How Much Food Do I Need to Survive?

Putting together an emergency food supply can be crucial to a person’s survival, should the unexpected happen. Power outages, unemployment, evacuations, or even natural disasters are just a few of the things that could cause food storage to be the difference between life and death. But how much do you need? Most government sources recommend storing enough food for at least 72 hours, but with each person varying in age, weight and dietary needs, how do you know what is enough to sustain you or your family for any period of time?

What Do I Eat Now?

The first and easiest way to work out how much food you will need is to pay special attention to how much food you eat currently. Start taking note of which recipes use which ingredients, how often you run out of certain items, and identify which items you use the most. There are a few things that you need to remember when doing this. First, think about the things that you eat. Which things are not necessary? You probably do not need to keep a stockpile of candy (although a little won’t hurt), but you may want a few extra essentials.Secondly, figure out how often you use a particular recipe and multiply the amount of food you keep by that number. Thirdly, you must allow for the fact that many of the things that you eat on a regular basis will not store well, make sure that you make your storage out of nonperishable items.

Work it Out

This leads us onto the next method of calculating how much food you will need in your supply. As the food that you are storing will probably differ from the food that you eat from day to day, you will need to work out exactly how much you will need to survive. There are a few ways that you can do this, but the best way is to look at the nutritional information of the food that you are storing. Bear in mind that the average recommended calorie intake for a male is 2500, and 2000 for a female. Make sure that you contain enough food to satisfy this intake for each person in your family. Of course, looking at calories is not enough. You could easily make that up with a few bars of chocolate, but that will do you no good. Make sure that you contain all of the food groups in your supply. Also allow for differences for weight, height and children. Ideally, you should keep about a gallon of water per person, per day.

Use a Professional

There are a lot of resources available to make things easier for you when creating your food storage. Professional companies make it their business to create entire stocks of food, ready for purchase, complete with the tools to store them. If you want to take the hard work out of the equation, check one of these companies out and you can do preparedness in style.

When you are preparing your emergency food supply, remember that more is more. It is always better to over prepared than under prepared. You will never regret having too much food. Having said that, remember that you can only store what you have space for, so focus on the essentials first. Whichever technique you decide to use, make sure that you at least do something to create food storage, as it could make all the difference for you and your family.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Doug Bennett is a freelance writer and expert in
Food Storage and Freeze Dried Food