Gluten Free Food Storage

(our previous food storage set up, but the curtains made it too hard to easily see what we had)

Several months ago we bought a Shelf Reliance Food Storage System (that I finally set up a week or so ago), and I started looking into finding gluten free food storage items.

A lot of foods that are naturally gluten free (like freeze dried fruits, veggies, and meats) are packed in shared facilities, so there's the potential for some cross-contamination. Since this has proven to be an issue for me in the past, I knew I had to be completely anal and find a company with a dedicated gluten free facility.

I only found one: Auguson Farms. They have a couple packing facilities, and one of them is a dedicated gluten free facility. Unfortunately, they don't offer their full range of products as gluten free, but they do have a decent selection, and it's much better than all the other companies I've looked into.

We decided to do a bulk order to start with, and several weeks after placing the order, FedEx brought 16 boxes of buckets and cans of dried and freeze dried foods (poor delivery guy!). An advantage of placing a large order: we got free shipping, as well as some free food items.

We'll continue to place orders, but not so much at one time. Now that I've finally rearranged the basement workroom (a workroom no longer) and set up the Shelf Reliance system it's so much easier to get to our food storage and see what we have.

(a sneak peak of the basement bedroom that used to be the workroom and is now our storage/exercise room- more pictures coming soon!)

I know we're told to store what we eat, but that's not really an option for us right now. This summer I plan on doing some canning and dehydrating, but for now the bulk of our food storage is dried and freeze dried fruits, veggies, meats, beans, rice, and lentils. I'd like to have food we could actually eat without having problems (like if our food budget were to be drastically reduced), but at this point, most of it would only be good if we were in a true emergency situation with no access to other food. If that were the case, we'd be able to eat, but we'd have problems.

We stopped building up our food storage for awhile because of this problem. Since most of what we eat now is fresh or frozen, it's hard to store what we eat. As I googled around, looking for ideas, I found that the best source of info for real food (how we eat these days) food storage are preppers. You know, the people who are preparing for the end of the world? Not all of them eat a real food diet, but I have found several bloggers who do, which has been helpful.

For us, focusing on self reliance in addition to food storage seems to be the answer. This means getting a garden actually producing veggies (unlike the complete failure last summer), and getting some chickens. I keep debating whether we want to keep them for eggs (which we still haven't added back into our diet) or just for meat. I'm thinking meat chickens this year, layers and meat chickens next year.

We also need to make the space for a larger freezer. We have a small chest freezer, but it can only hold 1/4 of a cow, with no room for any fruits, veggies or other meat. If we want to store food in the freezer, we need to have the space. Now if we could just figure out where to put the freezer...

What's your approach to food storage?