I am curious what I can buy as backup food for lowest cost and longterm storage?

I am thinking 25lb bags of rice.

estimated at 10 servings per 1lb I can do 250 servings for a family of 4 at two servings a day that would last about 40 days.

so lets say 100lbs of rice (4 bags)  half a year of food?  


What else would be a cheap investment or am I way off base here?


I am not looking for anything high in cost, basically a saftey investment to hold me over for 6 months or so assuming everythign went to hell.

Start here.



http://lds.about.com/library/bl/faq/blcalculator.htm





Rice will get boring after a few days.

luckily for me, i love rice, I could eat rice every day for every meal and still be happy.   the rest of my family. not so much..

great link, but anything much simplier?   bags of beans then? whats the best bean I can get that I wont risk poisoning myself with?

First, you should eat what you store store what you eat.  Sudden changes in diets are hard on your body.  SUdden changes in rough times that you (or your family does not enjoy = crappy moral.  No one item will be nutritionally adequate irregardless of calories.

Keep this in mind ignore servings count calories.  One pound of rice has 1600.  So 160 per serving two servings per day = 320 calories.  Emergency essentials used to have a food calculator, that you could plug in infor on items not on the list.  It calculated for calories sodium vitamnins etc.

Beans are a good edition.  Most run around 1300 calories per pound.  So one pound rice + one pound beans and a multivitamin = 2900 calories a day.  Lentils have the most (9 out of 11 iirc) of the essential protiens your body needs and do not need to be pre-soaked.

How long do you want the storage to last?  If under a year look at the bulk rice/beans but also buy canned veggies etc on sale.

Under normal conditions an adult needs about 2K calories per day.  A child needs 1400+ depending on age.  IF you are doing manual labor hard exercise that amount will go up.  So, input your family, do the math for how long a storage you want to have and actually look at the info on what you normally buy and what you are considering storing.

100lbs of rice alone is not going to feed a family of 4 for 6 months. Do not put too much stock into the "servings" you read on the label - they are usually pretty tiny in reality. 100lbs of rice is a good start and something to build upon, but you will need more than that, nutritionally as well. Also, it's highly recommended that you store your food properly - mylar bags and O2 absorbers with some sort of hard container to keep pests away from it.

Personally I built a base of rice, beans, potato flakes / hash browns, and various pastas, and from there have added meats and expanded the variety now to the point where we will have a pretty varied diet for about 6 months with pretty full meals, not a starvation diet. Now I'm going to work towards a year in the same fashion.

Rice in bulk is a really good place to start. It is a really bad place to stop.

Specific recommendations on the cheap:

- The rice is a good idea. Get it.
- Get some 10lb bags of pinto beans from Sam's. 3 of them in a large mylar bag fill a 5 gal bucket perfectly.
- Sam's also has fairly cheap bags of elbow noodles (6lb bags I think for under $10 each).
- Get some mylar and O2 absorbers (they're really not all that expensive) to package all of it in, and something (food grade buckets, totes, etc) to keep the sealed food in.

For under $200 if you went this route you'd have a pretty large amount of food that would last for a long, long time (at least 20+ years), and something that you could build upon and flesh out in the future. From here you can start looking at how to spice things up, and start looking at thinks like #10 cans to add to the diet.

As others have said, you need variety and you should store what you eat, and eat what you store.

Here's what I eat/store a fair bit of:
––Homegrown potatoes
––Rice
––Beans
––Pasta
––Home-canned salsa, pasta sauce, relish, ketchup, corn, pickles, jam, etc.––-also some dried stuff
––Flour (and whatever you need to make the bread you like)
––Soup
––Vegetable oil

I also usually have some fresh greens growing year-round––-lettuce, mesclun, sprouts, pac choi, chard, kale, etc.––-plus plenty of fresh and dried herbs. And various other fresh veggies depending on time of year.

Still haven't figured out dairy or meat. Have to buy those weekly.

My recommendation: Give Honeyville Farms a visit. Yoder's makes some good canned meats, too.

and don't forget the spices and gravy.  you can go a long way toward adding variety just by adding gravy to something.  

You should protect your food stash from vermin like mice & rats etc, also if you store rice for a long period of time, you will little insects that will hatch because the eggs are in the rice.

rice

dreid beans

dried pasta

wheat ( or flour)

salt

sugar

grits

oats

oil

spices



All of these can be had cheap.

100lbs of rice will not feed a family of 4 for 6months to a year. 100 lbs per person per year is a good base to build from.



For long term storage  you will need to buy pre packed for LTS food items from vendors or pack your own.

You can read/see how it is done in the links below along with LT storage results. Self packing saves a ton of cash and is really easy.
http://www.youtube.com/user/delta69alpha?feature=mhw5
www.bucketpacking.com

long pork. no need to store it, just harvest as needed!



yes, that's a joke!


but seriously, rice is an ingredient, not the whole dang menu. no matter how much you like it you'll need things to add too it for variety.

for calories cost and weight, twinkies and snack cakes rank surprisingly high.  CAn't live on them, but won't get skinny and weak eating them either.

I don't know about that one.  Calories do not equal nutrition.

Boring is better than starving.

http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/5711/2
here is a calculator for nutrition, there is a lot more to it than just calories.

this has been here before , 16 oz rice 8 oz beans, 1tbs oil, vitamins  =2500 calories and 64 grams protein, a minimum for an average person
doing minimal work.

grain + legume = complete protein, you can mix it up for variety

split peas+corn bread
beans and rice
lentils and barley
beans and tortilas

all of these dry goods are cheap, pintos and white rice, peas and corn, barley, and lentils are the cheapest in 25# sacks.
Last time I bought them under $10/bag and rice was $4.50.

eta
lentils and barley cook in 1 hour in a crock pot, rice in an hour in a preheated thermos or 20 minutes in a pan
you can cook pea soup in a thermos also, pan cakes or corn cakes are probably the quickest way to cook corn and wheat (other than popped)
soaked beans take 20 minutes in a pressure cooker, fuel is a valuable commodity and should be accounted for in your plans.

Damn. And most of my neighbors are probably so tender and nicely marbled...

Best not to harvest them right away, keep a pair of breeders for long term supply.  "Life, it keeps meat fresh"