> AFLM, I always love when you UK'ers post your meals. Geez, for being similar, we sure eat different.

More different than you realise. From it's Eastern Empire the brits inherited a taste for spicy food. And 'spicy' here is a lot different to the USA. Don't ask for spicy food or anyone to bring you some. You'll end up throwing it away as uneatable.

Shouldn't all spare food in a vehicle be eatable without having to cook it?
qjs

Certainly there should be some meals that do not require cooking/heating, but I include a alcohol stove and small cook kit so that i can heat up items, like the inevitable nice cup of tea,at a minimum. Just as important for morale as for physiology.

The Hormel Completes all contain 1100mg of sodium. At the very least this means you will need more drinking water, and those with high blood pressure issues will have even higher blood pressures (and they will already be higher due to the stress).

The meals also contain only 200-300 calories so you may need to eat quite a few of them--like 8 to 10 for a 2000 cal/day diet. If one consumed 10/day that would be a total of 11,000mg of sodium per day.

I tried one of the Hormel Chicken & Rice over this past weekend.

1. Definitely not enough to be filling by itself.
2. The taste is VERY salty.
3. More syrupy than I would have expected for chicken & rice.

Of the ones I found at Walmart, chicken & rice has similar salt to the other Hormel Completes except for the Beef Stew which has even more.

I'm adding dog food for the pups in the pack as well. and TP.

Haven't had any issues, I eat it and it's just fine. Worst-case scenario - the shelf life on the cans is like 3 years, you can always eat them and rotate through them after a year or so. Same for bottles of water, they get hot but it doesn't affect them enough to bother me at all.

One thing to remember about shelf life and the dates given the products is that after the given date, the food may begin to taste odd or funny - not at its peak or most appetizing. Usually it can be consumed without incident well after the shelf life date. I have eaten things ten years beyond their date without incident and will do so again if circumstances arise.

Just beware of containers that are bulged or leaking. That is a very different kettle of fish.....

I was recently in Wal-Mart and the little woman made me push the cart so I wouldn't wander off to sporting goods or pharmacy where I look for ration bars. While there I noticed a lot of foods tat would seem good for packs. Soft jars of peanut butter, retort packs of rice in multiple flavors, retort beans, and even retort packets of tuna salad. I filled up the baby seat with things to upgrade my bag, including snacks.

I was looking at the choices in Walmart. As expected, many shelf stable foods are VERY salty with the exception of the plain rice.

Is there a tabulation of prepared foods in which the amount of salt is NOT listed in terms of %RDA which I don't find a useful measure but rather mg NaCl / 2000 kcal ?

The amount of salt 30-50% RDA is tremendously high for a mere 200-300 kcal serving. While the taste of what I tried was OK, I found it overwhelmingly salty to taste.

If the container had 2000 kcal, the same 30-50% RDA sodium would be not a big deal.

Given that the bulk of calories can be carbohydrate based, pasta or rice, even 100% RDA sodium in 1000 kcal serving wouldn't be a big deal.

I don't think that relationship is usually listed explicitly, but you ought to be able to calculate it readily. I grabbed a yogurt which lists 80 mg of NaCl and 90 calories, which would be 1,777.7777777778 mg for 2000 calories (if you really like Harvest Peach yogurt). You would consume more than 22 containers to get that amount....

Please feel free to check my calculations. Math is not my strong suit .