Survival Food - Freeze Dried & MRE

I started this blog in January this year to write about superior survival food choices like MRE and Freeze Dried Food for disaster preparedness.

I wanted to keep a narrow focus on food storage and water storage only, something I have been able to maintain so far.

Events this year put much more emphasis on survivalist requirements for food storage. I tried to cover the different interests focusing on longer term options as well as short term 72-hour and 2 week preparedness, although it is not always easy.

The first surprise this year was the huge demand spike for survival food when oil shot up to $140 a barrel. Many people who ascribed to ‘peak oil’ theory acted on their concern and by early May there was resulting shortages of freeze dried food and lead times of 6 - 8 weeks or more till July. By August supply and lead time was back to normal as demand for survival food dropped with the price of oil.

Next up was the economic meltdown that started in September. Demand has gone up as a result but not as severe as during the May oil panic buying, and so there has been no shortages or long lead times of freeze dried food but a steady high volume since October.

I sincerely hope that 2009 brings some economic stability. I also hope that many keep buying long storing (25 years) freeze dried food in 2009 so that as many as possible are prepared if events take a turn for the worse and not wait till the last minute.

Freeze dried food and MRE became in very short supply quickly when a relatively small number of people took action and bought because of peak oil concerns last May. It is obvious it will then be impossible to get survival food once any more acute economic issues arise in the future.

There is a story on the US Army news site telling how Iron Chef Roberto Donna took 2 MREs and turned them into “five-star, restaurant-quality dishes”.

While at first this sounds too good to be true, it turns out that it is. They were allowed to use 5 ingredients and unlimited spices and herbs.

Once you read the story it is clear that the dream of just spicing up or adding some simple ingredient to enhance your MRE flavor is just a dream.

There is not much practical ideas you could use for survival food unless you give up the convenience and ready to eat benefits plus storing a whole lot more of other foods.

If they could have limited themselves to one or two ingredients requiring little preparation it would have been more useful. However basically they are really preparing a new dish with some MRE thrown in for the exercise.

Iron Chef gets creative with MREs

The ReadyStore is have a 20% to 30% off sale on their entire selection of emergency supplies.

The sale ends Dec 9th at The ReadyStore.

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