Stocking a Pantry With Staples and More

If you go looking online, you'll find all kinds of lists telling you what you "should" have in your pantry. While you can use them as a useful starting point to decide what should be in your pantry, just using somebody else's list is a recipe for disappointment. What should be in your pantry depends on what you eat, how you cook, how much storage space you have, where you live, who lives with you, and a number of other factors.

So, where to start? How do you choose what to store, when you don't have the space or money for "everything"? One way to start is to simply buy and store one extra of everything you normally eat. So, when you run out of rice and would normally buy just one package, buy two: one for use, and one for the pantry. Then, when you finish the "in use" package, buy another, store it in the pantry, and move the one that has been stored in the pantry into use.

This method has a number of advantages:

• You store foods you normally eat
• You don't have to spend a lot of money all at once
• You naturally rotate new foods into the pantry and older foods into use
• You can build your "stock the pantry" project into your everyday shopping

This is a great way to get your pantry started. However, you may have some purposes for your pantry that this method won't address. If you are planning some serious food storage, or stocking a pantry as part of emergency preparedness, then you'll probably want to buy at least some items in bulk, to get a price break.

One challenge that many of us face, when we want to begin buying in bulk or stocking up, is finding the money. Especially in economic hard times, squeezing the extra money out of the budget to buy 40lb of rice at once instead of a pound or two at time may be difficult. However, if you can find an extra $5 a week for about 3 months, you can stock a pantry: not instantly, but over time. Sharon Astyk has done a great job setting out this method, and you can find all the details here: 

Not Quite so Quickie Food Storage

Sharon has also written an excellent book about food storage and food security called "Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation", which I highly recommend - link to Amazon.com is below, but you can also find it through your local bookstore.

And Kathy Harrison has a very good post about watching your pennies when stocking up on food: Watching your Pennies: How Much to Buy

Judging how much to buy of something requires some knowledge of how much of it you eat, and how long it will stay good in your storage conditions. For example, perhaps you eat brown rice once a week, and it takes a cup of dry rice to make enough for a meal for your family. Brown rice can only be stored for 6 months in normal packaging at room temperature before the oils in it start to go rancid (which you may or may not be able to taste, but which isn't good for you). 1 cup of rice weighs 200g or just under half a pound. So, in 6 months (26 weeks) you will use around 13lb of brown rice, and that's the most you should buy at once for pantry storage. If you can store it in the fridge or freezer, then you can keep it for longer and buy more at once.