Wondering how to ration your food supply? If you’re on a food budget, trying to lose weight, have little access to food, or are hunkered down for the coronavirus self quarantine, you may be wondering how to ration food for 31 days or longer. Below is a simple method for rationing your food supply along with an equipment and shopping list. Print this guide and save it in your recipe binder.

More meal planning tools for download:

• [Printable] Daily Meal Tracker – track your daily intake and plan your meals with this tool!
• [Printable] 16 easy vegan kids meals (oil-free, plant-based, whole grain)
• [Printable] 15-minute Vegetable Meal Prep Plan

Why ration food?

There are many reasons to ration food, here’s a few:

• Food budgeting – if you’re using a tight food budget, rationing food is important for maintaining your food budget. Without food rationing you are likely to eat too much of one ingredient that was meant for another dish.
• Food insecurity – possibly you live in an area where there are very few grocery stores and farmers markets. Most likely, you shop for a week or month of food at a time. If so, food rationing is a good idea so you don’t over eat certain ingredients and end up with little to no food during the last few days before your next scheduled shopping trip.
• Self quarantine – possibly you are reading this article during the coronavirus self quarantine time period in the USA or beyond. If you’re planning to stay home for the next several weeks or months, rationing food is important so you do not run out of food and have to leave your home.
• Weight loss – if you’re trying to lose weight and want to maintain a set diet, food rationing is a great way to keep track of your daily intake.
• Meal prep – food rationing is also meal prepping. If you cook and ration your food supply, then you’ve essentially meal prepped your own homemade meal kits. This is a great way maintain homemade meals during a busy week.

Learn how homemakers in the WWII-era rationed their food: Food rationing tips from WWII: Health-For-Victory Meal Planning Guide

How to ration food

Step 1: Take inventory

First, you’ll need to know the total of everything you have on hand in your pantry, refrigerator and freezer. Use this printable inventory sheet to determine your food inventory, or use a scratch piece of paper with a pen. List everything you have by the number of servings, not by weight or number of packages. If you calculate the number of servings you can easily meal plan and know how many servings of each ingredient you have total.

Use the Easy Vegan Meal Planner™ to take inventory, plan your meals, prep your ingredients and keep track of what you’ve been eating >

Step 2: Plan your meals

Next, you’ll need to make a meal plan for the entire time you plan to ration your food, for this example, plan for 31 days of food rations. Here’s what you should aim to consume each day. Learn more about “Daily Dozen” at NutritionFacts.org. Here’s a few food rationing meal planning tips:

1. Plan meals around what you need to eat – maintaining your health is very important, and food can either improve or harm your health. When meal planning, it’s important to plan your meals around the foods that we need to eat on a regular basis, such as whole grains, leafy greens, berries, etc. This will ensure you are staying on a healthy diet during food rationing.
2. Plan meals around what you have – sometimes you may need to plan meals around what is already in your pantry. If this is the case, focus on using up the foods that will perish first, then on foods that can be cooked. Leave all quick and easy foods for emergencies when you cannot cook the food, if possible.
3. Plan easy-to-prepare meals – choose meals that are easy to prepare with very little steps involved. This will save you time an energy.
4. Plan easy-to-enjoy meals – choose meals that can easily be reheated on the stove in a pot or pan with a lid, baked, blended or enjoyed as-is. This will save you time and effort at meal times.
5. Plan easy-to-store meals – choose meals that can be condensed down and for storage in the freezer and refrigerator. Avoid choosing meals that cannot be portioned prior to storing.

Step 3: Prepare your homemade food ration freezer meal kits

Once you’ve decided what you want to eat for the upcoming week or month, it’s time to get cooking. Here’s a few tips for making homemade food ration meal kits:

1. First in, first out – Use foods that will expire in the near future before foods that have a longer shelf life.
2. Prep your ingredients – Cook your whole grains and legumes, then cool completely before serving. Steam, chill and freeze shredded or diced vegetables. Tip: Place prepped ingredients into muffin tins to create individual frozen servings. This will help you when calculating how many servings you need or have on hand. Here’s a tutorial for freezing fresh vegetables.
3. Use ziplock bags for storage – Ziplock bags are the ideal way to ration food because they can be washed and reused again and again. Glass containers are good as well, but when you’re rationing food it’s ideal to be able to package each serving. Additionally, ziplock bags aren’t rigid like storage containers, meaning you can place more ziplock bags into a freezer than containers. This is ideal if you’re stocking food in bulk at your home and if you feed more than one person.
4. Create homemade meal kits – the ideal way to store and ration food is to prepare homemade meal kits before storing your food supply. Simply combine several frozen foods into a ziplock bag to create easy stir-fry dishes, pastas, grain bowls, smoothies, and similar meals. Tip: Steam, chill and freeze shredded or diced vegetables. Then place into muffin tins to create individual frozen servings. This will help you when calculating how many servings you need or have on hand.

31-day food ration chart

Below is a 31-day food ration chart for one person. Multiple these numbers by the number of people you plan to feed. The calculations below are based on general nutrition guidelines for dietary intake of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and water. Please consult your physician prior to making any changes to your diet based on the recommendations below.

This chart also takes into consideration access to electricity and cooking ability. Here’s a shopping list of emergency food, most of which is shelf stable and able to be prepared without much effort or equipment.

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