A blizzard can shut you inside your home, blanketing the ground with several feet of snow. A tornado or hurricane can damage your property and cut off all water and electricity in the area. A wide-spread power outage turns off the most basic resource. Preparation is crucial in any of these instances. Help can take days, if not weeks, to arrive, and for the time being, you are left on your own. An emergency preparedness plan, one encompassing food storage and water, is paramount for getting through the disaster and its aftermath.

Food storage is your source of nutrition and strength during and soon after a disaster. Limited resources for food preparation are available, and all items in your storage must fall within these restrictions while filling basic caloric and nutritional needs. Starting with grains, beans, powdered milk, oil, sugar, salt, and seeds is a common recommendation for creating food storage. Although buying all items at once is not necessary, a year's supply should accumulate over time.

The basics are, well, a little too rudimentary, especially if the supply must sustain an individual several weeks. Adding bulk freeze-dried food gives it more variety. Bulk freeze-dried food from Wise, Mountain House, and Lindon Farms covers all food groups, from protein to fruits and vegetables to dairy and carbohydrates. Fueling your nutritional needs and providing you with energy to function and focus in times of disaster, bulk freeze dried food assists with meeting a daily caloric intake.

Bulk freeze-dried food varies with manufacturer, although all offer up to a year's supply for an individual. Mountain House bulk freeze-dried food is stored in #10 cans, each of which holds a breakfast item or entrée. A full year's supply covers a variety of such items, as well as soups and condiments. Wise Food Storage and Lindon Farms, on the other hand, stick with mylar pouches. Offering both prepared and individuals for creating your own meal, Wise and Lindon Farms are ideal for grabbing your supply in the event of an emergency evacuation. All pouches are kept inside buckets, which close easily and can be stacked on top of each other. Between these two, Wise packages only two servings per pouch, eliminating long-term food waste, and Lindon Farms offers kits that can sustain an individual on 2,000 calories per day.

Although bulk freeze-dried food lasts 25 years or longer, storage conditions affect lifespan. Light and moisture are particularly detrimental; a storage area, as a result, must be dry, dark, and cool. A dry basement, closet, or crawlspace in your home likely has such conditions. However, chemicals leach out of cleaning supplies and trashcans, and in response, your food supply should neither be kept in such a container nor placed in an area with multipurpose cleaner and other similar products.