Home / The guide / Blackout continuity

Extend food and supply stocks beyond the pantry

The living module's pantry covers daily rotation. Long outages need a deeper store of dry staples and household supplies that keep for years.

How

1. Size your daily needs with the pantry calculator in living-9.
2. Add a long-term layer of dry, low-moisture staples. Church food storage guidance, drawing on BYU research, gives shelf lives of 30 years or more for wheat, white rice and sugar, and about 30 years for dry beans, rolled oats and pasta, when properly packaged and stored at 24 C or cooler.
3. Utah State University Extension says white rice kept at a steady 21 C with oxygen absorbers keeps for up to 10 years, and up to 30 years when cooler.
4. Use foil pouches, PETE bottles, seamed cans or gasketed jars with oxygen absorbers for dry foods only. That guidance warns that moist foods in low-oxygen packaging risk botulism.
5. Stock non-food supplies too: soap, bleach, toilet paper or alternatives, menstrual products, batteries, matches, lamp oil, seeds, animal feed, oil and grease.
6. Rotate first in, first out, and replace stored water you filled yourself every six months (Ready.gov).
7. Keep stores off the floor, dry and rodent-proof.

Do these first

• living-9

Sources

1. Longer-term food supply. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (food storage guidance based on BYU research), accessed 2026-11
2. Storing white rice. Utah State University Extension, accessed 2026-11
3. Determine water needs. Ready.gov (FEMA), accessed 2026-11
4. Build a kit. Ready.gov (FEMA), accessed 2026-11

Open in the interactive guide