Just wondered what people thought would be the best cereal for keeping handy in hard times?

Total cereal for it's nutrititve content, though not sure the shelf life will hold up.

Grape Nuts never seem to go stale, long as they are kept dry.

Raisin bran can get tough to chew after a couple years I noticed.

Cheerios turn into Styrofoam after a year or so, depending on the humidity level.

Hmmm...I don't eat cereal much, but I suppose Grape Nuts would be a pretty good choice. If you can stomach the stuff oatmeal would probably also be good. Personally I can't stand oatmeal as cereal but it's versatile (great for bread, cookies, filler for meatloaf, etc).

Again, not a big cereal guy but Cream of Wheat is one I like. It would probably keep pretty well if you keep it dry.

That's easy - oatmeal! Extremely nutritious and it never tastes bad, because it never tastes at all. Also extraordinarily cheap if one buys rolled oats in quantity rather than those tiny little packets adulterated with sugar and spice.

I am about to sit down to my typical breakfast of oatmeal, milk, raisins, and various nuts - two minutes in the microwave and it is quite tasty. At any rate,probably a lot better than the Scottish warrior's meal, which was reputed to be a handful of oats dipped in a passing creek - no microwave back in those days!

Cap'n Crunch never seems to go bad and in a SHTF scenario its calories would be crucial....not to mention the morale boost. Just be sure you have toothbrushes, too.
-Blast

Oatmeal w/ blueberries & walnuts -- that's it, no additional sugar or milk. I use the Irish Steel Cut type oatmeal and avoid instant.

I go with Grits and Oatmeal, personally. I can add many different things to either to enhance or give them flavor(s).

I use tinned Hamlyns Pin Head Oatmeal for breakfast Cereal as well as for other recipes such as my home made Wall nut and Cherry Energy/Protein Bars.

http://www.hamlynsoats.co.uk/shop/

I also like Scotts Porridge Old Fashioned oats.

http://www.scottsporage.co.uk/home.php

Both are local producers

I also like the 'Simply Sumptuous Special Muesli Luxury Fruit' 750 grams from the local discount supermarket Lidls. Storage life is improved by vacuum sealing and then put in a sealed mylar bag (2 bags at a time)

I think the best is the one you regularly eat. Keep some in stock and rotate it so it doesn't go bad.

Personally, I'm a fan of granola and muesli. Both are good by themselves, both are good with milk or yogurt.

My first thought was oatmeal too. I'm talking rolled oats - the flat stuff. It can pack VERY dense, which helps with storage. It can be eaten cold or hot, wet or dry (though its tough to whistle with a mouth full of dry oats).

You can buy it in 40 lb bags at feed stores.

If you are going the Cap'n Crunch route, make sure to get the one with Crunch Berries since fruit is a good part of a balanced breakfast. :-)

Grits - unless they are jonny cakes, blech.

Altho, here is a recipe a buddy from the south once gave me -

Take standard serving of grits, throw in 2 horse apples - cook as normal, toss grits, eat horse apples, they taste better. He hated grits too.

On a saner note - whatever cereal you like. Just store it so that air can't get to it. Granola is good. Add some nuts/raisins/dried cranberries/whathaveyou and there ya go. Works even with powdered milk.

It would seem anything with oil in it would be less desirable, as the oil will go rancid.

Grape nuts aren't too bad served hot.

Perhaps one thing I like so much about Grape nuts is they take longer to eat per unit weight than other cereals. All that chewing makes my jaw feel like I am eating a bigger meal. That seems to help satisfy the appetite a bit more.

For short term storage, granola is pretty good stuff. It can have the same appetite satisfying effect as Grape Nuts.

Cap'n Crunch tears up my mouth too much. Tastes great, but then all I taste is blood after.

So the English waiter told the Scot:
- We don't serve oatmeal here sir, except to horses.
To what the Scot replied:
- That's why England has such good horses and Scotland has such good men...

Quinoa>bulgur>oatmeal>rice

Unfortunately, don't care for quinoa which reconstitutes with wormy things in it. I like bulgur for esthetics, cooking ease,a nd flexibility in extending/replacing ground meat.

I don't like quinoa, either. As a chef I guess I'm supposed to fawn over it but I don't care for it at all.

I've always taken oatmeal camping, canoeing, just about any overnight or longer outdoor activity. As stated earlier, it's good hot or cold, can add just about anything to it, and for sweetness if needed I add honey, mostly for taste since the calorie diff between sugar and honey isn't all that great. Plus i use the honey to sweeten my tea, and it never goes bad. I've had oatmeal I've unpacked a couple years later and it's no different than the stuff I got ate last week.

