Servicemembers and their families have an organic appreciation for the importance of nonperishable food that can be stored and even transported easily. MREs are the salty staff of life. We all have our list of favorites (if you can call them that) and those for which anything you get would be a good trade. Those same MREs make great food storage options at home. Even if you don’t like MREs, at least you can buy whatever you like (“like” being a relative term), as opposed to having to make do on whatever your unit hands out when you’re on deployment;
Freeze-dried- and dehydrated food have become more popular and more widely available in recent years. You can get them on line or in brick-and-mortar stores such Costco, Thrive and Emergency Essentials. You can buy your storage foods in all sorts of quantities, from enough for one person for a few days to everything you’d need for a family of four for a few months. The menus are surprisingly large, and may include things like freeze-dried, grated cheese, ice cream, and even butter.
Some brands, including Mountain House, Wise Company, and Patriot Pantry, come in containers that stack, which makes storing them much easier. Food storage doesn’t get much easier than that.
While freeze dried or MRE foods are good food-storage options, they can be expensive and their shelf life is no more than 60 months—for MREs, it’s somewhere between 18 and 36 months (depending on the temperature); for freeze-dried foods, it’s about 36 months. Not long ago, manufacturers increased the nutritional value of MREs. But the tradeoff is shorter shelf life. Even though they’re pricey and don’t last forever, it’s a good idea to keep 50 or so of them on hand. If disaster strikes, there are going to be times when you’ll need sources of quick energy that require no fuel (or very little) to prepare. Fortunately, there are plenty of survival basics that are inexpensive and store for much longer periods of time.
Here is a list of those basic items and how much you’d need for one person to survive for a year. Keep in mind that there’s a big difference between the foods you eat every day, and what you’d need to survive. With these foods, you may still be a little hungry but at least you won’t starve.
- Rice: 100 lbs.
- Wheat: 200 lbs.
- Oats: 100 lbs.
- Pinto Beans: 60 lbs.
- Powdered milk: 25 lbs.
- Olive oil: 10 quarts
- Honey: 40 lbs.
- Sugar: 40 lbs.
- Salt: 30 lbs.
It’s also a good idea to store a year’s worth of multi-vitamins to fill in the inevitable dietary gaps.
To break up the monotony of the above menu, here are some other things you may want to store as well
- Coffee
- Teas
- Hot Chocolate
- Spices
- Dried fruits and nuts
- Canned foods (meats and veggies)
- Hard candies (to help morale)
In order to bake bread, or tortillas. or other simple things with those 200 lbs. of wheat, you’ll need to purchase and learn to use a grinder mill. While an electric one is going to be faster, consider storing a hand grinder, just in case your electricity is down.
The prospect of surviving a week—let alone a year—on nothing but the above foods is probably pretty daunting. So get a little practice cooking with those ingredients, and plan a few menus. If you need some inspiration, take a look at Cookin’ with Home Storage, by Vicki Tate.
For even more information, tips and advice on food storage, there’s an entertaining podcast called Food Storage, Part One by Effective Tactics.