Food Storage: The List

Part of my preparations for the upcoming TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) event includes meditating long and hard on food storage. I have a lot of food in my house, but it is poorly organized. My wife and I both shop, and we often don't go with a prepared list. We walk down the aisles and throw things in the cart that we think we need. This is how we end up with 11 boxes of instant oatmeal in the cellar. At our current rate of oatmeal consumption, we have enough oatmeal to last us for the rest of our natural lives.

Or, at any rate, until the food is no longer safe to eat.

This week, I've been making an Excel spreadsheet that lists all of our food. I'm working my way through the cellar, reorganizing, cleaning, and putting like thing next to like thing, while entering in key data on each item onto a yellow legal pad, which then gets transferred into Excel and printed (so that, in the case of an EMP scenario, I do not lose it). I print a couple of copies, actually. One copy is taped inside our kitchen cupboard as a reference (so if the cupboard is empty, we can see what exists in the cellar already rather than buying the item on our next trip to the store), the other is in my briefcase. This way if my wife and I stop at the store on the way home from work, we have a guide to go buy. The key data I'm recording are:

Category (Dry Goods or Canned Goods)
Item (e.g., Oatmeal, instant)
Description (Low Sugar Apples & Cinnamon)
Brand (Quaker)
Quantity (1)
Unit of Measure (box, 10 1.23 oz. pkg.)
Expiration Date
and Notes (mainly, for now, the location -- which rack it is on).

Using Excel's Data Filters and Sorting, I can quickly arrive at which stuff in my cellar represents a surplus, which stuff needs to be thrown out, and which stuff should be eaten soon. To work on the Great Oatmeal Surplus, I'm taking a couple of packages to work for my lunch every day. As I write this, I'm eating a bowl of Oatmeal that (technically) expired in 2006. The good news is that even with no special storage (I didn't keep it in a plastic food grade barrel filled with nitrogen, a la Rawles), the Oatmeal is still edible. This gives me hope for the future -- if I bought some Oatmeal today, I'd still have something to eat when fighting off the hordes of zombies in 2012, 90 days after the "canister" at Fort Detrick accidentally goes off and the CDC fails to seal off Baltimore ("Damn you, CDC," he snarled, while jamming a shell of double ought buck into his Remington).

My plan is that when the inventory is complete, I'll then start building up the key supplies to give my wife and I a 2-year supply of food. They say the average American eats a ton of food a year. Besides some heavy lifting, this means that I need to store it efficiently and have systems in place to manage it so that food is not wasted.