It's worth mentioning that, at least purchased in quantity, oatmeal is really cheap. I figure my morning serving (1/2 cup dry) costs me about 5 cents. The nuts and fruit I add surely cost me more than that, but my breakfast total is well under a buck. Cheap, nutritious, can be palatable with modest additions, stores well - oatmeal is a pretty decent product.

I've always been a barley fan. I guess that's another reason why I like Grape Nuts so much.

i'll put my vote in for Red River cereal.hard to find outside of Canada but great stuff best when mixed with oatmeal,real oatmeal.
Grape Nuts served hot with brown sugar is a favorite on canoe trips.

I read about a study once where a bunch of researchers decided to test which breakfast cereals would allow laboratory animals to survive and thrive (as in maintain or put on weight). Out of all the cereals tested, Cheerios was the only one.

I'm thinking back now to a tour that we took of the Kelloggs Plant in Battle Creek, Michigan. One of the main features of the tour was following the entire process of producing Kellogg's Corn Flakes from start to finish. They were very proud of the fact that each flake was actually a kernel of real corn--that they first cooked the hail out of in big barrel-shaped pressure cookers, then squashed the hail out of so they'd be flat, and then dried the hail out of so they'd be crunchy, which then left the product so devoid of any nutritional value that they had to spray vitamins on the flakes through a big duct over the conveyer belt that dropped the corn flakes into the cardboard cereal boxes. Yum.

Oatmeal, Grape Nuts, and Granola.
Oatmeal is the easiest on the stomach and can be eaten with milk or cooked with oil.
Granola has the highest fat and protien content, will stick to your ribs the best, and can be browsed on as a snack. But, it is the hardest on your stomach.
Grapenuts is halfway between the two being more satisfying then oatmeal, but easier on your systen then granola. Prepare and serve it like oatmeal.

Add honey to your kit for more quick energy, and it has an indefinite shelf life.

Oatmeal is a great staple, but served as a hot cereal, I get tired of it quick. A lot of granolas seem to go rancid once they get exposed to air, must be the nut oils and such. I have yet to eat a stale bowl of Grape Nuts. I can eat it more often than oatmeal.

Of course, one of my best recipes is for baked oatmeal. It is probably the best way to eat oatmeal. Here's the recipe:

Big Ben’s Baked Oatmeal

Usually when you tell most folks oatmeal is the main course for breakfast, especially up at camp, they tend to get a bit disappointed. However, this oatmeal recipe is not a porridge. It is a rich, hearty quickbread that will remind them of an oatmeal cookie, only better.

½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar or molasses or sorgum syrup
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1 cup milk
3 cups quick cooking oats
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 lb raisins or other unsweetened fruit
1 cup chopped walnuts or almonds
1/2 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine first five ingredients. Add next three ingredients and mix well. Mix in fruit and nuts. Pour into ungreased pan. Sprinkle brown sugar over top, and any desired spices. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, when toothpick inserted in middle comes out dry.

Wheat berries (hard red winter wheat). It stores for a couple of thousand years, give or take, and tastes great with honey.

For a variety, you can have it with that Spam you have stored away (without the honey).

Could put those wheat berries through the mill once and make zoom cereal.

Not sure if the Spam will last as long as the wheat would. But after a hundred years, I don't suppose it would matter much to any of us here.

Sure, and if you have a mill, you will have wheat for your breads, too.

It also works whole in soups and stews.

I do so miss living in eastern Washington. Ready access to all the wheat, barley, lentils, peas and garbanzos I could want for pennies on the pound. Just had to pull up to the silo at harvest time and let em dump it right into the back of the pickup. Take it home, transfer it to pails and bags, and in one season you would have staples for a decade.

A lot of this thread has been about oatmeal, but we have overlooked a related product - acorns and acorn mush. Acorns were the staple for prehistoric Californians, who ate it morning, noon, and night. There are a lot of ornamental acorns in my neighborhood and every year the acorns drop, remaining unharvested.

The problem is, we have lost the technology for leaching the tannins out (well,maybe Blast knows), and that is extremely necessary. When you do that, I understand you have something that tastes like - oatmeal!

But it is dirt cheap. After all, acorns do grow on trees.....

You mean, the ancient Californians knew how to do it, but we don't, and can't even figure it out?

I didn't phrase that very well....Actually, it apparently is pretty straightforward. Women shell the acorns, pound the meat into a mush, and soak and rinse,often more than once, to leach out the tannic acid. It takes a lot of time and attention.

Men can't do this. They have to hunt deer and fish for the evening meal.....

and make beer, with all the other cereal stuff.