Creating an Emergency Food Supply on a Budget

Do you feel like buying and storing huge buckets of grain that cost $50 or more a pop is downright terrifying? I'm with you. That's my weekly food budget, for Pete's sake. (Who is this Pete guy and why is everything for his sake, anyway? Some day I'm going to take the time to find out.) Anyway, that's simply too much for many people to handle, so...They do nothing.

If you are one of those people, do what I did. Shelf the grain, not the idea of emergency preparedness. Take a few dollars a week to buy something for your stockpile. For example, we could say that this week, I am going to be combining coupons and sales to get some canned baked beans for pennies and will be buying 2 cans of chicken.

When I bring the stockpile food home, I'll look at the pantry shelves and notice that I have a can of chicken that will expire in a few months. I'll pull it out to use this week to make chicken salad sandwiches (No mercury worries and just as good as tuna!) I'll put the new chicken in the pantry and still have a can more of chicken and two more of baked beans than I did before I bought the extra food.

See how much less scary that is than worrying about whether you'll be able to eat 35 pounds of wheat when you open that five gallon bucket to rotate your food supply? And who knows? As you get more used to rotating out your stockpile, maybe you will end up deciding you can handle the big bucket of wheat. I'm still not quite that adventurous or that excited about blowing my grocery budget for the month, but I did work my way up to buying #10 cans of freeze dried or powdered foods.