My wife and I came to an agreement early on, if food prep was to be sustainable and not mark me out as an insane prepper, it had to rely mainly on foods we eat every day, and include a lifecycle check where I donate unused foods approaching expiration to local food banks. Hard part is, we don't actually eat canned foods every day, but reasonably often, at least to sustain an inventory of 3-4 months food supplies. Let me talk about food maintenance inventory and not how to compress down into less edible options.

I keep about 1 month of MREs for 3-4 on hand for longer term storage, and barely nibble my way through that - my family has tried them, and agreed they'll revisit once the regular food stocks are drawn down, and not before. I also keep some grains and legumes in bulk, but not too much. And rice I eat about 5 lbs every month so I keep a stock of that handy.

The dog and cat each have a 1 month inventory, just an extra sack of food purchased early on, when they finish one I pull the one in reserve to feed them, and I go buy a replacement which goes on the shelf as inventory. If they run out of food in a disaster, they'll either eat me, or we'll eat them. My dog has assured me that he loves me so much, he won't eat me until ~3 days after I am dead.

I last donated food to the USPS food drive last week, it included about $30 of food stuffs that was approaching expiration: with some dedicated eating of regular foods, I consider this to be normal, spoilage, the end result of stocking too much food, more than we can eat and cycle through the inventory. Since $30 is the price of 2 pizzas in this zip code, its an acceptable cost, for us anyway.

One enhancement I try to keep up with is color coding canned goods expiration: I bought a bunch of those round stickers in different colors, and when I buy new food for our pantry I write the month and year of expiration, and put that on it. Its a lot easier to look for all the blue labels (expires 2012) and red labels (expire 2013) etc than to individually poll each and every expiration date on every can and bottle. I can visually scan for things labeled "6/12" or "12/12" and put them in a bag for the postman (or Boy Scouts, whose food drive comes out later this year).

My wife has given me one closet to call our pantry and store my 3-4 months of food - I don't think she would give me another. Since I'm not stocking any more than that, it has enough room for us. If I felt the need to stock for a longer duration, I'd have to renegotiate with wifey.