Many years ago, my dad bought me a box of freeze-dried emergency meals. This box expired in 2019, and while I had planned to get rid of it in 2020, the pandemic convinced me to hold onto it a little longer. But it’s been several years now, and it got me researching emergency food.
First of all, I want to state that buying emergency food is an exercise in economics. Let me explain.
Most emergency food will never be used. Of course, this is ideal. But the whole point of buying emergency food is to have it in the event you really need it. However, some situations are more likely than others.
I once heard about the rule of 3s, a shorthand for assessing priorities in a survival situation. These “rules” state that you can live 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without protection from exposure, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food. Obviously, these are approximations and your mileage may vary, but it’s the order of priority that counts.
Mind you, I carry quite a lot of spare food on me at all times, roughly 20 to 25 pounds of extra calories. Personally, I’d like to reduce this, but it’s strangely helpful to have some spare calories in an emergency situation.
But more important than food is water. Your body always needs it, and you can’t really store it well on your person. Plus, most freeze-dried foods have to be rehydrated, so it doesn’t do you much good having a year’s supply of emergency food if you don’t have a year’s supply of water to go with it. At a more basic level, having some jugs of purified water is one of the single most important steps you can take to survive a potential emergency.
That being said, if or when an emergency happens, there’s an order of frequency you can generally expect:
- Going 1 day without electricity
- It’s rare, but it does happen. In such an event, you need flashlights and maybe a little food to stave off hunger. Strictly speaking, though, unless you have a medical condition, you’re aren’t going to die by not eating for a day, but you probably have food on hand to survive one day anyway. Because the power is out, the food in your refrigerator will spoil first, and the food in your freezer will spoil second. But even then, the stuff in the freezer may be good for a few days if the thaw happens slowly enough and the temp stays cold enough, so you’ll probably raid the fridge first, less from a survival perspective and more from a “eat it before it goes bad” perspective.
- Going 1 week without electricity
- I seem to recall this happening in Texas a year or two ago? I don’t remember the details. But sometimes power grids get messed up for a wide variety of reasons, and when things really go bad, you get situations like this. In such an event, you will be raiding both your refrigerator and your freezer. You may also start using up foods in your pantry, such as flour and canned vegetables, maybe pasta if you’re into that. Be warned, these will likely be gone from the supermarket as people rush to buy staples. One week without electricity is very rare, but every great now and then, it does happen in specific areas. It might even be possible to stay with a relative out-of-state who lives in an area that isn’t affected by the outage.
- Going longer than 1 week without electricity
- Also extremely rare, this is probably the only time you might actually need to open the emergency food, especially as the days drag on. You might still have some flour and rice left over (and remember, I’m speaking as a single person without kids), but nutrients may be a bit sparse. This is when the greatest struggle for people will start, but it’s important to realize that most people will never experience this in the first place.
So, with that, let’s get back to emergency food.
As I started looking into freeze-dried foods, I hated almost all of the options. These freeze-dried kits are extremely predictable. There’s always some kind of beef stew, some kind of rice and chicken, some kind of pasta, and/or some kind of creamy chicken. For breakfast meals, it’s always oatmeal with cinnamon, eggs and bacon, and some kind of creamy grits or something like that. Here’s the problem: cow milk, tomato sauce, and cinnamon give me heartburn, and I don’t like bacon. These meals frickin’ piss me off, because I probably can hardly eat any of them without getting raging heartburn.
Plus, these companies are always trying to make their meals sound as gourmet as possible, which is totally unnecessary. Moreover, they show pictures of what those meals look like normally, definitely not their true rehydrated powder form. Besides, it bothers me that it’s automatically assumed people can’t live without these fancy meals. Honestly, the more basic the meal, ingredient wise, the less likely I am to get heartburn from it and the healthier it is. Have you seen the wild ingredients they put in some of those meals? Besides, I hate to say, but lasagna just isn’t very nutritious – it’s just pasta, cheese, and tomato sauce. It tastes good, yeah, but it’s not exactly doing you many favors.
