Are you looking to start building up an emergency food storage? This is a great way to prepare for emergencies like natural disasters or any reason you need to be home for long periods and might not have the ability to purchase more food.
Here are some easy tips from Functional Medicine Los Angeles, a functional medicine Studio City provider, for gradually building your emergency food storage.
1. Build Your Emergency Food Storage Slowly
It can be tempting to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on food for emergencies, but this isn’t helpful or practical. You want to start slow and build it up just a little at a time. One of the easiest ways to start working on your emergency food storage is just to buy a little extra of certain types of food or bottled water.
If you buy one package of ground beef for tacos one week, buy 2 packages of ground beef instead. Our functional medicine Los Angeles practitioners suggest you grab an extra box of bottled water when it is on sale, or slowly add more items to your pantry that you know will last for a long time.
2. Make Water Your Priority
Having clean drinking water and water that can be used for other things should be your number one priority when it comes to emergency food storage. Water is the best thing you can have in your home since it comes in handy in so many different emergencies. You can use it as clean drinking water, for cooking, brushing your teeth, bathing, cleaning, and so much more.
Try to stock up on bottled water either in the pantry or in other areas of your home, like storing it in your garage or basement. Just be aware even bottled water has expiration dates.
3. More Emergency Food Storage Tips
Here are a few more tips from our functional medicine Burbank specialists to follow when you are putting your emergency food storage together.
4. Stock up on more non-perishable food items. Yes, even the processed ones! These are going to come in handy in an emergency. This should include canned and jarred foods, freeze-dried and dehydrated snacks, and anything that is pantry-safe, like nut butter, granola bars, and other processed snacks.
5. Get vegetables in cans, not frozen. While frozen vegetables are great for normal daily cooking, in emergencies, the power often goes out. Stocking up on frozen vegetables isn’t going to help you much in those situations. Our functional medicine doctors propose you get plenty of veggies and tuna in cans for emergencies.
6. Be smart about where food is stored. For example, if there is a flood in your area, keeping all that food on the ground level of your home is only going to get it ruined. Make sure you choose an area higher up above the ground, and store it in containers that will protect it.