Stocking food smartly means means you have to have a plan beyond “go to the grocers and buy stuff.”

That type of plan is a recipe for disaster as well as a formula for wasting a lot of time, money and space on food that will not be eaten or that will not meet your daily nutritional requirements; here is one person's way of figuring out where she is and what she needs.

I’ve started a reassessment of my stored foods. I use a spreadsheet that calculates the total calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrates for the food. I’m finding that fat and carbs are easy to store — vegetable oil, pasta, rice, flour — these foods are inexpensive, store well, and provide ample fat and carbs along with some protein.

I have over 100 lbs of pasta, over 50 lbs of rice, and about 35 lbs of wheat flour. For vegetable oil, I have 5.6 gallons of assorted oils: soy, canola, olive, sunflower seed.

The most difficult macronutrient to store is turning out to be protein. Stored protein in my pantry: salmon and tuna, soynuts, walnuts, canned legumes, peanuts, peanut butter, dry instant milk, sunflower seeds, and some frozen egg whites and frozen blocks of cheese.

All those protein sources only raise the amount of protein in my food stores to 10% of total calories.

My spreadsheet says I have 100 days’ worth of food, for 3 persons, with 10% of kcal from protein, 40% from fat, 50% from carbs. Those are acceptable percentages, though I’d like more protein and less fat (as a percentage of total calories).

Generally, you should have a minimum of 1800 – 2000 calories a day, per person, for the duration of however long you are storing food (six months, a year, etc.)

By using that as a baseline, you can accurately calculate where you are calorie-wise and then you can figure out if what you have has the optimal nutritional value you need to live healthily.

To learn more on how to use math to ensure your food stocks can meet your nutritional needs, please visit the Prep Blog.