If you’re like me, you’re concerned that some or all foods will soon be either too expensive to buy or not available at all. It’s no secret that I am a “late prepper” who used to dismiss calls to get prepared. I never saw the need to be ready for whatever is to come because I didn’t think things would ever get as bad as they are now.
I was wrong.
On today’s episode of The Late Prepper, I discussed seven food items that new preppers need to stock up on as soon as possible. These are items that I and other, more experienced preppers believe are both necessary for long-term survival and that may be hard to get in the coming years, even months. Food isn’t everything. We need to have a strong supply of potable water. We need medicines and other supplies. We definitely need a way to protect our supplies when someone tries to take them. But today we’re talking about food.
Certain items will be harder to get than others. This is always the case, but it will be accentuated during an economic downturn or full-blown collapse. I took that into account as well as two other factors: price and usefulness. You could stock up on Doritos if you’d like, but I don’t consider them to be very useful in a crap-hits-the-fan situation.
Rice and Beans
This is the no-brainer that every prepper knows and loves. The reason the combination of rice and beans is so important is because it hits all of the necessary qualities. Today, both are relatively cheap but in a near-future collapse scenario, demand will overtake supply and prices will skyrocket. They can be stored for very long times, up to 25 years or more in the right conditions. The nutrition is proven; combining them delivers the right amino acids to form proper proteins. Technically, you could survive on just rice, beans, and water indefinitely.
Canned Foods
For the sake of variety and having foods with mid-term shelf-lives, most canned foods are great. They are also generally inexpensive, though not as inexpensive as fresh foods that you can yourself. But the best part about canned foods like soups, meals, fruits, vegetables, and meats is that they’re generally ready-to-eat without necessary preparation. They’re better when heated, but they can be eaten right out of the can. Just be sure to have manual can-openers ready.
Wheat Berries
This versatile family of grains can help you meet your daily caloric intake easily. They are nutritious and when stored properly, they can last for decades. Definitely make sure you have a mill that can grind up your wheat berries into flour. We have one electric and one manual. We get ours from 4 Generations Organic.
Food Buckets
I often tell new preppers to get their freeze-dried foods last. Too often I see people going straight to ordering buckets of long-term food before they have enough regular food to get them to the long-term. Only after cupboards, pantries, refrigerators, and freezers are full should anyone move to food buckets. Once you get your short- and mid-term food covered, buckets can be cost-effective ways of getting a nice variety of long-term food. We recommend one of our sponsors for this, and they currently have a summer sale that just launched.
Milk, Butter, Eggs (and Cheese)
Fats are going to be the hardest macronutrient to acquire after the crap hits the fan. Most oils do not last longer than a year or two even if they’re not opened. This is why we store plenty of powdered milk, butter, and eggs. Milk and butter also have other nutrients that are necessary for survival and if stored right, the can last a decade. As for cheese, we’re just now testing out Bega canned cheese. So far, so good. It’s expensive, but they claim their cheese can last a decade, so we’re starting to stock up.
Dehydrated Fruits and Vegetables
If you can afford freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, that’s the better way to go. It’s definitely more expensive, but it’s healthier, tastes better, and lasts longer. We are stocking up on dehydrated fruits and vegetables. They won’t last as long, but we will store them for as long as possible as today’s fresh fruits and vegetables that are so abundant in the United States may not be so easy to get in the near future.
Freeze Dried Chicken
We started a an organic, roasted, freeze-dried chicken company. Okay, so technically it’s an organic freeze-dried food company, but our focus is on one product now. We’re selling five pounds of chicken that is roasted and then freeze-dried down to a single pound. It’s 19 servings with 27 grams of protein per serving. Between bird flu, supply chain, fertilizer and grain prices, and escalating inflation, we believe chicken will be gone or at least cost-prohibitive in the near future. That’s why we build the company now.
More people have started prepping (even if some don’t want to call themselves preppers). Considering the state of the economy, there will soon be two types of people: those who prepared and those in breadlines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrBBTlN_TZk
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
