"Deep Pantry" AKA storing extra of food you like to eat and know how to cook

I often see pictures of people with stacks of corn and beans to eat in case of emergency. I used to think like that: "Just buy a bunch of cheap food so we can eat if things go crazy". But, then I realized I would rather have stacks of food I actually eat. This means I'll eat it before it goes bad (just bring the oldest cans forward and the new ones behind), and I'll be happy eating foods that I (A) Like to eat, and (B) Already know how to cook, in an emergency.

The last think I want to have to do when life is crazy, is try to figure out how to cook kidney beans or listen to my kids fussing because they're eating canned peas for the 6th day in a row.

I also don't want to waste food. If I buy a bunch of food I don't know how to cook or don't like eating, it's likely going to go to waste.

A deep pantry means you have extra food that you actually eat. This is handy for all sorts of reasons and situations.

• Everyone in the house gets sick for a week or two? No worries, there's lots of food so you don't have to leave the house to go shopping!
• Big storm rolls in and you're out of power and the roads are blocked by trees? No worries, you've got food to spare! Just hunker down and relax until the storm rolls over.
• Lose your job and can't find a new one for a few weeks? At least you don't have to worry about buying food.
• Grocery prices go up due to volatile markets? You bought extra when it was cheap!
• Don't want to go shopping for a few days because life is busy? You've got extra in the house!
• An unexpected medical emergency happens and you've got a big bill? You still have food, so you don't need to worry about buying more and can use that money to pay the bill.

I always try to buy extra of whatever we like to eat when it's on sale. We've got lots of things lara bars, nuts and dried fruit, chocolate, canned beans, canned pumpkin, canned fruit, and frozen food. I also keep cartons of broth and coconut water and boxes of crackers for if we get sick. I don't want to make broth or go shopping when I'm sick!

All these shelf-stable or frozen food don't go bad quickly, and they're nice to pull out when we need it. We have at least 2 weeks of food that we like to eat, always in the house. There's probably a month of food if we count all the stuff we don't like eating. I always advise buying extra of the non-perishables that you're family likes to eat--then you have food that everyone likes, and that means it won't go to waste. And, when times are stressful, you're not adding to the stress by trying to get people to eat things they don't like.

eat what you store, store what you eat... i have racks that you put cans into and it rolls to back and drops then rolls forward to front. first in first out inventory made easy. so this way i can buy stuff when it's on sale and not have to waste time sorting stuff by reading expiration dates... the more used stuff gets more shelf/rack space. we can, and freeze things regularly. the major issue is when we get bonus crops and we're tired of zucchini, tomatoes, & peppers ect... then we hold neighborhood salsa making party and process store a bunch at a time. my suggestion to those starting out with building pantries is to take good notes on your food that regularly gets consumed. types and quantities then make a plan as to how to store it at about 80% of it's shelf life/rotation thru your kitchen. i started this path in the 90's and have benefited greatly from reducing impulse or panic buys. happy bargain shopping and planning your garden calories. john

I encourage you to do far better than that.  It is a good start.  But done correctly food storage will cut your food budget almost in half over buy it now strategies and you can fairly quickly build a much bigger reserve.  Buy what you eat, eat what you buy.  Key to doing it properly is storing and that means rotations.  Best aid tool for that is a permanent marker.  Put the month and year it was purchased on the container and the price and put it at the back of the shelf.  Sharpie makes an oval cross section marker that is amazing for this because it is not forever rolling off where you are working.

Now when you are opening cans you know when they were last on sale and you have a feel for the long term price.  If you can buy a years worth of what ever it is on sale do so.  So say you know use on average 4 cans of soup a month.  That means if you can catch that soup on special you want 48 cans on the shelf for the year.  buy it now price typical would be $2.35 here for name brand and watching the specials price would rough$1.   Since it is good for 4 or 5 years if you are slow using no problem.  And you have longer storage items too.  For example spaghetti 1 lb is just over 3 meals per person and you can get 26 packages in a 5 gallon bucket with almost 1/4 of the capacity left over.  Bucket and lid roughly $10, spaghetti less than $26.  Cost for the main calorie count for the just over $0.36 per meal and a 20 to 30 year shelf life in good storage conditions and you have a bucket and a lid at the end.  Now you are going to want, butter or tomato sauce or soup or meat something to augment that.  So plan for those things in your gathering food.

