72 Hour Kit Series Week 1: Food for Your Emergency Kit

Welcome back to the 72 Hour Kit Series!  If you haven’t already caught the introduction, read it now so you’ll know what’s going on.  I’ll wait right here until you get back.  Remember that you are building a kit for YOU and YOUR family, so your kit will probably look different than mine.  In this segment, we’re covering food for your emergency kit.

There are many different options for stocking your kit with food, from crackers and jerky to freeze dried backpacking meals.  Each has it’s pros and cons.  I cover these options extensively in the first chapter of my book, Food Storage for Self-Sufficiency and Survival, so if you want to get more in-depth than we will here, get the book!

If your kit is supposed to sustain you for 72 hours, ideally you’ll have a full three days of food in it.  Yes, you can live longer than three days without food, but I like to eat.  If it looks like help may not arrive soon, you can ration those three days of meals and probably get by a little longer.  Consider what you’ll eat in the morning, at mid day, and in the evening.  Don’t forget snacks–you’ll likely be expending more energy than usual in the aftermath of an emergency so you want high calorie foods.

You also want food that you will want to eat, so if you’re putting specialty foods like MRE’s or backpacking meals in your kits, I would advise you to try some of them out and find the ones you like before buying a bunch to stock all the kits in the house and then finding out that you don’t like them or the kids won’t eat them!

Emergency kit food should be easy to carry, easy to prepare, and provide the calories you will need.

Emergency Kit food options

1.  Food from the grocery store.  Choose sturdy foods that can withstand being bounced around in your kit.  Canned goods, oatmeal packets, granola bars, jerky, dried fruits and nuts are all good options.  Store foods are familiar and readily available.  You probably already know what you like and can find it at your local grocery store.  These foods are not usually packaged for long term storage, so you’ll want to be diligent about rotating them regularly.  Choose cans with pop top lids or add one of these little can openers to your kit so you’ll be able to get your food out easily!

2.  MRE’s.  Meals Ready to Eat were developed for the military, but are now available to the public.  The quintessential “prepper” food, they require no cooking and are high in calories.  MRE’s are the item I would highly recommend tasting before stocking up on.  I’ll just say I’m not a fan of the flavor, but I haven’t tried every meal variety.  Some people like them, and I’m told the new ones are better than the older ones.  The last one we opened my husband ate after I tasted it and didn’t want it, then he said he’d have that again.  Some include a flameless heater that activates with a small amount of water (does not need to be potable), which is great for warming the meal up without needing additional cooking supplies.

3.  Dehydrated or freeze dried meals.  Available from most food storage retailers and often marketed as backpacking meals, these meals are pre-mixed from dry ingredients and all you need to do is cook them.  Usually a 5-7 year shelf life on these, so they are a great option if you want to build your kit and forget about it for a while.  Some, like Mountain House, you just need to add boiling water and wait.  Others need to be boiled together with the water for 10-30 minutes depending on the meal.  These meals are light weight, but you’ll need extra water and a way to cook it.  We’ll talk about cooking options in week 4.

You can also make your own just-add-water meals using freeze dried ingredients!  For recipe ideas, check out The Meals in a Jar Handbook.

4.  Emergency food rations.  Super compact, these are a great option to save space, but not so good if you want any kind of variety in your emergency food supply.  They range from tasting like cardboard to a heavy-on-the-shortening sugar cookie, so find one you like before stocking up on them.  These are inexpensive enough to stock a lot of kits for comparably little money, but aren’t going to give you a lot of flavor variety.

5.  Snacks.  We’ll talk more about comfort items in week 13, but adding some hard candy or other long shelf life snacks is a great way to make the situation a little less miserable, especially if you have children you are packing for.  Energy bars like PowerBar or Cliff Bars are also a great addition to your kit–taking up little space and providing lots of calories.

Remember to keep in mind any food sensitivities or allergies you or your family members might have when you’re packing food in your kits!

In my personal kit, I have a variety of these foods.  I like the Mountain House Turkey Tetrazzini, Chicken a la King, and Beef Stroganoff, so I have those.  I also have the emergency food rations for a breakfast food, as well as a couple MREs and some energy bars for eating on the go.  I tend to shy away from short shelf life foods as I’m not the best at rotating the kits!  Except for M&M’s.  Those do need rotated out frequently, but they are the most durable chocolate source I’ve found.

Emergency food for babies and children

If you have a baby in the family, stock your kit with infant formula (even if you are nursing), squeeze pouch baby foods, or make some dehydrated baby foods.  You can also make instant baby food by blending freeze dried foods into a powder.  Mix with water and you have baby food!  Be sure you have the bottles, bowls, and spoons packed as well to make it easy to feed that baby.

Children, for the most part, can eat anything adults can.  But you don’t want them to be miserable, so pack some foods you know they’ll like.  For the little ones, check out these toddler approved food storage foods for some ideas.

And yes, I have some visuals for you in a new video:

What food do you have in your emergency kit?  Let me know in the comments!

Keep preparing! Angela