Now, the beauty of these prepackaged foods is that they often have a 25 year shelf life, they come in a sealed plastic box, and they are one-and-done. You buy the box and it’s there for you. It’s also true that I’d rather get heartburn from food than die of starvation, so, yeah, pick your poison, Risky.
But I realized that I didn’t have to settle with pre-packaged emergency foods, either.
When the pandemic started, I was worried about one key ingredient: fiber. If you don’t get enough fiber, your poops will be quite messy. Which, incidentally, affects how much toilet paper you need, but also how well your intestines can process food. In recent years, my goal has been to increase my fiber consumption, due to family history of disease, but during the time before the pandemic, my highest source of fiber was bananas. When the pandemic started, guess what was largely lacking from super markets? Bananas. That’s when I made a particularly desperate purchase of frozen mixed vegetables, which went on to rot in the freezer for a year, because…gross. Now, everything worked out fine, and bananas did slowly return to super markets (you just had to go at the right time), but it taught me a valuable lesson:
When the shit hits the fan, produce goes fast, and produce has many of the nutrients your body needs (as well as fiber). Plus, produce also goes bad very fast, relative to staples like rice and flour, so even if you hoarded those foods, they might not last long enough for you to get the nutrients from them. Dry white rice lasts a long time, so you can easily get calories from it, but it isn’t high in nutrients. In true emergency situations, nutrients become scarce. Stockpiling lasagna doesn’t do you much good: you need more nutrients.
That’s when it occurred to me that freeze-dried fruits and vegetables are pretty common, so I bought a container of these, rather than a container of pre-made freeze-dried meals. Because if the 20+ pounds of rice and the bags of flour I regularly keep on hand can get me calories, I can easily mix this with freeze-dried fruits and vegetables to make sure I have more nutrients.
(I should note, though, that the freeze-dried banana chips that came in the container I bought apparently had to add banana flavoring back in. Gosh dangit, these companies…but there was no better option, really)
I haven’t bought it yet but it also occurred to me that you can buy freeze-dried chicken and freeze-dried beef separately, and you can mix and match these with other foods to make meals. No, it’s not the same as chicken alfredo or beef stroganoff, but I’m not a picky eater in that sense (and again, alfredo sauce is probably going to give me heartburn because it’s milk based).
As far as I can tell, goat milk does not give me heartburn, so I bought a few cans of dehydrated goat milk. They don’t last 25 years, maybe 3 years tops, but I can always use them normally, too. You can buy fully dehydrated goat milk. It’s a bit pricey but I still plan to buy at least once can for the emergency supplies. Besides, you probably should review your emergency food at least once a year.
The disadvantage to mixing and matching like this, though, is that it’s not one-and-done the way some of those tubs of freeze-dried meals are. I value that kind of simplicity, I really do, but I just don’t think it works with the food I prefer/need to eat.
You could potentially get a dehydrator and some of those air-tight seal bags and make your own, I’m sure. But that’s a lot of effort, money, and equipment. It might make sense if you backpack a lot, though.
So yeah, I dunno. I have a number of flashlights, a heat candle, lots of water, a water filter, basic knowledge of bread-making, lots of rice, freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, and a few scattered backpacking meals that might be nice mid-emergency. For the vast majority of emergencies that might visit suburban America, I think I’m pretty well set. I still need to order the chicken, though. There’s always the possibility of things being far worse, but you have to weigh the chance of that happening with the cost of building a bunker in the woods. Take the economical route and have some basic supplies on hand, but you probably don’t need to go crazy.
If you have a house and a green thumb, you can do what my roommate did and grow a garden, which is beneficial even without an emergency. It’s important to note that it’s only productive during certain times of the year, but you can always learn about preservation methods to extend the impact. But gardens are also subject to economic pressure, where growing your own potatoes, for example, isn’t tremendously advantageous over buying them from the store, but growing otherwise more expensive produce might be. You could just live off-grid, and some people do and love it, but for most of us, a few weeks of emergency water and food will be good enough.
This is also a really big subject, but I think I’ve made the key points I wanted to write about.