When engaged in practices that consume significant time, money, etc., I find it useful to first nail down my philosophy on the matter. Why am I doing this? What's my real goal? Below are my thoughts on food storage.

What is the reason? Well, my family and I need food to live. Historically, disruptions to the food supply happen. So I want to protect us from those disruptions. (And saving a few bucks would be nice).

So what is the goal? To store up enough food to keep us healthy and functional until...well, we'll get to that.

So how do I do it?

First and foremost, and this is not "my idea", eat what you store and store what you eat. Very basic prepper principle. If you store it but won't eat it, it's failing to perform it's role. You can eat something you don't store (fresh fruit tends to have a short shelf life), but you should also eat what you do store, to keep it rotated and make sure you're still familiar with it.

Second, make sure you'll actually be able to eat what you store during whatever emergency you are preparing for. This means having a plan that interfaces with your other preps, most notably energy and cleanliness. If your plan is to grind wheat into flour and bake bread, you need to have a grain mill, the ability to use it (milling can be hard work, there's a reason it was one of the first tasks that we found non-human energy sources for), an oven, fuel or electricity for the oven, etc. Does your food storage rely on freezers? What's the plan for total electrical loss? When's the last time you actually repaired a generator?

Third, don't just store "enough calories" or "enough macros". Perhaps the most common approach to long-term food storage is to listen to the LDS, AKA the Mormons. Their recommendations have changed over time, but a lot of people settle for long-term storage on some combination of rice, beans, powdered milk, and oil. Okay; what's for dinner? If your answer is "oily beans and rice with reconstituted milk", okay; try eating that for a week (oh, you didn't store any salt? No salt!).

So where does that leave us? Here's where we get back to the time thing; how long do you need your food storage to last? A few weeks because you're planning for an earthquake? A year because you're planning for a more serious disruption? Ten years? Most foods simply cannot be stored for more than a few years, many cannot be stored for more than a few months; your plan for what to eat from your storage in ten years needs to only involve things that last, well, at least ten years. You can still have things that last only, say, a year; you just need to eat them in that first year.

So the immediate thing (for those who have no real food storage or who want to adopt this approach) is to build up equipment, storage, and recipes for what you are going to eat normally, and expand that to the limit of the shelf life of those foods or to whatever emergency you're preparing for, whichever is less. If you are only getting ready for that earthquake, no need to worry if the ingredients you're buying "only" have a two year shelf life; you'll use them up long before that.

What if your normal diet requires ingredients whose shelf life is shorter than the emergency you want to plan for? That's when you plan for a long-term dietary shift. When (insert emergency here) happens, you keep on eating your normal diet for a while, progressively substituting more and more meals with the long-term diet until eventually you've used up all the food you had for the normal diet. And again, consider energy; it's probably a good idea for the long-term diet to be mostly or entirely the sorts of things you can prepare with very simple techniques and equipment, like boiling. Rice, beans, pasta, etc.

So:

1. Figure out how long you are planning to live off your storage.

2. Figure out what recipes you are and least willing, hopefully eager, to eat regularly and that only require foods you can store; make sure you can actually make them, considering equipment, fuel, etc.

3. If those recipes require ingredients that won't keep as long as the time you figured in step 1, figure out long-term recipes that you're still at least willing to eat and that only require ingredients that last as long as the time from step 1.

4. Calculate how much food you need to store, and of what kinds. Build in a fudge factor, remember that children grow up, think of pets, and do NOT base your calculations off starvation rations; 1700 calories a day (lookin' at you, Mountain House) is not a recipe for success. You may well be working a lot harder than usual, walking or biking a lot instead of driving, etc.

5. Buy it and store it right! It's a waste of time and energy and money and space if you're not going to store it properly. Bulk beans aren't a way to save money if they get eaten by vermin.

6. Eat it! Cook and eat it using your emergency plan. You've got "lots of fuel"? All those lumber cutoffs you got for free from the woodlot? Cool; cook dinner over a lumber cutoff fire once a month. And not just to test your process, but to test and improve yourself. You CAN bake a pretty good loaf of bread in a wood stove, but it's a skill. And skills only improve with practice.