Emergency/Survival Food?

[BN]

We're interested in getting some survival type food to just store for long periods and forget until needed.

I did a search but everything I found was pre-Covid and I expect things have changed.

I saw a couple ads on Facebook and clicked on them. Now I'm getting tons of ads.

During Covid, we saw what happened to the food supply in a short while and something could easily happen to interrupt the food supply again.

I see ads for a 3 month supply that will keep for 25 years. That's what we are interested in. We probably won't be rotating it. Just store it and forget it unless we have Armageddon.

[Borderland]

Costco sells those emergency survival kits now. Not sure I would eat any of that until my neighbors chickens all disappeared.

[BobM]

Costco sells those emergency survival kits now. Not sure I would eat any of that until my neighbors chickens all disappeared.

And the neighbors!😀



Just kidding.

I have several buckets of rice and beans, and oatmeal in mylar bags. I bought them in bulk at Costco and got the bags and oxygen absorbers online.

[whomever]

My view of most of that kind of stuff is that it tastes nasty. Also, at least some of them will say '30 day supply', but only at 1000 calories a day or something. Something like 2000 calories a day is more realistic if you aren't too active.

Another strategy is to just keep as much of your regular food on hand as possible. Most of it keeps a lot longer that the 'best by' date[1]. For example, we filled a couple of buckets with the little packets of instant oatmeal 10 years ago or so. We use it from time to time camping - take some out, put new in. I think we still have a little of the original stuff and it's fine. Peanut butter keeps a couple of years at least, and we usually have a year's worth on the shelf. This needs a convenient storage area, as opposed to a case of 30 yr shelf life stuff that is at the far end of your crawlspace. We're lucky enough to have a decent sized pantry, so it's easy for us.

Speaking of storage areas, you need cool and dry to get the best shelf life.

If you are going for the 30 year shelf life option, see if you are near one of the LDS stores:

https://providentliving.churchofjesu...nters?lang=eng

They don't have a huge selection, but generally pretty good prices. Having stuff in cans means not worrying about insects and rodents. We asked and were told they are happy to sell to non-LDS folks.

We use Nido milk at our no-fridge cabin. It's way better than the normal dried milk. They say the shelf life is 1 year, but I know we have kept it three or so. We haven't tried longer than that because we use it up.

https://www.amazon.com/Nestle-Nido-I.../dp/B00E5XMY0M



[1]I worked in Seattle, as in earthquakes. I put a couple of boxes of random food (sardines, corned beef hash, crackers, PB, liverwurst, gorp, fruit, Dinty Moore, ...) on a bookcase in my office in case of The Big One. 20 plus years later as I was getting ready to retire I decided to eat the contents. One can of mandarin oranges had gone bad - it was swollen into almost a sphere, without leaking!. IIUC acid things like tomatoes and citrus are problematic that way. The peaches and pears were fine, as was all the other canned stuff. One of the boxes of crackers (out of 4 or 5) had gone off - it tasted a tad rancid, as did the (not-vacuum sealed) bag of gorp. After some research, in the name of science, I ate those too, and had no ill effects. The vacuum sealed nuts tasted fine. Etc, etc. My take home is that most canned goods, and I expect things like instant mashed potatoes, etc, will last at least a couple of decades in good storage conditions.

[TGS]

There's a few ways to look at this, @BN. This is a bit stream of consciousness here, but stay with me.

Goal: 3 days to 1 week in case of short term disruption (bad weather, natural disaster, etc)
Answer: Plastic bulk totes of Mountain House freeze dried pouches. They're generally single serve, same things people use for camping. Mountain House also makes a 3-day emergency box that is oriented towards this.

Goal: extended disruption (1 week to a couple months)
Answer: best thing to do is stock deep on the staples. This is easy in my house because my woman is Indian, which means we eat a primarily Indian diet. so it's quite easy for us to keep dry stuffs in bulk of the various Indian staples. She started assisting her mom with cooking at age 6, and by age 12 was the primary cook for the family as her mom was working two jobs....so I'm in good hands

In addition, that's supplemented with cases (6 each) of bulk #10 size cans of freeze dried food, both meals and individual ingredients like bulk chicken, vegetables, fruits, etc. our idea is that in addition to using the freeze dried ingredients with bulk staples to make regular Indian food, we can take the Western style freeze dried meals and add a cup of food to a cup of rice or beans. This has several advantages.

