A pantry is a number of days, not a feeling of fullness. Count calories for the people who will eat them.
A plain target
Holdfast uses 2,000 kilocalories a person a day as a planning figure. It is not a diet prescription. Children, heavy work, cold, and pregnancy change the need, so treat the number as a floor you can see, then adjust the people count until the “days of food” line matches real life.
Calories hide in fat, sugar, oil, nuts, and dried fruit as much as in rice. A shelf of tinned vegetables looks virtuous and still leaves you hungry. Balance bulk (grains, pasta, potatoes) with dense foods you will actually eat when you are tired.
Build in layers
Three days of food you can eat with no cooking. Two weeks you can cook on a camp stove. Then, if you have the space, a deeper store of rice, oats, oil, and tinned protein. Each layer should be food your household already likes. A crisis is a bad time to discover nobody will eat the experimental stew.
Write calories per unit when you log a tin or a pouch. A 400 gram jar is not “some calories”; it is a known share of a day. The barcode scan fills many of these in. Correct anything that looks like a per-100-gram figure pretending to be the whole pack.
Do not store what you will not rotate
The cheapest calorie you never eat is waste. Buy a little extra of normal shopping — oats, tinned fish, pasta, peanut butter — and eat through it. That is rotation. A secret bunker of food you are afraid to open goes out of date in the dark.
Once a season, open Holdfast and read the days-of-food line out loud. If it dropped because you fed the family from the store, that is success. Replace what you used while it is still on offer at the shop.
2 of 20 · All topics