At this point in my life, I've basically been in survival mode for the past 6 months. Having the extra food stores of food we like to eat and that I can quickly cook has been super helpful.

There's totally ways to level-up my pantry use. I really appreciate Erica Straus' Food Storage For People Who Don’t Hate Food article. It has great advice for organizing and improving food storage for food people actually eat. Writing dates and prices on cans would also be super useful. I'd also love more area to store food.

But, right now, I'm still in the throes of disaster (It's why I've not been on permies much this year). My husband's Crohn's flared up right at the beginning of the school year....the same school year that I increased the amount of classes I'm teaching from 2 to 7. It's been me taking care of my husband, cooking all the meals, homeschooling my kids, creating all the curriculum for my classes, prepping for all my classes, maintaining the house, and teaching my classes. I'm barely able to juggle all the balls I need to juggle. It's a lot like the year that inspired me to write The reality of homesteading has dissolved my "prepper"/homesteading fantasies.

When I prep, it's this sort of life chaos I'm thinking of. Sure, we get 4 day long power outages every few years, and sure, worse things might happen. But, really, I'm preparing for when life goes crazy. When there's not enough money or time. Right now, I'm really grateful for the times I was able to get out to get groceries to buy lots of food my family will eat that's easy to cook. When we were all sick with some horrible crud for two weeks, I was super grateful for the coconut water, broth, tea, and crackers I'd bought when they were on sale.

Sometimes, life is too crazy to do really good food prep. Sometimes it's too crazy to grow a good garden or really organize the pantry. But, there's still stuff we can do that makes life better for "future me." I can buy extra food that my family will eat when it's on sale or at our local Grocery Outlet. Sure, that means I have a bag full of meat sticks sitting in my living room because I don't know where to put it and it's one of the few foods my husband can eat that isn't cooked from scratch. It's not perfect, but it helps!

Another type of food preparedness/pantry is the one we keep outside.

I really like perennial and self-seeding plants, like kale, berries, sorrel, alliums, and fruit trees. They don't take much work, and they survive when life gets crazy and I don't have time to care for them. They also usually pack a lot of vitamins and are expensive when bought in the store!

I really like the edible "weeds" that grow on my property. I can easily encourage them to multiply and create more food/medicine. The nettle is delicious for dinner. The mint helps my husband's Crohn's. The cleavers are good for my psoriasis. The dandelion is good for pretty much everything. Even if I don't have a chance to try and preserve them, I still can eat them for months of the year without much effort at all.

My garden this year might just end up being perennials and some peas, carrots, kale and radishes and potatoes....because they're all like to grow well here and my kids will go outside harvest/eat them without much help. Some years I can do more. More would be better. But, this year is my disaster, and I'm going to be grateful for what I can do, when I can do it.

Last night it so happens I was interviewed on a podcast about food, and people specifically wanted to talk about stockpiling and pantry.
Some background: I live in Brazil, and people still have strong memories of 'inflation times' (in the 80s, when the currency fluctuated so much prices of products changed before you reached the checkout, and people converted their savings into things like canned vegetable oil).
In the 20 years I've lived here we've been through not only the pandemic lockdown and the resulting limited shopping options but also several transport strikes, where the first casualty was diesel fuel and shipping of goods. We know a thing or two about surviving. I also had some very lean times as I was growing up, and ever since I've had the money to do so I've had things stashed as reserve, "just in case". I have never really quantified it, but I probably have enough to feed us for at least 3-6 months, not counting the garden.

The best way to prepare is calmly, little by little, when you see good prices on things you know you'll use, and you know you have a good place to store it. Bug proof, humidity proof, etc. That pasta you like is on sale? Those dry beans you know how to make a killer bean soup with? Found a good deal on something? Buy some extras to stash. This way you can slowly build up a reserve without spending too much at once, and you know you'll use the things you buy.

One thing many people learned during Covid, when they had things stockpiled, was that they didn't use some of the things they thought they would. A good friend of mine asked me, at least a year later, "what the heck am I supposed to do with all these lentils I still have??" If you don't have a plan for an ingredient, you're probably not going to invent some great use for it as the shit is hitting the fan (and you certainly don't want it in large volumes!). Buy what you know how to use, and what you like. For me, that means a whole lot of dried beans and rice and flours.
And what goes up must come down-- if you have a pantry full of dried stuff, it needs to be rotated or it will get buggy and wasted. Elsewhere I've posted my adventures as I clean out my cabinet and use up some of the weirder things (and replace them with stuff I know I'll use).

