“A pantry is a room or cupboard where beverages, food, (sometimes) dishes, household cleaning products, linens or provisions are stored within a home or office.” – Wikipedia
You want the benefits of a deep pantry. In all of the potential circumstances you can imagine, good or bad, can you picture one where you do not want food? And, I believe you already know what type of food you want because that is the food you are already buying and eating on a daily basis, which brings us to the first rule of a deep pantry:
“Store what you eat, eat what you store.” – Prepper mantra
Most of us have a pantry of some sort. To determine how “deep” your pantry is, ask yourself how long you can go without making a trip to the store before circumstances would start to get unpleasant. When will you start running out of what you use on a daily basis? In addition to food, it could also include other consumables like toilet paper, the soap trifecta (dish, laundry, and hand), as well as your personal hygiene items and commonly used medications.
Here are some questions to ask when deciding what should go in your deep pantry:
- Will it last 3+ months?
- Will my family willingly use it before it goes bad?
- Do I have the shelf-space?
- Can I buy it and still be improving my savings?
- Is it going to be more expensive in the future?
- Can I donate it before it goes bad?
- (Bonus) Do I have the right prerequisites to use it in an emergency?
A deep pantry should only consist of the items your household would consume over the next “X” weeks that won’t go bad in “X” weeks, limited only by the amount of space and money that you can wisely allocate for those items. (And, by “wisely”, I mean “wisely”. Hoarding and prepping are not the same and putting yourself in financial jeopardy is never a great idea.)
Deep pantries are one of the most beneficial preps that you can have in place. If done properly, they are one of the rare preps that can provide a lot of active value even if there is no emergency. There are some preps you hope to never use even once (think fire extinguishers and flood insurance). But, there are other preps that you want to use over and over and never run out of (think toilet paper, retirement funds, and food). If done well, deep pantries fall squarely into the preps that you will want to use all the time.
Here are some of the reasons I work on my deep pantry:
- Food security: There have been many times recently when a can of soup in the pantry is worth two in the store. This was especially true when the store shelves were bare at the beginning of Covid, but it can happen any time a hurricane or other major disaster is forecasted.
- Convenience: If most of what I need is already in my house, I have far fewer urgent trips to the store and I love saving that time as well as the money on gas. Also, if you or your kids were sick, would you rather have to run to the store or to the pantry for medicine?
- Financial: If most of what I need is already in my house… then I can usually wait for sales on more items.
- Inflation hedge: I started my deep pantry decades ago, but it has really paid off recently with the jump in food prices. Wouldn’t you rather have paid last year’s prices for the pasta that you’re eating today?
Now, there can be some downsides to a deep pantry. Here’s what I’ve experienced:
- Management: The more you have in your pantry, the greater the cognitive load to track all of it. Some people are excellent at this and others are horrible. Personally, I’ve found the laziest way I can think of that still works for me. I wrote about it here, but there are myriad ways to successfully stay on top of your pantry.
- Waste: The more you have in your pantry, the greater the potential for waste. (Even when cupboards are bare we can somehow manage to waste a lot of food.) The method I use to manage my pantry works very well for me, but food can still go bad. However, that hasn’t hurt me much. The biggest blow I’ve had was throwing away a few jars of pasta sauce after I changed my eating habits for health reasons without grasping that would mean I would burn through my supply at a slower rate. Fortunately, all the losses that I have incurred have been entirely offset by the savings I’ve gained due to inflation alone.
- Mobility: If you know you will be moving in the near future, keep in mind that a few months’ worth of food is not conveniently transported. Also, on the off chance that you need to evacuate your home, you may prefer to leave with the money in hand rather than the food in the basement. However, most of the time having the food on hand is the clear winner. Even if you did need to urgently bug out, would you rather load what you can take from your basement or wait in line at the supermarket? (Additionally, this can be putting a lot more at risk during a house fire, but I don’t think that qualifies as a valid reason to not have a deep pantry. Better to put the time into preventing house fires as much as possible.)
- Emergencies: Having months’ worth of food but no way to prepare it can is better than nothing, but it can be a great idea to make your preparations more resilient by adding additional can openers as well as ways to heat/prepare food if the electricity is out.
Just to be clear, in this context deep pantries are not the stereotypical “food storage” often associated with emergency preparedness. When you see the term “deep pantry”, we are usually not talking about MREs, #10 cans, or Mylar bags of wheat berries. Those have a place, but it’s not in the discussion around deep pantries. I would recommend getting your pantry well underway before diving into longer term food storage.
Can you think of some ways to improve the resiliency of your food security?