through to the ceiling. I can walk around on it, jump up and down and do anything else required with no risk of falling through so I'm hoping its safe up there. Its pretty cool temperature wise up there as well which is handy. I made sure to grab some toilet paper on my first prepping trip, I'll try and grab another today along with some more food and water. Oh and my family already know about the prepping/stashing and are actually very much agree on the idea. We have the water pipes cut out every year or so and probably have a powercut ever 6 months at least so the idea of having gas stoves, food and lots of water on hand were already in place I just have to build on them. Anglian Water the local water company normally come round and hand out about 40 of the 2 litre bottles of water whenever the water stops anyway, so I'm hoping that'll happen quite soon so I can stick the extra water in the preps.

Thanks,
Svothe

[Svothe]

Ok, grabbed a few things while I was shopping today and got a bunch of those cardboard boxes from underneath the checkout so I can structure everything a bit better. I'll buy some stack'n'Stores in january once they are available in the supermarket. I grabbed an extra 2.5kg of Pasta, loads more tins of food, a litre of vinegar, 1.5kg of cooking salt, pasta sauce, kitchen roll, nutella, tinned fruit, tinned potatoes, mushy peas and loads more...

Anywho, heres photos of the new 'organised' system:(Again cba to rescale)
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... elled1.jpg
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... elled2.jpg

Thoughts, Opinions, Criticisms. Remember this is only like my second week of prepping so I know I'm missing a lot, but ideas and such are still welcome.

Thanks
Svothe

EDIT:
Not Pictured is two packs of wet-wipes for washing/hygiene, two good quality tin openers and also two tubes of tomato puree.

[TacAir]

Ok, grabbed a few things while I was shopping today and got a bunch of those cardboard boxes from underneath the checkout so I can structure everything a bit better. I'll buy some stack'n'Stores in january once they are available in the supermarket. I grabbed an extra 2.5kg of Pasta, loads more tins of food, a litre of vinegar, 1.5kg of cooking salt, pasta sauce, kitchen roll, nutella, tinned fruit, tinned potatoes, mushy peas and loads more...

Anywho, heres photos of the new 'organised' system:(Again cba to rescale)
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... elled1.jpg
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee18 ... elled2.jpg

Thoughts, Opinions, Criticisms. Remember this is only like my second week of prepping so I know I'm missing a lot, but ideas and such are still welcome.

Thanks
Svothe

EDIT:
Not Pictured is two packs of wet-wipes for washing/hygiene, two good quality tin openers and also two tubes of tomato puree.

I would only suggest you mark the purchase date on the can top and store like items together.

Zombie Grannie has posted (other threads) a set of plan for DIY can stackers - makes rotation a breeze, new in on top, old out front to be used first....

Now, do you have a way to cook/heeat all that new grub? Meth burner?

[Svothe]

I have a Trangia Gas Stove, but its in my GHB at the moment due to the weather. Got a bunch of gas for it as well, but again its in the GHB.

[Trident]

I'd love to have a Trangia gas stove!

My strategy has been to store what you use and use what you store.

Keep a notebook of EVERYTHING your family consumes during one week.

Times it by 4.5 and you will have a starting list of what you do use and how often.

Learn to cook from scratch ie. recipes.

DON'T tell your best mate, your Mom or your boss or the persnicky co-worker what you are doing!

You can share later if you are able, but it is a real pain to fend off the losers or uprepared or snitches who are envious of
your hard work in preparing for your family.

You may wish to inventory every possession you have.

Reduce the unnecessary and stock up a bit on the necessary.

The only drag to that is that you may end up with an item you really can't use any longer and it can then become a trade good.

That happened in our family. We stocked up on ladies hygiene products and then one of us went through the change of life.

Now we have a years supplies of sanitory pad and tampons to trade for who know what : )

Also,now your country's laws and rules on "hoarding" versus preparedness.

If you know by heart the "recommended" preparations, then you have a ready answer for folks who wonder why you have more than one four pack of toliet paper on hand.

I still have not convinced my dear hubby why I have six rolls of aluminum foil instead of just one.

[Kill Switch]

Just came across this link.

http://grandpappy.info/hfood1yr.htm

"Food" for thought...

Kill Switch.

[Svothe]

Got myself another 40 litres of bottled water today. Slowly stocking up. Now got 62 Litres bottled in total and 400 in the tank.