Freeze dried food really isn't meant for regular, long term consumption. It's amazing stuff but can cause gastrointestinal issues, and is also wicked high in sodium to the point it'd be dangerous to consume it for your total diet on an extended period beyond a 1 week camping trip. By using it as a topper for another base staple, you're mitigating those concerns while also significantly extending your food supply for a fraction of the cost.

Stay away from MREs. They are crazy expensive, cause a notable amount of GI issues with people, and aren't actually that great for long term storage. They're a combat ration that is purpose designed for maneuver warfare where you eat while marching or patrolling because the environment in modern conventional warfare isn't permissable to field kitchens. Unless you're in that circumstance, it's really best to ignore them.

Mountain House is the gold standard for freeze dried food. Emergency Essentials is where I get a lot of my freeze dried food, as their in house brand is also okay. Be careful about what freeze dried food you buy, as most of the stuff you see in targeted advertisements catering to panic-porn/"preppers" are absolute trash quality; low quality fake TVP meat, absurdly inflated day estimates, horrible taste due to ingredients being cooked separately instead of as a meal, and sub-par packaging/freeze-drying. If it ain't Mountain House, research it.

[Jason M]

To add to what others posted, BYU has a very succinct guide to requirements per person for long term scenarios. It’s from their dietary school so there is some thought about calories and macros involved, Here is the link:

https://brightspotcdn.byu.edu/b1/4d/...e.SEPT2019.pdf

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Not an expert but we plan for a week or two. If it's the end of the world after that, we're sunk. We probably run out of needed meds, etc.

Thus, small cans of veggies, proteins (lots of King Oscar Sardines, tuna, meat pouches), canned fruit. A few weeks of oatmeal. Dried Milk and water. Small Minute Maid OJ bottles for a couple of weeks.

There is a box of liquid survival something for two weeks in the basement. Wife says she will die first. The usual batteries, crank radio, etc. An axe - for what? The fire wood heart attack?

Not a long term planner behind this period. Certainly lots of ammo but that's a Mad Max fantasy for long term survival. Does it sound like we give it up for a long term civilization fail - yes, that's probably true. Fortress Geezer is also probably not in the cards. Being realistic about our situation. We are the folks for ice floe.

[fatdog]

My wife is the prepper, not me.

Having spent 22 years in the .mil she refuses to even allow MRE's in the house.

Her approach has been the dry stuff, various mixes and such, and to gradually test it by buying it for us to actually eat once in a while. She really likes the Auguson farms stuff. When she has found a dry thing she likes, a couple of the big cans go in a heavy gauge tin bucket style container in our internal storage closet.

Her belief is we will be able to hydrate dry stuff and cook it if we had to go completely off line. We have several fire pits with grill attachments that can serve as cooking locations when the propane runs out. Plus my camp cooking gear. Big, like 5 gallon Berkley water filter things the size of a coffee urn which also get used regularly.

Because we know what this stuff tastes like and we can digest it just fine, we would not take a totally horrible and desperate lifestyle hit from a food perspective if we had to turn to our supplies for a few months.

[Default.mp3]

Mountain House is the gold standard for freeze dried food. Emergency Essentials is where I get a lot of my freeze dried food, as their in house brand is also okay. Be careful about what freeze dried food you buy, as most of the stuff you see in targeted advertisements catering to panic-porn/"preppers" are absolute trash quality; low quality fake TVP meat, absurdly inflated day estimates, horrible taste due to ingredients being cooked separately instead of as a meal, and sub-par packaging/freeze-drying. If it ain't Mountain House, research it.

Funny enough, out of all the higher quality camping meals, I still think Mountain House is far and away the best, IME. It lasts way longer than many other brands, which often only have an advertised shelf life of 5 to 7 years, versus Mountain House lasting decades (the newer Mountain Houses I have have printed expiration dates in the 2050s).

For whatever reason, I've also found Mountain House to be the tastiest of the them all, enough that there are a couple I would totally eat in the front country if I was being lazy and didn't feel like driving somewhere to pick up food. I've tried a lot of different Backpacker's Pantry, and they were either very meh, or actually terrible. I've also tried a few AlpineAire, and they're a bit better than most Backpacker's Pantry, IMO, but still not great. Trailtopia's not too bad, but I haven't tried enough of them to give a blanket recommendation like I would with Mountain House, as I've never had a Mountain House that I hated, like I have with Backpacker's Pantry.

[BobM]

I also have an assortment of Mountain House, originally so I could provision a short notice camping trip without driving an hour to Bass Pro, etc. I have a few of the Peak freeze dried meals that are getting a lot of good reviews but I haven’t tried any yet. I also don’t know how their shelf life compares to Mountain House.