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Three days is the number every official emergency list agrees on — and it is also the number that runs out first. The 72-hour kit this blog has already covered gets a household through the first three days of a disruption: food that needs no cooking, water, medicines, documents and cash. But what happens on day four? The US Federal Emergency Management Agency's own guidance points past it: its Ready.gov programme recommends at least a several-day supply for evacuation, and a two-week supply at home. The American Red Cross says the same — three days if you have to leave, two weeks at home. This piece is the next layer of that plan: how much food and water a household actually needs for two weeks, a month, and three months — counted in calories, not in cans.
The maths first: calories, not cans
The only reliable way to size a stockpile is to count energy. The planning figure used by FEMA and the American Red Cross in their joint publication "Food and Water in an Emergency" is about 2,000 calories per person per day — the same figure the US Food and Drug Administration uses as a general guide on nutrition labels. It is a planning floor, not a personal target: real needs vary with age, size and activity, and children need less while people doing hard physical work need more. But as a planning number it turns a vague "stock up" into arithmetic.
At 2,000 calories a day, one adult needs roughly 6,000 calories for three days, 28,000 for two weeks, 60,000 for a month, and 180,000 for three months. For a family of four, two weeks means about 112,000 calories — a number that sounds enormous until you remember that most of it is dry staples you already eat. The water side scales the same way: Ready.gov's standard is one gallon of water per person per day, covering drinking and basic hygiene. That is 14 gallons per person for two weeks, 30 gallons for a month, and 56 gallons for a family of four over two weeks. Children, nursing mothers and sick people may need extra, and in very hot weather water needs can double.
One honest caveat: only the three-day and two-week figures are official recommendations. No agency sets 30 days or three months as a target. Those longer horizons are a personal choice, built by extending the same 2,000-calorie-a-day maths. Saying so matters, because a stockpile plan that pretends a month of food is government advice would be inventing authority it does not have.
Layer one: days 0–3 — already covered, don't rebuild it
The first layer is the 72-hour kit, and this article deliberately does not repeat it. The kit is ready-to-eat food that needs no cooking, no refrigeration and no water: canned meals, tins of fish, crackers, peanut butter, cereal bars, UHT milk — plus a manual tin opener and nine litres of drinking water per person. The full list, with exact quantities per country, is in our 72-hour emergency kit guide. The point of the layered plan is that this kit stays as it is — a grab-and-go layer — and everything below is built on top of it, not instead of it.
Layer two: days 3–14 — the quick-cook shelf
Once the first three days are covered, the next rung is the two-week shelf, and the food changes character. This is where cooking returns: pasta, rice, oats, dried beans and lentils, canned vegetables and fruit, tinned meat and fish, cooking oil, salt, sugar and tea or coffee. A per-person weekly basket of about 14,000 calories looks roughly like this: around five tins of beans, four tins of meat or ready meals, three tins of fish, 500 grams of pasta with a jar of sauce, 500 grams of rice, a 500-gram bag of porridge oats, a 340-gram jar of peanut butter, a pack of crackers, four tins of fruit and vegetables, two litres of UHT milk, and a pack of biscuits or cereal bars. Two weeks is two of those baskets per person — and for a family of four, eight of them, plus roughly 168 litres of drinking water.
The reason this layer is worth building first, before any longer-term storage, is that it covers the overwhelming majority of real emergencies. Most disruptions — storms, power cuts, supply interruptions — resolve within days, and a two-week shelf is the level that preparedness guides consistently call the gold standard for a household: long enough to matter, small enough to actually finish. It is also the layer most people can build from an ordinary supermarket, one extra item per weekly shop, without special suppliers or equipment.
Layer three: one to three months — the bulk core
Beyond two weeks, the plan stops being about tins and becomes about bulk staples — and the numbers get simpler, because a handful of foods carry almost all the calories. Dry white rice delivers about 1,600 calories per pound; dried beans about 1,500; whole wheat about 1,550. A 16-ounce jar of peanut butter holds roughly 2,700 calories. At those densities, one adult's month of food — 60,000 calories — weighs about 40 to 45 pounds of dry staples, roughly one five-gallon bucket. Three months is three times that: 120 to 135 pounds per person, plus oil, salt, sugar and honey, which keep almost indefinitely when sealed and dry.
The shopping list for a month, per person, works out to roughly 10 pounds of white rice, several pounds each of beans, lentils and oats, a few pounds of pasta, a quart of cooking oil, and a stock of canned protein and vegetables to keep the diet varied — about 48 pounds of dry goods and 45 cans in total, with 30 gallons of water. The trap to avoid is buying food nobody in the household will eat. A stockpile of bulk wheat is useless to a family that never cooks with it; a shelf of tinned fish is wasted on people who hate fish. The guides are unanimous on this point: store what you already eat, and eat what you store.
That is also why rotation matters more than size. As this morning's shelf-life guide showed, the long numbers on packets — 25 or 30 years for sealed rice and beans — are packaging claims, not properties of the food itself, and they collapse in heat or humidity. A three-month stockpile that nobody rotates becomes a three-month stockpile that quietly expires. The system that works is the boring one: buy a little extra of what you already use, date it, eat the oldest first, and replace what you use. Build it one grocery run at a time — three days, then two weeks, then a month — and every stage leaves you better prepared than the one before.