As my time prep­ping matures, and liv­ing in an apart­ment, I am also find­ing that my prep­ping is start­ing to morph a bit.  As I prep for food, most specif­i­cal­ly, I find that cans of food are becom­ing cum­ber­some.  Specif­i­cal­ly, soups, tunas, canned chick­en (which is a per­son­al favorite of mine), etc.  I also find myself revis­it­ing “Bug In” and “Bug Out” plans.  I’ve made con­ces­sions for bug­ging out with MREs and freeze dried / dehy­drat­ed foods.  How­ev­er, that is most­ly for short term.  Many of my sup­plies, are also in my apart­ment, mean­ing when/if I bug out, for any medi­um or long term issue, much food and sup­plies must come with me.  ALso mean­ing, I will have a lot of load­ing to do, so a bet­ter com­part­men­tal­ized sys­tem is going to be required.  Cans of soup in a Lowes or Home Depot five gal­lon buck­et may work, but can be as heavy or heav­ier than a ix gal­lon buck­et of rice or prepack­aged and pre-packed six gal­lon buck­et of some­thing like a Chef’s Ban­quet buck­et with 30 days of food at 2,100 calo­ries a day…  That is not to dis­count my soups and oth­er canned foods that I “try to rotate” as I use them.  The truth is, I find myself not using the canned foods as often as I thought I would.  In addi­tion, I find my self sup­ple­ment­ing canned foods with oth­er canned foods to make it a high­er calo­rie more sus­tain­able meal, not to men­tion a bet­ter tast­ing meal.

I even bought a portable shelv­ing unit from Lowes to hold all my canned foods.  As I look at it, no mat­ter how I look at it, how­ev­er, it still looks unor­ga­nized and a bit con­fus­ing.  Hence, I keep a detailed inven­to­ry list that gets updat­ed spo­rad­i­cal­ly, so sad­ly it is nev­er accu­rate, although it is “most­ly accu­rate.”   So for that, I have been look­ing at solu­tions like the Chef’s Ban­quet buck­et and look­ing to sup­ple­ment it with oth­er veg­etable and pro­tein solu­tions around it, as I think it’s pro­tein con­tent is a bit low for me, per­son­al­ly.  Some­thing I urge you to do as well, is eval­u­ate how much pro­tein, carbs, and oth­er nutri­ents your own body will require in a SHTF sit­u­a­tion.  I’ve done this numer­ous times, and as I gain and lose weight, work out, etc. I am con­stant­ly per­son­al­ly eval­u­at­ing my nutri­tion­al con­tent and intake to adjust it where I need to.

Why do I like the Chef’s Ban­quet buck­et:

• The price at Cost­co is right. $85.00
  • I need to do an analy­sis of what it would cost me to go to the gro­cery store and sup­ply myself with a mon­th’s worth of food at about 2,000 calo­ries per day, in food stor­age.  How­ev­er, with food prices where they are today, I bet it is going to be more than $85.00 with the right mix of nutri­ents I am look­ing for.
• It gets most­ly good reviews
• It is portable
• It saves me time and men­tal ener­gy to focus on oth­er items such as work, oth­er preps, and skills…
• More com­part­men­tal­ized.
  • If I want to dis­trib­ute a few buck­ets at a BOL or a fall­back loca­tion, then I can and not wor­ry about gath­er­ing a “nutri­tion­al val­ue com­bi­na­tion” of preps, it is already done for me.
• I’m pret­ty sure it is going to save me space when I look at how I have things stored today.
• I can actu­al­ly use some of the preps in every day cook­ing I had stored and may be close or just past their expi­ra­tion date, with­out fear of hurt­ing my “inven­to­ry list.”

If you are prepped and liv­ing in an apart­ment, how else do you save time, space, and effort when stor­ing your food prepa­ra­tions?