Storage of food and other basic supplies that you know you’ll need can help you feel more on top of things.

I grew up in a family that stored food. We had Mormon ancestors, and while the religion had gone out with my grandparents, the tendency to stock up on things stuck, specially with my mother.

How much might you want to store of any given item? That depends on your use of it, how much space you have, how much more expensive it might become, whether it might be hard to get ahold of later, how long it lasts, etc.

In previous generations, it was common to have food and household items stored up in quantities sufficient to last for long times. When roads were bad and winters fierce, most people as a matter of course kept supplies on hand. (I went about stocking up in this spirit when I lived in Colorado for ten years, but when I lived in a very small house in Mexico, I didn’t store much at all. Now I keep enough beans, rice, water, pet food, toilet paper, and cash on hand for at least a couple of weeks.)

Much of the literature on how to prepare for emergencies suggests figuring out desired quantities, either from provided lists or by logging what your household eats for a month and then extending it out. A useful bit of information on calculating what to store came from Utah State University Bulletin FN 502, Food Storage in the Home. (The link is to that bulletin, which is in PDF format. It’s free… you can download it by right-clicking or the Mac equivalent and then choosing to save it. You can open it in a new tab or window by right-clicking and selecting to do that from the list of choices.) Here is a key principle from it:

Store 1 pound of dry matter per person per day of dried foods.

The bulletin explains:
One pound of dry matter provides about 1600 calories of energy. Because energy is the most critical item in a food storage program (it will prevent the baby from being hungry) it should be considered first. Thus dried beans, flour, wheat, rice, sugar, dried fruits or vegetables, pastas or dried skim milk all provide about 1600 calories per pound. While 1600 calories will not adequately meet the energy needs of a hard-working large man it will quiet hunger pangs for individual members of a family. One pound of dry matter per person per day serves as a basis for a food storage program.

So that forms a useful concept, for the dried foods at least. If there’s a “hard-working, large man”  or teenage boy in your household, you may want to increase the amounts, and they could be reduced for small children. I’ve read that 3:1 is roughly a good ratio of grains to beans to eat, so that would mean store about 3 times as many pounds of grains as of beans.

Then you can supplement all this with fresh veggies and protein.