Okay, so my pantry will hold about a 4 month supply of food for the wife and me. Fortunately I still have some free space in the house. But I've been considering the logistics of a year's supply of food and where I would put it all. Keeping in mind that almost all of the food prefers to be kept in a temp controlled environment, that means keeping it in the house at a minimum (no garage, no attic space storage). So I am looking under the beds, behind the sofa, or stacked beneath the dresser in cases or crates and dressing it with a valence of some sort (raising the dresser by a couple feet is not a problem in my household).

Sometimes you just gotta be creative in your thinking I suppose. It took me a little bit to think that darned near every piece of furniture in my house could be "lifted" enough to put stuff under, yet not become awkward or uncomfortable. Pedestalizing the food this way makes it easy to camoflauge so it isn't aestheically unappealing either (more for the wife than me).

Double up the top of closets, the top shelf of a closet is about 30" below the ceiling, you can put another shelf half way in between and all the stuff you don't use very often up up higher.
Also open up an interior wall, usually side of back of closets, you then get a 3.5" deep opening which you can put in shelves and stack stuff there.
Remove the flooring of the closer, build a simple box to outline the closet floor out of 1x4 or 2x4 or 1x6 or 2x6 lumber sitting on its side, cover with plywood add a couple hinges and then recover with the old flooring so you in effect raise the floor 4-6" up with empty space under.
Though I noticed our crawlspace under the house stays pretty decent temp year round since its underground. I lined it with shelves.

What types of food do you have in your food storage? I have about 3 months worth of food that we eat everyday, and then I have items that store for years and years (40+ years some of them).

Since I am renting our home, modification is out of the question. All available conventional storage space is already taken, pretty much up to the ceiling, so no more shelves can be mounted with aesthetic impact that the wife won't tolerate.

As I have said in previous threads, I have too much stuff in my house and need to get rid of some of it. Were it my own house, I would simply open a hole in the floor and start excavating. Dry earth is a great place to store food. I am pretty sure the water table under my house is quite a ways down.

I just got an idea for a new thread.

I am fond of quoting Dirty Harry, a man's got to know his limitations, one of mine is food storage. My family maintains a separate pantry with 3-4 months of food in it, 75% things we can eat almost every day. I'm happy to say my wife has gotten into it, without her level of organization I would probably have alot of inedible but long-term shelf stable stuff only. But we can't sustain much longer than 3-4 months of food, and every year when we do a quick inventory we tend to pull 25% as it approaches its expiration - that goes to a food bank, as cans of soup, chicken and chili are still good and nourishing, just not as likely to be eaten in our household before their nominal expiration date. We don't naturally eat out of cans, we tend to eat fresh food almost every day. It takes more maintenance than we can muster to have more food than this in reserve, so I'm just grateful to keep a good 3-4 month supply that doesn't go to waste or a once a year automatic food bank donation. However I have learned a few food supply tricks from the mass care folks at Red Cross (proactively labelling for expiration), maybe those will rub off.

Lono, I do the same thing. I write expirations on the can with a sharpie. At Christmas I go through and anything that is close but still good, I donate. A couple hundred items go to a food drive my company hosts for the less fortunate.

I'm lucky to have more crawl space than I know what to do with. Nice and cool also.

Luckily we have a basement, pantry and mud-room... if you can't modify your house, and you are out of conventional space I think you are out of luck

When we lived in a Manhattan apt., I had about a months worth of Mainstay bars. Not what I want to eat, but it fit in the space of a couple shoeboxes. If I got hungry enough, they would have been delicious.

For me it's important that storage areas be accessible, otherwise it becomes too hard to rotate the food and when you eventually need it, it's gone off.