Exposure to heat, light, moisture, oxygen and insects or rodents are the enemies of food storage. Any one of these can adversely effect the shelf life of stored foods. Commercial freeze dried, vacuum packed (or nitrogen flushed) foods will generally give you the longest shelf life, assuming there is no physical damage to the packaging; this is also the most expensive type of emergency food.
I use a vacuum sealer and bags for long term storage of meat in the freezer ( first wrap the product in "Seal-Tite" plastic wrap as an extra barrier against freezer burn). Storing meats in the "styrofoam trays" from the store is not a good idea. I also pressure can meats (especially venison or tough roasts) in pint Mason jars. This tenderizes it and it is then pre-cooked and ready to use right out of the jar. The bulk of my garden produce (tomato juice, saurerkraut, and pickled vegetables) is water bath canned in pint Mason Jars also. All of the home canned items are in milk crates, in the cool basement, usually dark.
I have accumulated about 150 Mountain House freeze dried meals (mostly entrees). I usually buy them at clearance prices at the end of "camping season". They and a couple of dozen MRE's are also stored in cartons on shelving in the basement. Along with these items I have a couple of months of canned goods (and oils), dated and rotated, on steel shelving. In the garage, which isn't optimal from a temperature viewpoint, I have two dozen 5 gallon buckets of wheat berries, beans and legumes, dried corn and salt. I "flushed the buckets with CO2 from dry ice before sealing. It is a "tuck under garage" that does stay cooler in summer and never freezes in winter, so I have a potato bin with 200 pounds of potatoes and onions from the garden.
The common thread here is diversity and as much protection from the "spoilers" as possible. I have never had anything spoil (I do use the left over potatoes that have begun to sprout in the spring as seed stock for the next year). Of course, the frozen meats (and frozen squash) will have to be rapidly canned, jerked or consumed in a protracted power outage; the vacuum sealing won't protect against room temperature spoilage.
Places to not store food are in attics, garages (with some exceptions), the trunk of a car or anyplace with wide temperature swings. if you keep emergency rations in a vehicle, perhaps in a "go bag", either use freeze dried meals, "Clif" type meal bars, "lifeboat rations" or jerky. MRE's will degrade rapidly stored in a hot vehicle. In any case you will have to rotate hose items more frequently than if they were stored in a cool place.
One last thing, I vacuum sealed a 5 gallon bucket of book matches, strike anywhere matches, waterproof matches and butane lighters to use as barter items. Being able to deliver the ability to make fire could be a good bargaining chip.
