The hardest part of building a food storage plan isn’t the shopping — it’s knowing what numbers to shop toward. Most guides give you a generic 3-month food list that doesn’t account for how many people you’re feeding, what calorie level you’re maintaining, or how much physical space you actually have. This is the math behind a real food storage plan. The Base Number: Calories Per Person Per Day The CDC uses 2,000 calories/day as the standard adult baseline. For a re