Jeff, have you considered adding a few items that would be consumable even if a surely-this-won’t-fail item failed?
As a hypothetical example, imagine that person X thought “I will always be able to eat dried pasta because my tomato plants will never fail, which means I’ll have tomato sauce”. And person X normally eats pasta each week so they stock up on a few extra bags.
It seems reasonable to say “But maybe my tomatoes will be dead so I should also have one or two packages of freeze dried pasta meals” even if person X has never eaten freeze dried pasta before. One downside of doing this would be that person X has to start eating freeze dried pasta once a while to keep the inventory fresh.
I do think this is important, and the big one is fuel for heating food: pasta and rice are pretty minimally nutritionally valuable if you can’t cook them (pretty sure soaking is not good enough). Canned / jarred food does very well here, and we do have a decent amount of this.
As much as possible I’d like to approach this through the nearly-free “buy more of what we already cook”, and in our particular case I think we’re good there.
With freeze-dried meals, you can get big tubs of ones packaged to last 25y (example, though note “just add water” is misleading since you need to cook them), so I’m not too worried about rotation there.
Look around your house at the non-perishable food already on the shelves, and buy more of that. Then rotate through over time.
Jeff, have you considered adding a few items that would be consumable even if a surely-this-won’t-fail item failed?
As a hypothetical example, imagine that person X thought “I will always be able to eat dried pasta because my tomato plants will never fail, which means I’ll have tomato sauce”. And person X normally eats pasta each week so they stock up on a few extra bags.
It seems reasonable to say “But maybe my tomatoes will be dead so I should also have one or two packages of freeze dried pasta meals” even if person X has never eaten freeze dried pasta before. One downside of doing this would be that person X has to start eating freeze dried pasta once a while to keep the inventory fresh.
I do think this is important, and the big one is fuel for heating food: pasta and rice are pretty minimally nutritionally valuable if you can’t cook them (pretty sure soaking is not good enough). Canned / jarred food does very well here, and we do have a decent amount of this.
As much as possible I’d like to approach this through the nearly-free “buy more of what we already cook”, and in our particular case I think we’re good there.
With freeze-dried meals, you can get big tubs of ones packaged to last 25y (example, though note “just add water” is misleading since you need to cook them), so I’m not too worried about rotation there.