UK Prepping For Beginners, Step 2: How To Make A Food Stockpile

This article is part of an in-depth series on the getting prepared, and is tailored to absolute beginners. Each one is a deep dive into its specific topic, so for a more general overview on how to get started, check out the Beginner’s Guide To Prepping In The UK page on this site.

With almost any big project, the question that stops most people is “how do I even get started?”. It’s the same here – the barrier to entry seems high for having a stock of food and water, with all sorts of knowledge and planning and investment required, but it really isn’t. If I described it as “putting some extra food away”, it would sound a lot less scary, and since we’re just getting started, that’s all we need to do. Here’s how:

How To Build A Food Stockpile – Step By Step

1 – Figure Out A Budget

Money’s tight at the moment, for all of us – so the first thing you should do is think about how much you can afford to set aside for a food stockpile. Don’t spend more than you can afford – it’s better to have a smaller stockpile and no debt, and you’ve got time to build slowly. The world probably isn’t going to end tomorrow, but your bills will arrive. They’d probably still manage to arrive even if the world did end.

If you’re crafty, you’ll be able to extend your budget by shopping around or finding alternative sources of supplies, but I think most of us are probably already at the limit of our craftiness when it comes to saving money in this country.

2 – Use the OAR System To Keep Track Of Things

I talked about the OAR system in another post recently – it’s my preferred way to manage… basically everything relating to supplies, and it’ll help make sure that you don’t lose track or focus when it comes to building your own stockpile.

I won’t rehash that other article here, but in a nutshell, the OAR system comes in three parts:

• Organise
• Acquire
• Rotate

First you organise – deciding what you need, clearing space, figuring out where you could store things, planning how to get them, etc.

Then you acquire – you buy what you need to, make what you can, thrift, freecycle or trade, or whatever you plan to do to get your hands on your supplies.

Finally, you rotate your supplies – working through what you have and using up the oldest supplies first, so nothing is forgotten in the back of a cupboard and nothing goes bad.

3 – Work With The Space You’ve Got

A common problem for people who want to build resiliency or deepen their larder is lack of space. This is one reason why the “Organise” part of the OAR system is so important, I think – it gives you a chance to clear out all available space, declutter, and look at the space you have to work with. Don’t overlook anything – a back room may have space for a corner shelving unit in one corner, the space underneath beds or sofas could be used for rolling storage boxes full of supplies, and light, dry goods like pastas could be kept on top of kitchen units if you were short on cupboard space.

Declutter your existing food storage, work out what you actually want to have, and get rid of anything that you’re just keeping for the sake of it – once you’ve turned all your available space into useful, accessible storage for your supplies, you’ll realise you have much more of it than you thought.

You should also tailor your goals to the space that you have – for example, I live in a terraced house and therefore am unlikely to be able to store two years’ worth of food for my family. So, instead, I focus on having a few months’ worth in the form of a deep pantry. When I lived in a shared house, I had only a built-in-wardrobe and one under-bed space to work with, so my stores were proportionally smaller. Even a few days’ worth of food will be enough to tide you through many common disruptions, so if you can only store enough for three days or so, that’s still a gigantic step in the right direction.

4 – What Food to Stockpile: Start With Food That You Actually Like And Explore New Options Gradually

When I first started building a stockpile, I got carried away with the variety of options I could store, and bought lots of things that turned out to be terrible. Since they were terrible, I never ate them, and both the money and the storage space were wasted.

Since then, I’ve only stocked up on food that my family and I actually enjoy eating on a day-to-day basis, which has the triple advantages of:

1 – making sure we never run out of sauce or lunch supplies in our everyday lives
2 – making sure that the stockpile is rotated and used up, without anything sitting untouched for years and going bad, and
3 – guaranteeing that, if the worst did happen, we wouldn’t also be hit with a sudden and dramatic change in our diet

When I decide I’d like to try a new, more cost-effective corned beef brand or something, I buy one or two to begin with, and try them out. If they pass the taste-test, then I’ll buy a dozen of them. It’s a good rule of thumb not to buy a lot of food that you haven’t tried yet!

If you are interested in having a fallback for your fallback (or if you just want to buy something and put it in the cupboard forever and not have to think about it) then I’d recommend the super-long-life pre-made meals from ReadyWise – you can get them in tubs that have a 25 year shelf life and contain 80 or 120 meals, with plenty of variety, and they even have freeze-dried fruits and vegetables that can be put away as “emergency ingredients” if you fancy a bit of post-apocalyptic cookery.

5 – Take Your Time And Stick Within Your Budget

As I mentioned above, the world is probably not going to end tomorrow (although if it does, I’m sorry, and you can say “I told you so” when we meet in the wasteland).

Incorporate a small increase to your supplies into your normal shopping routine, and you won’t even notice that you’re building up your pantry. Ragnar Benson, the famous insane survivalist guerilla, recommends a “buy doubles” way of doing this, which is simply: if you’re buying a tin of beans, buy a second one, and put the second one in your larder.

It seems simplistic, and it flies in the face of a lot of extremely complex Tactical Survival Retreat Supply Freeze-Dried Apocalypse Bucket salesmen, but it really is that easy. Try it – you won’t even notice you’re doing it, and I promise you won’t regret it.

No matter what happens, you’ll never be annoyed that you have too much tasty food in the house.

6 – Voila! As Simple As That

My main lesson about prepping, that I’m always trying to hammer home, is just that one – it really is as easy or as complicated as you want it to be. Building a food stockpile can be done in no time flat, with thousands of pounds necessary and a giant cellar to store it all in, or it can be done more smartly, over a long time, and with minimal space and financial investment needed.

Like I said up above, you’ll never be mad at yourself for having too much delicious food, and even if a meteorite strike or EMP never happen, you’ll still eventually need to eat that food. Plus, with the rate that our food prices are increasing, you’ll be getting to live at last years’ prices, which is nothing to sniff at!

7 – (For When You’ve Done The Other 6) – Exploring Replenishable Food Sources

Once you’ve got a store of long-life, shelf-stable food that you like to eat, you might want to look into replenishable food sources. The most popular of these in the UK are gardening and foraging, although dumpster-diving and zero-waste food collectives are also becoming much more common and popular.

I won’t elaborate on the last two here, but if you want to begin growing your own food, I can’t recommend it highly enough – a fantastic resource to start with is Rebel Gardening by Alessandro Vitale, or The City Grower by Matt Franks. Both books focus on growing smart in small, often urban spaces, and working with your environment to create both a surplus of food, and a healthy, happy place in which to spend your time.

If you’d like to look into foraging for food, this is the perfect time of year to do it – there is SO MUCH wild food around, even in the cities. The small, heavily landscaped park by my house is still full of three-cornered leek, lemon mint, barberry and wild garlic, while the wilder woodlands on the roadside are teeming with dandelion, stinging nettle, thistle stalks and fiddlehead ferns. And I don’t live in the countryside – this is the outskirts of a major city.

One of the best books I’ve ever read on foraging in the UK is The Forager’s Calendar, by John Wright. I really can’t recommend it enough if you’d like to start gathering wild food!

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