The topic on vegan survival made me think about my own personal diet more. I have a fairly restricted diet for medical reasons. Basically my doctor told me I could never eat these foods again.

Basically the list of what I can not ever consume is as follows: Any kind of nuts, berries, beans(I'm actually glad I never have to eat tofu again ), chocolate, coffee, tea, or milk products(this includes cheese, sour cream, yogurt and what not). Then there's a whole list of things I can only eat occasionally. I won't bore you with that. My diet also restricts what I can drink. Simply put, the only things I can drink are ginger-ale, 7up type drinks, and water. The drinks aren't too much of a problem for me, since I actually enjoy drinking water, and keep a few gallons on hand all the time. But the food restrictions have been maddening at times, especially when my room mate brought back chocolate covered macadamia nuts from Hawaii, they were the size of golf balls! But I digress.

My diet has placed special restrictions on what I can store as food, and also on the importance of storing food. I need to store food, because in an emergency I can't eat those raspberries growing right outside my door. This is a problem for me, since food storage is something I'm lacking in. I'm in a small apartment with roommates, and my sored food consists of a few cans, maybe enough to get me through two days.

I know to store the foods I generally eat, but a lot of them don't have a very good shelf life. I'm looking for some specific advice for someone in my situation.

Apartment life just does not allow us to have a pantry stocked with food for a year. My emergency stash is food that you would find stored in a life boat. Not something I want to eat, but it lasts and takes up a cubic foot of space. I have more food stored too, but it comes and goes quickly.

Just for completeness, this is the stuff or similar to the stuff deep in the back of the closet: http://www.quakekare.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=22. I wish we had more room amd storage capability, but for now, we don't. So, I've got enough for us to ration them out over a month. Hopefully, it will never some to that.

How restricted are your grains?

I would focus on what you can eat that is easily storable for a long while. Dehydrated veggies, potatoes and grains you can tolerate.
http://www.harmonyhousefoods.com/dehydrated.html
http://survivalacres.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?template=menu&search=yes&keywords=meat

I know people with severe GI and food allergy issues who live on restricted diets. Believe it or not there may be foods even your doctor might not be aware of that are healthy and safe alternatives. There's also the issue mentioned above of how you prepare certain foods, dehydrating for example. I'd recommend researching raw food diets.


Here's some alternate foods/ingredients off the top of my head:

Carob (instead of chocolate)
Goat milk/cheese/yogurt
Rice cheese
Teeccino (instead of coffee)
Young Coconut juice (coconut water)
Agave nectar (an alternative to sugar and honey)
Dried Seaweed
Seeds (sesame, etc)
PeaButter (no nut alternative to peanut butter)


There's tons more stuff but thats all that comes to mind. Good luck.

You can try some of the dehydrated fruits (pineapples, peaches, raisins, apples, figs). Check out your local sporting/camping stores for backpacking foods. Usually pasta based, but they have side dishes, desserts, breakfasts too. Usually these are vacuum packed, and need water to reconstitute.

As for your drinks, can you have stuff like Kool-aid or lemonade powders, to vary the taste?

Oh wow, thanks for all the advice. I've never even heard of rice cheese or pea butter.

Responding down the line:

Ironraven: Whole grain foods are one of those limited items. I can eat them, but I shouldn't overdo them. The only real exception to this is rye bread and corn products, which I can have as much of as I want. I can also eat rice, and have heard of rice flour, but haven't experimented with it yet.

Billym: Thanks for the links.

Led: I really haven't considered alternatives to these foods before, I've pretty much just cut anything from my diet which had these foods. I'm going to have to look into these food alternatives and raw food diets. Thanks for that list. It gives me a big starting point to look into.

Mdinana: I love dehydrated fruit, especially pineapple and apple. I actually own a dehydrator, but it's at my parents house about 8 hours away. I've had a bunch of dehydrated fruit, and want to try dehydrating other foods for storage, like mushrooms or veggies. I've had trouble with ready made meals, because they usually contain something I'm not supposed to have. As for drinks, kool aid or iced tea mixes are not okay, but lemonade is. It's one of the few things besides water I can drink. Although I've gotten pretty used to drinking nothing but water, a little variety is always good.

My plan as of now: I'm going to pick up some pasta, rice, and a few more canned things for the time being. Maybe a jug of lemonade mix as well. I want to look more into these alternative foods(maybe I can actually eat brownies again )as well as look into getting some dehydrated foods I can eat. Once again, thanks for all the advice.

What can you eat?

Sue

I asked my doctor that, and she said "Well, waters good" .

Really though, I can eat almost anything, just need to watch a couple dozen food groups and avoid completely a few more. I still go out for burgers or tacos, I just cut out the cheese and sour cream. Really, some of the things aren't too bad, since they were only occasional foods anyways. For example, I've learned to love oatmeal raisin cookies for a treat instead of chocolate chip.

Visiting my parents in the summer kind of sucks, since they live smack dab in the middle of three different berry farms. If you've only had those berries they stock on shelves, not fresh picked, you don't know what kind of torture this is.

The hardest thing for me to quit was cheese, mostly on pizza. I had some real will power problems at first. I've quit cold turkey now. Still sucks when someone wants to go out or order in pizza, and I'm the only one eating a sandwich.

The LDS Preparedness Manual is here:
http://www.abysmal.com/LDS/Preparedness/Preparedness.pdf
You can skip down to about page 20 and look for storage tips for all sorts of food.

Check here for storage of vegetarian food:
http://www.vegparadise.com/survival.html
(Just ignore that ad for mouthwatering Nut Gourmet, nut recipes for all occasions.)

I'm in a similar situation concerning storage at home - I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with no outside storage, and my worst case scenario is my house is flattened by an earthquake, with nothing in it being reachable. Among the suggestions is off-site storage in self-storage lockers, keeping everything in a car parked on the street (out of site, of course), and the like. I'd also suggest having friends within walking distance who can hold food for your, since you can't store enough on your own property.

It's a tough situation, and I don't know any really good answers. It's the same for medicine, by the way. My wife and I are on daily doses of various stuff, and if we have a big earthquake, I don't think pharmacies will be open, and I have some expectation they'll be looted.