Preparedness 101: Building an Emergency Food Supply
Freeze-dried meals can last 30 years and are a set-it-and-forget-it emergency food item.
Having an emergency food supply is one of the most straightforward steps to enhancing resilience at home. FEMA recommends having three days of food on hand, but we recommend at least a month. There are many different methods for stockpiling food based on your time and budget. The method below is relatively easy and works for us.
When grocery shopping, it’s always a good idea to get extra meat for your freezer and capitalize on kitchen staple sales.
Many people will stock up on canned foods, but canned foods pose a problem for us. Their shelf life ranges from 2 to 5 years, and we aren't frequent consumers of canned foods, so they risk going to waste. That's why we've anchored our non-perishable stash with Mountain House freeze-dried meals and healthy fats. Though we don't eat these meals regularly because it would not be healthy to do so, their 30-year-plus lifespan makes them an attractive choice.
Conversely, fats like tallow, coconut, and olive oil are mainstays in our kitchen. They have a shelf life of 1-3 years (tallow lasts even longer if frozen) and are versatile. Since we regularly use these healthy fats for cooking, we can buy them in bulk, knowing we will rotate through them before they go bad.
We buy tallow in bulk. It’s a healthy choice for cooking that we use regularly and it is packed with calories to plus up meals in an emergency.
Take note: The combination of freeze-dried meals and extra fat forms the majority of our emergency food stash. A single tablespoon of these fats provides 120-130 calories. Integrating 1-3 tablespoons into a freeze-dried pouch helps up the calories and extends the time our supply lasts.
While an average individual requires at least 1,200 calories daily for survival, this figure can fluctuate based on numerous aspects. My personal planning revolves around a 2,500-calorie daily intake per person per day to estimate the duration our food stash would last.
Pictured above is a Mountain House bucket tailored to provide 1,125 daily calories for two people over three days. Though this might suffice short-term, I'd argue it's suboptimal. By simply adding a few dollops of oil or tallow to each serving, we're inching closer to that 2,500-calorie benchmark.
Think of our freeze-dried food lasting 30 or 35 years as an insurance policy. It's an investment we hope not to use, but knowing it's there if needed is comforting. For items with a shorter lifespan, we prioritize foods we routinely cook with. This way, we avoid unnecessary expenses and don't sacrifice our health just to use up that can of Spam before it spoils.
You don’t want to be worrying about groceries in the wake of a cyber attack or a deadly pandemic. Your chances of survival will be much greater if you can stay put and avoid the chaos.
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