- Water purification method
- Rice
- Beans (dried)
- Salt
Get white rice if you want it to last a REALLY long time. It doesnt have the nutrients, but it wont rot as quickly as wild rice or brown rice.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Canned food - usually it's sterilized in over 100°C giving it a very long expiration date.
Additionally dry stuff like pasta. Pure sugar won't spoil ever as well.
Anything with a long shelf life that you're already eating anyway. No point in buying food just for the apocalypse for the apocalypse to then never happen.
Also, keep in mind that water is the priority number one,
Exactly. If you buy something you eat you can build a stock where you track expiration date by batch. Eat from the batch closest to expiration. Refill when a batch is eaten up (or thrown out).
If you wanna go overkill, solar powered hydroponics (if you don't want to settle for potatoes)
Settle for potatoes?! Potatoes would be extremely difficult to grow in an apocalyptic scenario, no? Potatoes stocks have a good shelf life and might turn into gold depending on the situation causing the food shortage.
By settle I mean hydroponics can be a ton of continous work
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Multivitamin tablets. Not much of a meal on their own but if food availability and variety become an issue, they'll help replace some of what you're missing.
Vitamins degrade over time. You'll want to make sure that what you get will actually last for the period of time when you intend to use them.
Knowledge of how to produce your own food. Unless you plan on having years worth of MREs, you're going to run out eventually. Learn to garden so that you can just make more food.
Producing food, year round, to feed yourself/family is actually insanely difficult. Small scale farming that provides year round is no small task and generally not considered “good” advice for prepping. Do that if you want to supplement sure but you’re going to die if your only source of food is the garden in your yard. Farming is a very labor intensive and resource consuming, highly contextual skill that requires highly specific knowledge with a huge variety of variables that can also just flat out fail through no fault of your own, it’s not a safe plan for survival.
Long term shelf stable foods like rice, beans, grains, pastas, canned goods, canned protein, dried goods, dried spices/seasoning and salt all need to be stocked before you consider growing fresh food as part of the equation. Also canning/preserving food will be a huge task if you plan to rely on your own grown food, which is in and of itself a time consuming skill that requires the correct tools and knowledge to do well and safely.
If the time comes that your only food option is home grown food you’re as good as starved in basically the entirety of the US and I’m sure most other developed nations. If you happen to live in an agricultural valley that has actual real, dedicated farms with farmers who actually know how to produce food at scale you will survive longer but it will still be very difficult and social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul, go spend that time doing what the farmer needs so you can barter.
social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul
Join a community garden. You get both social connections and the yard garden experience - and as a bonus, your social connections are with people who know how to grow food and can give you advice 😆
That being said, don't be too dismissive of "supplementing" your diet. If you know what you're doing you can grow all the fresh veggies a person needs on a few hundred square feet per person. Fresh veggies are the kind of food most vulnerable to supply chain disruptions - like if, "hypothetically", some toddler dictator decided to throw a tantrum for no apparent reason and start a war right on top of the shipping lane that the majority of the world's fertilizer passes through - and they're also the most beneficial kind of food to grow yourself, because you can grow varieties optimized for taste and nutrition instead of varieties optimized for shipping and appearance on grocery store shelves.
(Book recommendation: Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World. Read the chapter on how fresh Florida tomatoes are grown and you'll never buy anything but canned tomatoes again 😆 )
Yeah, it takes knowledge and experience. Which is why you should start gardening now, so that you'll have those skills when they become necessary.
MREs tend to sell online for about $4 a meal.
That would mean you would spend a little over $5,000 plus tax to get a year's supply.
Technically, you can survive off of beans and rice and a few vitamin supplements.
You could also learn how to bow hunt to supplement your food with birds and wild animals.
Slingshot (or old-school sling but they're much harder) is probably better for small game if we're entertaining real dystopian collapse, unless you also learn how to make arrows.
I think if we're talking about "real dystopian collapse", as in a major population reduction, there are going to be more leftover bullets than you could shoot in a dozen lifetimes. If you're thinking about hunting small game, get something that shoots .22 LR, take it to the range every weekend, and don't waste your time with slings and arrows.
And with that being said, trapping small game is more efficient than hunting with any kind of weapon, so if you wanted to learn bushcraft for hunting for food after the end, that's where I'd start.
True. I can think of at least 3 houses within line of site from where I live that both have guns and would be too paranoid to keep them all in their safe.
[off topic?]
After 9/11 some New Yorkers were carrying gas masks with them everywhere in case there was another attack.
Someone pointed out that if you were on a subway during a gas attack and you had a gas mask, you wouldn't be killed by the gas.
Same thing with food. If people are starving and you have food, you're going to have to deal with that.
Can you stay awake 24/7?
Okay, but if OP is primarily worried about food costing more rather than food not being available stocking up on nonperishables is legit.
