Food

The page above builds the pantry. This is what the pantry does not do, which is the part that decides whether it works for three months or for three weeks.

What the pantry runs out of first

It does not run out of calories. It runs out of the things calories do not contain. A backbone of rice, pulses, oats, flour, sugar, oil and salt is an excellent energy store and a poor diet, and the failures are predictable enough to plan around.

The parent page is right that scurvy is a real Phase 2 risk, and it is worth knowing how little it takes to prevent. About 10 mg of vitamin C a day is enough to stop it, against a UK reference intake of 40 mg. That is a very small amount of fresh material, which is why the sprouting jar on the parent page is not a novelty: it is the cheapest insurance in the entire food chapter, it needs no soil, no sun and no garden, and it produces in three to five days indoors in January.

Two specific gaps deserve naming, because neither is obvious.

Vitamin B12 is in animal foods and effectively nowhere else. A pantry of grains, pulses and oil contains none. The body holds a long reserve, so this is a Phase 3 problem rather than a Phase 1 one, and the answer is either preserved animal food in the store or a supplement that costs almost nothing and stores for years.

Vitamin D is already a problem, before any emergency. UK advice is that everyone should consider 10 micrograms a day through autumn and winter, because there is not enough sunlight at this latitude for skin to make it. A household spending a dark winter indoors is the case that advice was written for.

2,200 is the wrong number for a cold house

2,200 kcal is a maintenance figure for an average adult in normal conditions, and the conditions this app is about are not normal ones.

Cold raises it. Keeping core temperature up in an unheated house costs energy continuously, and shivering is expensive. Physical work raises it a long way further, and an emergency is full of physical work: carrying water, sawing wood, digging, walking to places you would normally drive.

It also varies more between people than a single number suggests. A large working adult may need half as much again; a small sedentary one, less than the figure. Children need less in total and more per kilogram, and they have almost no reserve, so they tolerate a deficit far worse than an adult does.

The planning consequence is simple. Use 2,200 to size the store, because it is a reasonable average and the arithmetic has to start somewhere. Do not use it as a ration without looking at who is eating it and what they spent the day doing.

The water and fuel bill on a sack of rice

This is the interaction between two chapters of this app that neither one states, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

Dried staples are not ready food. They are concentrated food plus a bill.

• Rice absorbs roughly twice its volume in water and needs that water boiled.
• Dried beans and lentils need soaking, then prolonged boiling. They are the most fuel-expensive item in the pantry by a wide margin.
• Flour needs water, and bread needs sustained heat.
• Oats are the cheap exception, since they will soften in cold water overnight if it comes to it.

Two things cut the bill sharply, and both are already in this app.

A haybox finishes the cooking with no fuel. Bring pulses to the boil, insulate, walk away. It turns the most fuel-expensive item in the pantry into one of the cheapest, and it is the single highest-value trick in the fire domain.

Cooking water is not waste water. The water pulses and pasta cooked in carries starch and some nutrients, and it goes into soup, into bread, or onto the garden. Nothing that has been boiled should be poured away in a shortage.

Rationing deliberately

If it comes to it, rationing decided in advance is a plan and rationing decided at the shelf is panic.

• Set the ration by household, not by person, then serve by need. Children, the ill and whoever is doing the heavy work get theirs first.
• Deliberate deficit is a legitimate choice. A fit adult can carry a modest shortfall for a long time. This is the reason to know the maintenance figure: it lets you decide how far below it you are running, rather than discovering it afterwards.
• Do not put children on a deficit. They have no reserve, and growth is not optional.
• Protect the protein and the fat. They are what stops a calorie-adequate diet feeling like starvation, and oil is the densest thing in the store at 9 kcal a gram.
• Keep one thing that is purely a treat, and ration it separately. Morale food is not sentimental, it is what makes people eat at all.

The pantry you will actually eat

The commonest failure of a deep pantry is not spoilage. It is that nobody eats it, so it sits until it is genuinely too old, and the household discovers on the bad week that it has no idea what to do with 15 kg of dried pulses.

• Store what you eat, and eat what you store. Anything in the pantry should already be appearing at your table.
• Cook from it now, at least monthly, so the recipes exist before they are needed and the household knows it likes them.
• Rotate by using, not by discarding. First in, first out, with the date written on the container in pen.
• Appetite fatigue is a real and documented problem, not fussiness. Eating the same thing for weeks reduces how much people eat, which turns an adequate ration into an inadequate one. The parent page's line that flavour is function is exactly right.
• Spices, stock, vinegar, chilli, herbs and something sweet are the cheapest and lightest items in the entire chapter, and they are what makes the rest edible.

Test it once. A weekend eating only what is in the store, cooked only on the fuel you would actually have, answers more questions than any amount of shopping. It is also the fastest way to find out that you own no tin opener you can work without electricity.