Gardens can be a great extender of the pantry-- I keep some kind of alliums (leeks, scallions, garlic chives, etc) at all times. But leafy greens are the real nutritional powerhouse, and you can have them year round. It can be as easy as growing a few sweet potatoes in a pot on a porch during the summer, or having a collard patch year round, or having kale or other heavier leafies in the cooler weather. You can even forage for greens-- chickweed, purslane, sowthistle grow almost everywhere and are edible (and yummy) and are important if your diet is limited.

And don't forget -- pantry also includes other things. Cooking fuel-- what happens if your propane tank runs out and can't be refilled? We bought an induction burner to test during the first fuel shortage, and it turned out to be so awesome that now we rarely use gas! We also made a mini cooking rocket stove out of large cans outside for the pans that don't work in the induction burner (mainly, my wok). It's nothing fancy but it cooks, and if need be I could rig one up out of bricks. We also have a stock of dish soap and vinegar (my main cleaning materials), laundry soap and materials for disinfecting (mostly for the animal spaces in the garden).

I have always been hoarding food. When I grew up, we did not always have enough food. Very often I went hungry, but my parents were very good at finding “free” foods. The men would go hunting, during the hunting season, and fishing from a boat, when allowed. We also foraged for food in the Royal owned forests and national parks. My parents also always had a yard. Where we primarily grew food. Because of this, I have always craved food security.
I turn 58 in two days, and we have food security. As things are, 90% of what we eat, are foods we have produced ourselves. If we have a crisis, we can survive by only eating what we produce. It will mean different meals, with less meat, and the other things we buy, but we will survive. I do have a stack of freeze dried meat stored.
When I buy things like rice, pasta, red meat, sugar, salt, oil and nuts, I always buy a year’s supply. I do this, because it’s a lot cheaper and I have the space to store them safely.
Our garden production has also been planned, to feed us year round, which we can do since we live in Growzone 10b.
I picked fruit trees, based on harvest times, so we have fruits and/or berries fresh all year round. We also have 2 types of avocados, that also was picked one covers 6 months, and the other the next 6 months. I grow 8 different kinds of strawberries, which gives us fresh strawberries 7 months out of the year. I grow tree collards, because they too produce all year round. During the few months we don’t have fresh fruits or berries, we rely on surplus preserved fruits instead. I also only grow things we or the livestock, like to eat.
Most of our crops, produce more than we can eat in one go, so we end up canning or freeze drying the rest. It’s the same with most of the  vegetables, herbs, spices, teas, coffee and grains, that we grow, and we often have one or two crops that produce more than what we can eat in a year.
All of those extras we get from the garden, are why I now have a 2 year supply of food, in our pantries and freezers. Those extras also mean that I can have a larger variety of foods stored. If I have an overwhelming amount of something, I am not going to grow that the following year. That way I can use the space to grow other things, which creates the diversity we like to have. For example: in 2024 I grew over 800 pounds of pumpkins and winter squash. So last year I used that space to grow corn. Since we still have a large amount I am not going to grow pumpkins and squash again this year, or so was the plan. Yesterday I found summer squash and pumpkins growing in the food forest garden. Anyway, this year the space are used to grow peas, beans and more corn and sorghum.
As for prepping, we do several things. We try to grow most of what our livestock eats, and I grow a lot of medicinal plants. Right now, I grow over 50 different kinds of culinary herbs, medicinal herbs, spices, tea plants, coffee plants, roots like licorice, mallow, chicory and so much more. I do this, because what we grow is much more fresh, and it’s freeze dried, so it’s a better quality than what you can buy. It’s also where I save the most money.
All in all our gardens are very productive. Since 2024 we have produced around 2000 pounds of produce a year, and around 500 pounds of meat. We also reached 1 million calories and the foods value was over 12 thousand dollars. Over the coming years, these numbers will go up, as the food forest plants matures.
We also store 2500 gallons of drinking water, have a solar battery wall, cook with natural gas or propane, and we have 2 generators.
We also spend much less time in the gardens, since most plants are perennials, and a lot of the annuals are self seeded.
I calculated how much time I spend in the gardens, compared to how much time I spend on food preservation. It turns out, I spend more than double the time on food preservation than I do gardening. I tell this to people who ask about our gardens. Most new gardeners, don’t take this into consideration, get overwhelmed and start given food away instead.
I don’t give food away, unless a friend has an emergency. I also trade with others in the neighborhood. Like lemons for grapefruits. One year, I traded 25 pounds of tomatoes for 2 bottles of homemade wine.
As things are now, I will keep building our food supply, to get diversity in our diet, and to save food for when we need it.

