The old saying that an army marches on its stomach is just as true for preppers and survivalists as it is for armies. Well-fed people are happy people.
I’ve warned you in previous posts not to let fear compel you into panic buying. So let’s talk about the temptation to plop down a bunch of money to buy a metric buttload of freeze-dried survival food.
Well, first of all, good luck finding some right now – since the COVID-19 pandemic woke Americans up to how fragile the chain of supply is, survival food companies are struggling to keep up with the demand; many items are out of stock, and we’re talking weeks and months of shipping delays.
But if you are thinking about trying to snatch up some buckets of freeze-dried peace of mind, I want to arm you with some caveats.
Let the Eater Beware
Surviving whatever potential disaster keeps you up at night doesn’t just mean stockpiling food. It has to be good food that doesn’t make everyone’s life miserable. Quantity and quality often are mistakenly seen as opposing factors, meaning you can stockpile either a small amount of good food or a year’s worth of tasteless garbage.
That’s hogwash. A good meal plan has both quality and quantity. A hot, home-cooked meal is one of the best ways at your disposal to make a stressful situation somewhat bearable. Food has to sustain morale as well as life. And the best way to do that, by far, is to serve food that you and your family are used to eating.
I’m not discouraging you from purchasing freeze-dried food, especially if it’s the individual ingredients, like fruits, vegetables and meats, that you would use to cook the dishes your family is accustomed to. But my advice is to go easy on buying a whole lot of ready-made entrees.
A disaster is not the time to introduce yourself and your family to an entirely new type of food. You’re going to have enough problems without turning your home or survival retreat into the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles.
While the decades-long shelf life of freeze-dried foods is very appealing to preppers, you likely will find that subsisting on them will be tedium ad nauseam, perhaps quite literally for the “nauseam” part. The excitement of breaking it out will last for a few days, and then you and your family will get very tired of it very fast.
I have a small amount of survival food on hand to augment my regular food stores, and throwing an MRE or a freeze-dried meal in a pouch into your bug-out bag is a great and lightweight way to carry a square meal on your back. But again, your focus for long-term food supply should be what your family eats on a daily basis.
In future posts, I’ll dish on how you can store what you normally eat, and how to rotate it through a “first-in, first-out” system so it gets eaten and replaced during normal times.
If you’re looking for my take on what I think of stocking up on MREs, I’ll take those down in my next post.