Food is important to every person on this planet. It can be complicated storing food properly, but paramount to your health that it be done properly. The best weapon in your arsenal of food preservation is critical thinking. Before any action think of the possible consequences, good or bad, of what you are doing. Remember, a food store is giving you nothing more than options and time to best decide what to do in a situation where you must rely on it. Food

When preparing food, prepare for your family members, and friends maybe if you know them well enough. I prepare for my extended family, because I know they are not prepared at all and lack the financial means or know-how to do it effectively. Economy of scale, it is cheaper for me to prep a lot more food for them than it would be for them to buy all the equipment I have and start from scratch. While keeping your stores a secret is a good idea (nobody except my wife knows) it is better to over-prep than to under prep. I don’t know who originally said it but "Prepare for the worst, Hope for the best. "

Fundamentals

Food can be made up of minerals and organic matter. Minerals are generally shelf stable and require little thought, it is when you are trying to preserve organic matter that storage gets complicated. There are three main dangers to food. Oxygen, Heat, and Moisture. I remember it as the non-electrical OHM law. The more you reduce each of these elements the longer your food will store generally.

Oxygen is generally removed by either oxygen absorbers or purging with an inert gas like nitrogen. Mylar bags will keep oxygen out once it is removed.

Heat is a bit trickier. Short term heat (eg cooking, dehydrating) can be beneficial to the longevity. Long term heat is where the problems come in. Either you will be storing your food in a freezer, or a climate-controlled room, or underground. The first two require power. Underground requires the right climate/land to be effective. It isn’t available to me due to living in a swamp, so I am stuck with the first two options.

Moisture can be removed by a variety of methods. The main reason to remove moisture is because bacteria and pests need moisture to live. If you have a way of killing all of the microbes and then keeping them out, moisture isn’t as big of a problem(an example would be canning). Food dehydrators are good options, as well as desiccant packs (like oxygen absorbers but it absorbs moisture). There are some fancier techniques I will get into later for removing moisture. Baking, smoking, and sun drying are also options. Another area that comes into play here is the PH levels of the food. Some foods can be pickled, fermented, or brined without any special processing.

Some foods that seem to be dry are actually quite wet. The food just stores the moisture inside so you don’t notice it. A good example is rice, or ‘dried’ beans. While these foods are drier than how they came off the plant, they still have water in them. In my own tests (provide links) I found that these foods can be up to a 25% water by weight. Depending on the food and how well it retains water it can be difficult to entirely remove the water. This may shorten the lifespan of the food, but it can still be stored for many years successfully with a low water content.

Meats are more complicated to store than plant based foods. Meats typically require freezing in order to last longer. One detriment that can happen when freezing is something called freezer burn. This is when the moisture inside of the food migrates out, onto the plastic it is in or into the freezer itself. The best way to prevent this is vacuum sealing, which I will go into detail later. Meats typically last longer if they are dried with a smoker or dehydrator. Beef jerky can last very long with preservatives and if kept in an oxygen free environment.

Dangers

There is so many ways food can kill you. Make sure you know your groups’ allergens. There would be nothing worse than offering a person some of your food, and then seeing them go into anaphylactic shock because you didn’t write in the descriptions it had a peanut allergen warning on the original label.

Pests can get into your food stores, chew holes in the mylar, and ruin thousands of dollars worth of food. Weevils can multiply inside your rice. Weevils are edible when cooked luckily, but try convincing your 5 year old daughter to eat bugs. A good way to kill weevils and other pests is either remove the oxygen, or freeze the dried goods for a week. If you opt for freezing, make sure when defrosting it is stored inside of a waterproof bag, because water will condense onto the cold when it is warming up to room temperature.

Another danger you have to look out for is that you aren’t storing oily foods for long term. An example would be freeze dried avocados. While it is a plant, it is a very oily fruit and the oil will degrade faster than regular freeze dried fruits like strawberries. Coconut oil can last years if stored unopened in a cool environment, I personally have a tub of coconut oil that is over 5 years old that I still use today.

One of the biggest dangers is botulism. One gram of botulism is enough to kill a million people. Botulism thrives in low oxygen, low acid environment. It is most common when home canning, so make sure that you properly pressure can your foods for the required times listed in the recipe. Produce or Buy?

When buying food, I weigh my purchases with three factors. Cost, Quality, and Time. I can grow top notch vegetables if I really wanted. However, in my situation they would be exorbitantly expensive. This will almost always be the case if you must work 40 hours or more to survive. It is simply cheaper to get your food from the supermarket, because of the economy of scale. These factors will always be different for each person. If I had land, and worked from home or had passive income, it may be cheaper for me to spend an hour or two a day tending to my very large garden, rather than buying from the store.

Chances are if my local supermarket has everything I need I will just buy it there, because it is cheaper than spending an extra 2 hours in traffic going around to who has the cheapest banana or chicken.

I like to buy my food in bulk because it is significantly cheaper than buying smaller amounts. The ability to preserve bulk food until you need it has been a staple of the rural lifestyle since the beginning. Most of what city dwellers consider ‘prepping’ is just regular rural living. One website that may help you out is called Azure Standards (in the US).

Community gardens are also an option in some areas, to get practice growing food if growing it in your yard isn’t an option.

In most cases you will be better off buying the food from the store. It will be cheaper. You should still garden so that you have the practiced skills to grow the food should that change in the future.

Microgreens

Microgreens are an interesting concept. Instead of growing the plant to a stage in which it is ready to harvest, with microgreens you cut them down when they are 2-3 inches tall, and eat them as a salad. It is said to be very nutritious. Microgreens are grown on a small layer of soil, packed tightly together. They sell seeds in bulk for microgreens, since you will be spreading a lot of them over the soil. Microgreens also do not require a lot of sunlight like typical plants, they usually can be grown under a standard fluorescent light. They are not calorie dense but they provide needed nutrients and are relatively low effort.