True
Dried beans. Rice. An established fruit/vegetable garden.
What's a good way to store dried goods like rice, beans and pasta so you have a substantial supply that you routinely top off, while eating the oldest you have in stock?
Five gallon food-grade buckets with good, tight, food-grade lids.
If you’re really tight on cash, go to restaurants or bakeries and ask if they have any that they’ll give you for free. Pickle buckets are common but will need some deodorizing.
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Dried beans and lentils and shit
If you buy dried bean and Lentils you won't have to pay for shit, its a byproduct.
You need to define the design event before determining what the correct course of action is. If it is a natural disaster response, you should have enough food, potable water, and fuel for a few weeks. Anything beyond that and you really need to start questioning how the assumptions affect your prep.
If you're expecting climate change/agricultural blight, not all crops are going to go at once. You need to select foodstuffs to keep where there aren't any equivalents in the market.
If you're expecting long term war creating embargos, there will be a calorie deficit over months or years. You are also going to have community members and government trying to redistribute any available foodstuffs from hoarders. Unless you are very wealthy, you likely run out of food within a year unless you can grow and keep your food. Even then, you'll likely be caught as everyone is starving and you still have some fat on you.
If you're expecting collapse of supply chains causing mass shortages, security is going to be a major concern. That's why people are recommending being armed and organized.
It is the reason why a lot is people don't take preppers seriously. A sustained food shortage beyond a natural disaster is likely going to result in an issue with a lack of security or the security apparatus has a vested interest in controlling scarce resources.
10 kg mylar bags of rice.
That will last the average adult about 20 days, and you'll probably be constantly feeling hungry during that time. Adding a sack of dry beans would make a huge difference.
Lentils. Definetly lentils.
Get yourself a patch of soil, even if it's just a couple of growbags, and grow potatoes. They're like a magical self-replicating food. When you harvest them, keep some aside to plant later. One potato produces 5-10 potatoes easily, scale up for infinite potato glitch.
If you live in the UK or EU, you can even literally just plant ones you buy in the vegetable section in the supermarket. In the US, they often treat these with a growth inhibitor to extend the shelf-life, they won't grow as easily.
Seed potatoes are guaranteed to produce healthy plants, but cost slightly more. You can buy them from garden centres or online.
Growing enough potatoes to sustain yourself much less multiple people, a plant that needs 90-120 days between planting and harvest, isn’t a reliable plan. It’s definitely one of the best options for supplementing fresh foods but it absolutely should not be the foundation of a persons survival prep.
Oh, yeah - I 100% agree. I was just trying to convey how ludicrously easy it is to grow your own. There's no way you should base an entire survival strategy on just potatoes, despite how plausible Matt Damon made it seem.
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Well preserved, high nutrient density stuff. You want the most bang for your buck.
Imo, MRE type supplies are going to be a good backstop, with the usual beans, rice, and canned veggies being your foundation. Keep multivitamins on hand, along with water purification/filtration/purification options.
OH!
Books on local flora that cover what is edible. Lots of shit that grows in the wild or green spaces is edible (often after some preparation like blanching or roasting.)
Start making hardtack.
A lot of people commenting here don’t seem to actually be from the prepper community and are giving very naive advice that requires you to have a lot of space, resources, knowledge and luck. Growing a garden is unequivocally not a good idea as your primary food source for a myriad of reasons, if you have the space, time, physical capacity, knowledge, context to grow a garden definitely do so, things like fruit trees, berry bushes and potatoes can be good options but don’t provide steady streams of food and lack protein. Generally long term shelf stable foods and “high value” items for bartering are what is suggested when prepping is being discussed. Don’t forget ways to provide yourself with clean fresh water too, that’s critical if infrastructure breaks down.
There’s a lot of resources out there on survival food prep, what is good, bad, safe, best practices etc. gardening is never suggested as a first line of defense. I’d suggest you dig into your local areas prepping community because the particular difficulties you may face, what’s available, what conditions you need to work around etc. will all be unique, plus learning to avoid problems with prepping preemptively will be the things that actually help. Having enough to share and trade with other people is also highly important.
Prepping communities have little to no knowledge on the subject which is why people avoid them and why most advice you'll hear outside those communities is so different.
Is there a name for the community that has the knowledge? Like a anti-prepper/mutual aid person?
Library?
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Seeds, soil, compost, buckets
Canned goods. Beans in particular are pretty versatile.
Plus, anything with long shelf life, Luke pasta, dry noodles, flour, sugar, etc.
Guns
Can't eat bullets. Enough people already have guns, so you're more likely to be shot if you try anything.
You have more faith in humanity than I do if you think a stockpile of resources won’t need defense
There are two schools of thought when it comes to firearms. One is I am defending, the other is I am taking. Often times those who suggest guns are in the latter camp.
A garden
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