Category Archives: Food

Food Buckets

Prepper Resolution #3: Cook With Your Preps

Some folks initially getting into prepping are so eager to build their food storage quickly, they’re tempted to go out and buy a bunch of expensive freeze dried food, or a pallet full of beans and rice, sock it away, and forget about it.  That’s fine, and it’s certainly better than having no food storage put away at all.  However, there are some downsides.

  • Expense – while beans and rice are cheap, if you go the freeze dried route, you are paying a hefty price for the convenience compared to similar food that can be stored in a different more cost effective manner.  Buying a huge amount right away also potentially means you’ll be missing out on sales you could take advantage of to stock up at much increased savings.
  • Nutrition – much of the commercially available food is not the best quality from a content point of view.  It often times is potentially GMO in origin, and could have lots of extra ingredients like salt and preservatives.  Storing lots of rice means you’ll have plenty of carbohydrates, but you’ll also want protein and fats to have a balanced diet.
  • Taste – if you never eat the food you have socked away, you may be storing things that you don’t even want to eat.  In a SHTF scenario, sure, having any food is better than having nothing.  But in an already stressful situation, you’ll have extra comfort knowing you have food to fall back on that you actually enjoy eating.
  • Rotation – if you’re not eating out of your food storage, that means either you’re not rotating it or you are throwing things out.  Granted, if you go the freeze dried route, spoilage isn’t a big concern until 20+ years down the road.  However just because something is technically still edible does not mean its nutrition is optimal.

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3 Days of Food… 5 Feet of Snow

NBC News had a really interesting segment last night about the recent blizzard in & around Buffalo that quickly dumped over five feet of snow in some locations.  The whole segment is interesting, but I think particularly interesting is the part that starts at about 2:55 into the clip – the couple with the baby…  Check the video out here.

They planned for 3-4 days at most, and now they’re out of food…   So, they knew the storm was coming, apparently had less than four days of food on hand, went out beforehand and got up to 3-4 days worth, and now since it’s worse than that, they’re in trouble. With a baby!

If this isn’t a perfect example for why it’s important to have some food on hand, I don’t know what is.  This isn’t NatGeo being prepared paranoia – here’s a real life story. Put another way, isn’t some part of your capital reserves safer kept in your pantry in physical form rather than in a bank in digital form, where it does you no good if you can’t get to the bank/store or if the power is out? “Food” for thought.