By Ravi Har Singh Khalsa

Many people have asked me what I recommend as a starting point for a food storage plan. I am happy to share the plan I came up with for our family and the thinking that went behind it. Planning food storage has to be a personal process. If your family has to live for an extended period of time on stored food, morale is not going to be good if the only food you have is what no one wants to eat. A diet of Brussels sprouts and lima beans would probably push me over the edge of sanity after just a few days!

Okay, so how do we start? I started by making some general assumptions. First of all, we want to store enough food for our family to keep us alive for twelve months. Foods have to store well and not require refrigeration or other energy inputs. The primary consideration was total calorie count. We plan to supplement stored food with fresh vegetables and fruit from the garden in season and preserved produce and sprouts during the winter months. Based on these assumptions, I figured that a diet supplying about 1200 calories from stored foods would be adequate to keep us going.

Second, I came up with a sample menu that we felt we could live with. Here is what we worked out for our family. Yours might be completely different.

• Breakfast: oatmeal with dried fruit and nuts
• Lunch: mung beans and rice, or rice with vegetables in season
• Dinner: wheat berries, or bread, or chapatis with vegetables in season

Granted, this menu would start to get monotonous after a few months, but it certainly is an improvement over wheat berries three meals a day.

Finally, I looked up a calorie calculator on the web to verify that this menu would, in fact, supply our basic nutrition targets. One good online resource is: http://www.webmd.com/diet/healthtool-food-calorie-counter. Making some assumptions about serving size, I calculated that the following list would be adequate per person for a period of twelve months.

• 100# organic wheat berries
• 25# organic mung beans
• 50# organic basmati rice
• 50# organic rolled oats
• 2 gallons olive oil (in cans)
• salt, spices and condiments
• other legumes, nuts and dried fruit

Based on last year's prices, the cost totaled something over $400 per person (prices have gone up since then). Don't forget the last three lines in your plan. These can be the most expensive items, but they are critical to a successful program. By making our meals tasty and inviting we can make the difference between sailing through a food emergency and literally dying of boredom. If we are faced with a crisis where we have to tap into our stored foods, it will already be a stressful situation. We don't want to add any more stress through our diet than we have to. 

Ravi Har Singh has been a student of Kundalini Yoga since 1971 and with his family has been a part of the Hacienda de Guru Ram Das community since 1976. He was a founder of the software company Sun & Son and continues as its owner and general manager. Ravi Har has many interests beyond technology. He is an organic gardener and a founding member of the local Community Sustainability Project.