Survival Food – Freeze Dried & MRE

Although MRE has a long shelf life of 7-8 years if stored in a cool place, there is a desire by some to make it last longer.

The belief by some is that if you freeze MRE, it will be edible longer and therefore not needed to be replaced as often. That is if you are fortunate not to have a disaster where you will need it in the course of 7-8 years.

There are several reasons you should not to do this.

Over a long period of time (years) you are likely to have power outages. While they may not last long enough to ruin your regular frozen food, each time the MRE is partially thawed and re-frozen the more likely the packaging will delaminate and contaminate the food.

Also meat products, as we all know, should not be thawed and re-frozen. But you won’t be able to tell if there was any re-freezing until you open the MRE when you need it. And since the food will be stored over long periods it is more likely a thaw will go unnoticed.

What a time to find out your food is inedible.

Finally, whenever you freeze food a lot it’s nutritional value is lost, so it is better not to freeze food especially food that stores at room temperature a very long time.

There is no benefit at all to freezing freeze dried food on the other hand, as it lasts longer and freezing it would only degrade it’s quality.

Today there was some buzz on a “Costco Emergency Food Kit” that has 275 servings on Reddit.com .

The title implied that “now” they just started selling this kit but it has been around for at least a year. It was $100 a year ago and Costco is selling it for $80 now.

The questions I have is

What is it?

How many days food does it represent?

It says it will store for 20 years and that water needs to be added. It sounds like it is freeze dried food but why don’t they say that? There is very little information on Costco’s website. Looking at the label I found the brand’s website here;

Food for Health

On this website it still does not indicate what it is. However it does tell you the nutritional information including salt content which is very high in one meal (Cacciatore), 25% of the RDA for each “serving” (one cup after water is added). One other piece of information is that cooking instructions which appear to indicate one cup of water per serving needs to be boiled and then content added when it is simmered for 20 minutes.

This does not sound like freeze dried food, but then what is it?

I found these comments on post of the blog “1913Intel” from July 11th 2007;

…tried the Ala King and Western Stew mixes. We really hated the Ala King mix, but we only hated the Western Stew mix. They’re too salty, and generally don’t taste that good. Although the Western Stew was a lot better than the Ala King. I wouldn’t want to live on this stuff for very long.

We didn’t try out the other mixes because we’re returning the remaining bucket to Costco.

There were other comments in forums indicating people thought it was better than ramen noodles, and cheap, a good deal if you are a student on a budget and love salt.

There is no calorie information to indicate how many servings you need per day on the Costco site, but there is information on the nutrition information labels shown Food for Health website. The  Cacciatore, Ala King, stew and pancake servings have 200 to 220 calories each. The soup, noodles, and chowder servings have 98 to 125 calories per serving. The whey milk has 80 calories per serving.

A healthy adult’s typical calorie intake is 2000 to 2500 calories per day. You can get away with less if you are less active but if you have too low calorie intake for an extended period of time and you may suffer health issues as a result.

So based on the calorie information above a typical day’s diet would be;

Pancakes X 2 – 420 calories

Milk 2 glasses – 160 calories

Cacciatore Lunch X 3 – 618 calories

Ala King Dinner X 4 – 880 calories

This works out to 11 servings a day for a total of 2078 calories per day.

The 275 serving emergency food kit will support an individual adult for about 25 days, which is a little more than 3 weeks.

So for $80 you can eat salty food for 3 weeks. You need to boil water to prepare each meal and wait 20 minutes for it to be ready.

What would happen if in a disaster, you are unable to boil water all the time, how would you prepare it?