7 Food Storage Tips

I'd better first start by saying that I'm no expert on food storage by any means. A lot of what I know I've learned from great websites and family. However, over the last 6 years, I have learned a lot about storing food long-term in an apartment first and then a home.


Tip #1: Only buy what you will really eat for your food storage. If you're living in a small space, don't start collecting massive amounts of food that you would never eat. Things can be crowded enough without bags of dry black beans that just take up space for no reason. Make a list of the things that you eat the most (corn, green beans, canned black beans, peanut butter, pasta, etc.) and make sure you have those things in your food storage first.

And even if you have a lot of space, in an emergency situation, your family is going to have a really hard time eating things they have never eaten before. So definitely make sure everything you have in your food storage is something your family will eat. Besides, then you'll be able to rotate your food storage by eating it and not throwing it away.


Tip #2: Start small. If you haven't started your food storage, don't get overwhelmed by the massive list of food that you should have stored. Start with a month at a time. There is a ton of websites that give you good ideas of what to buy each month to slow stock up on your food storage so that it's not a financial burden. I just recently came across a list that shows how you can start stocking up for only $5 a week; you can find it here.
 

Tip #3: If you don't have a lot of room for food storage, maximize space. When we lived in an apartment, this was huge for us. We had the floor of two closets and the top of our kitchen cabinets to store food storage. We lived on the top floor which apparently gave people a perfect view through the window to the boxes and boxes and boxes of cereal that we stored above the kitchen cabinets. Man we got a lot of gruff for that one. But there was no way I was letting that space go to waste. So even though it may look tacky, you may have to display your food storage in a public place in order to be practical.

Rubbermaid shelf, $3.86 at Home Depot

Another thing I did was stack our cans of food storage under our shoes in the closet. If you look at almost anybody's closet, you see clothes and then a huge gap of space and then shoes on the floor. I didn't want that space to go to waste either. Look in other closets as well and see if there's some wasted space there. You could put food under stacks of towels or sheets. If there's enough space, you could also install another shelf in the closet and put food there (you can find some relatively inexpensive ones from Lowes or Home Depot like the one to the right). Just remember to make sure it's not going to get too hot wherever it is.


Tip #4: Rotate Your Food Storage. It's no good to store something for years only to find that it's bad/moldy/old when you need it. When you add stuff to your food storage, add it to the back and make sure you're using the older stuff first. Then, pay attention to expiration dates so you'll use them in that amount of time. To be honest, I usually still use stuff if it's within a year of its expiration date.

There are also some things that don't store very long like mayonnaise, salad dressings, certain nuts, etc. So make sure you don't buy too many of these things at once so that you will be able to rotate through them without them spoiling.


Tip #5: Always keep track of what you have in your food storage and where it is. Especially if you're doing all of these creative methods of storing things, you're going to forget where you put what and then the food will just go to waste. Also, if you have an inventory of what you have, that will help you to not buy things that you don't actually need for your food storage. I'm blessed now to have my food storage all in one place, but it's still impossible to keep track of how much I have of each thing. So I stole my sister-in-law's idea and made a Food Storage Inventory sheet.

At the top of the page, I have the month and year it was updated. Then I have listed what is in my food storage under some general categories (in italics). Then the first column is what we have, the second is what we need to have to fulfill a year food storage goal, and then what the difference is. You could easily add another column that says where it is stored.


Tip #6: Reuse plastic bottles for water storage. I don't really know if this saves space per se, but it definitely saves money. Wash out your used plastic bottles and caps well and then fill with water for your water storage. Check the lids after a few months because some caps go moldy if you don't wash them out well enough. If that happens, just throw away (or RECYCLE) the bottles.


Tip #7: Learn how to cook with your long-term food storage. This has been one tip that I'm still working on learning. When we bought powdered milk for instance, I told my husband, "Ummm, how am I going to use this?" Then I found out that you any recipe that calls for milk can be substituted with powdered milk (I wouldn't suggest drinking it as milk though unless you really are in an emergency situation). I also found a great blog on how to EASILY cook dry beans in a crock pot (which is really good since I have 25 lbs of dry black beans in my food storage room). That blog post can be found here. There is so much information on the internet that if you're not sure what to do with a long-term food storage item, you can easily find ideas of what to do with it.


Well that's pretty much it for me today. Some day I hope you can have your husband (and father-in-law in my case) build you amazing shelves in a food storage room so you can get the same satisfaction I get from seeing this: