The government’s Be Ready campaign asks households to be ready for three days. Aim for a week to begin with, then build from there. This article is general advice. Every family is different, so use it as a starting point, not a shopping list to copy.
Prepare for your own household
Beyond very basic habits like stock rotation, nobody should copy anyone else’s setup. Everybody is different, every family is different, and everyone has different needs. You are preparing to provide for the needs of you and your family.
Start with a list
The government says to keep three days of food. Most people couldn’t tell you, item by item, what they and their family would eat over three days. We eat on autopilot, so the picture in our heads is vague.
So make the list. Write down every meal, snack and drink for everyone in your household for three days, as if the shops were shut. Then turn it into a shopping list. That list is your own three-day supply, built from food you actually eat. Once it works for three days, stretch it to a week.
Two rules to start with
- Never buy anything you don’t eat. Food you won’t eat is wasted money, and in a crisis it is the last thing you want to force down.
- Rotate your stock. Use the oldest first and replace what you use. If you only buy food you already eat, this happens naturally.
Food to keep at home
When the food is staying put, weight doesn’t matter. Tins, jars and other heavy items are fine, as long as they are things you eat. Remember that a freezer only keeps food while the power is on, so think about what you would eat first if it goes off.
If you have a baby. The government’s checklist recommends ready-to-feed formula, because in an emergency you may not be able to boil water to make up powdered formula. Keep a few cartons, check the dates, and rotate them like everything else. Ask your health visitor or GP what suits your baby.
Shelf life and power cuts
Check the dates when you buy, and put the items that expire soonest at the front so you use them first. We rotate very regularly, and it is the habit that keeps a store of food useful.
Think about what happens to fresh food if the power goes off. Milk is a good example, because it is one of the first things to spoil. Powdered milk and long-life UHT milk keep without a fridge until you open them, so a few cartons or a tub are a cheap safeguard. For everything else, use up the fresh food first, and keep the fridge and freezer doors shut as much as you can. A closed fridge and freezer hold their cold for a while, but not for days.
How much to keep
For longer-term items, how much you keep depends on how much you use. If you use more of something, keep more of it in. If you use less, keep less.
Here is how I do it with hair conditioner. I always have one bottle in use and two spare in the bathroom cabinet. When the one in use runs out, I open a spare, and that is the moment I buy the next one, so there are always two in reserve. The same idea works for anything you use regularly, and it keeps your stock rotating without any effort.
Food to take with you
If you have to leave quickly, you don’t want to pack a bunch of cans and jars in the car, and still less into a backpack you then have to carry. For anything you might take, think light. Dehydrated and freeze-dried food weighs a fraction of tinned food and keeps for a long time. Most of it needs clean water to prepare, so plan for that too.
Be honest with yourself about ingredients. Most lightweight, long-life food is processed, so it is a trade-off between weight and shelf life on one side and what is in it on the other. Choose things you would actually eat.
A food flask for each person
A food flask is a very useful thing to have, and it works as a cooker you don’t have to light. In the morning, put dehydrated food into the flask, add boiling water and seal it. By dinner time it is ready to eat. The same trick works with plain old pasta.
This suits a grab bag as much as a cupboard at home. The flask weighs little, uses no fuel while it sits, and turns light dried food into a hot meal with nothing more than a kettle or a pan of boiling water. Get one flask per person, and try it at home first so you know how long your favourite foods take.
This is how I do it
We eat keto and high protein, and we don’t eat processed food, so my setup won’t suit everyone. We keep about two weeks of food at home, much of it frozen. We have a generator to keep the freezer running if the power goes off, and a dehydrator so I can dry food to make it last longer. That setup comes from years of practice. You don’t need to match it. Begin with the first step and build from there.
Where to start
- Write down the food your household eats in a normal week
- Buy a little extra of those things each shop
- Work towards a week’s supply, then more
- Date everything and use the oldest first
- Choose a few light, compact foods for a grab bag
Useful resources
Don’t take our word for it. Read the originals, and decide what works for you.
- Be Ready checklist, UK government
- Food safety during a power cut, Food Standards Scotland
- Food safety in a power cut: advice for consumers, Food Standards Agency
- National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia (US), for preserving, drying and freezing food