Ulla, you've got so many good points, especially about taking turns planting things. I grow loofahs every few years (it takes me a while to use them!) and we are still working on pumpkins from last year!
Neighbor and community trade is also super important. I swap with my neighbors because we have different fruit trees, and everyone is happy.

Lastly, many people who don't have a garden feel left out by canning and preserving, but you can also can things you didn't grow!! This year when tomatoes were dirt cheap I bought a huge quantity to make passata and can it for when tomatoes are expensive. I did enough for a year, and it has been marvelous. I did the same making compote and jam when I got a super deal on very ripe peaches and plums, and with the mulberries I foraged. Some of the mulberry jam got swapped for honey, which was a great deal as far as I'm concerned!!

Tereza Okava wrote:Ulla, you've got so many good points, especially about taking turns planting things. I grow loofahs every few years (it takes me a while to use them!) and we are still working on pumpkins from last year!
Neighbor and community trade is also super important. I swap with my neighbors because we have different fruit trees, and everyone is happy.

Lastly, many people who don't have a garden feel left out by canning and preserving, but you can also can things you didn't grow!! This year when tomatoes were dirt cheap I bought a huge quantity to make passata and can it for when tomatoes are expensive. I did enough for a year, and it has been marvelous. I did the same making compote and jam when I got a super deal on very ripe peaches and plums, and with the mulberries I foraged. Some of the mulberry jam got swapped for honey, which was a great deal as far as I'm concerned!!

Yes, it’s so nice trading/swapping with your neighbors. One of my neighbors has a lot of pomegranate trees, but isn’t able to pick and use them. Now I pick them all and process some for juice and some for wine. Then I pack a basket with a bottle of pomegranate wine, from the previous year, plus eggs and what I have in my garden. It’s a win win for both of us.

I do buy some things in bulk I can preserve. Especially apples and pears, which we can’t easily grow here, and before the garden started producing, we also bough things like pickling cucumbers, peaches and avocado. We still buy bananas, but only because our banana trees haven’t produced yet, and we still buy some avocados since we don’t produce enough yet.
I don’t mind, since we spend less on groceries every year, as the food forest matures.
One thing I also do, is make sure we produce the vitamins and minerals our body needs, and as for medicinal herbs the inspiration is a first aid kit. This means that on top of the usual immune boosters. I look at it as a first aid kit, I have focused of comfrey for sprains and minor breaks, rock roses to treat infections and chock, mallow, mullein and Elecampane for respiratory health, licorice roots for low blood pressure, pectin from fruits, to stop bleedings, broadleaf plantain and panadol for pain, mint and ginger for stomach cramps and so on. Right now I am concentrating on plants as local anesthetic, like toothache plants.

The perennial pantry idea is something I have been leaning into more and more. Sorrel and walking onions basically look after themselves and they are the first things producing in spring when everything else is still waking up. Fruit trees take a while to get going but once they do the amount of food coming off even a small one is ridiculous.

Sometimes I feel like I should be “prepping” more by storing more cheap food or long-life food, but at the end of the day, if we’re not going to eat that food unless it’s something like in “the road” happening outside, then we are far more resilient storing the foods that we do eat.

A pressure canner has been a great help - it means we can have shelf-stable bone broth, meat, and ready-to-eat meals that meet my family’s requirements.

Encouraging the best kind of weeds in the garden makes us more prepared too. When life has been crazy or weather at planting time has not been good, it has given us nutrition and resilience just having a huge amount of dandelions and fat hen coming up all over the place. Planting and tending any kind of perennial can be seen as a gift to a future self.

I've never understood building a cache of food you don't eat. When times are hard, and you're down to whatever is in your cache, chances are things are already going to be stressful, possibly very unpleasant, possibly even dangerous (depending on the situation, of course). It's my personal experience that that is not going to be a time when "it will be fun" to learn something new or to rough it with foods you/ your family don't eat. That tends to be hard on both morale and the digestive system. If you don't normally eat beans and corn (or fill-in-the-blank), stressful situations are not a good time to throw your digestive system for a potentially painful, or unpleasant loop.