Well, if something hits the earth from space and destroys it, then not much we can do. For the rest of the doom worries, there are a lot of easy to stock and cheap survival foods for the broke crowd. Everyone is not rich enough to stock freeze dried foods. Cereal and powdered milk are just one example of easy and cheap prep foods. I like Shredded Wheat, Wheaties, Wheat Chex, Total and Life cereal as some healthy examples. I don't like the corn cereals as they are GMO corn. I also don't like cereals with wheat gluten in them. Wheat cereals are fine, just no 'added' vital wheat gluten. Read the ingredients list! If you got some water, powder milk and cereal you got a few weeks of something to eat. And many cereals are fortified with vitamins.
Another good prep food is Nutri Grain bars. Fortified with vitamins. They are foil wrapped and last a long time. Only issue is they have lots of acids in them (citric acid / malic acid) for preservatives. In other words, if you are predisposed to heartburn, you can't eat too many of them at once or per day or you get acid reflux. If you eat oatmeal, get the quick oats. Saves on fuel in SHTFF. Bad thing about oats is they use a lot of water to cook. Add some canned / dried food to that, such as rice, beans, pasta, pasta sauce, can veg, can tuna, etc., and you got a nice food mix if and when SHTFF. The thing with cereal and the rest is...you must rotate it, so don't forget. Store what you eat and eat what you store. And don't forget the water in the deep preps.Point is, anyone can get a month or two of food preps to start with, even if on a low budget. Just chip away at it every time you go shopping with some extra prep food you buy.
Ramen is another good survival food to stock. I'm not interested in this, but you may be. Besides your own survival, ramen is also a good charity hot food to give to people that may come to you when hungry. Just add hot water, a Styrofoam cup and plastic spoon and you can hand out some hot meals.
Apartment dwellers and those with little space and $$ got a rough go with prepping. If you are not a food producer, you need to be a hoarder. If you are not a producer or hoarder, then you have to be a forager, sponger / vampire or a werewolf. There is no magic bullet to prepping.
To be a hoarder with little room, get chrome wire shelving and go up to the ceiling with it. Keep adding tubes and shelves until you get to the max height. Have them on high quality casters and have 2 layers of them in front of each other. You roll out the front shelving unit to get to the rear unit. I like chrome wire shelving as it is very adaptable and standardized to filling even odd spaces. My walls are short. If your walls are a decent length, you could have 500 linear feet of shelving easily. When I moved here, they had one narrow 10-foot long by 10-inch-wide wood shelf on the wall. I removed it and went from one 10 linear foot wood shelf of storage to 120 linear feet of shelving with just one layer of shelving on 1-1/2 walls. And as a bonus, my shelf width went from 10 inches deep of wood to 18 inches deep of chrome wire. If you already have built-in wood shelving, you can add another layer of roll-out chrome wire shelving in front of it. Just get the big, easy roll casters.
Here is a bonus for you...
In SHTFF you can get a source of vitamin C from unrefrigerated - store bought refrigerated OJ. What I'm saying is...you can bulk up with the deep preps and keep refrigerated OJ...unrefrigerated. I've found out that the refrigerated OJ they sell in the market does not need refrigeration, it is shelf stable. It is refrigerated for show. You can test this out for yourself. If you keep a bottle at room temp and the bottle does not get hard, that means there is no gas forming inside. (Even if there was gas, it would just be fermenting and still probably safe.)I've tested out a few brands by storing them room temp and drinking it months later. The results are all the same...it is stable at room temp. Now, I haven't tested out all brands, just a handful. And I haven't stored it at 118 degrees out in the Mojave Desert or tested it 4.7 years later. Hottest my bottles have been 85 degrees F and stored for 8 months unrefrigerated. So, before SHTFF, you test out all the brands and conditions that affect you.
