Curious as to what long term food strategies folks here are taking and what choices they have made WRT specific Brands?

How long do you prep for?

Grocery store canned foods? What brands?
Grocery store self stable foods? what brands?
Bulk dry/dehydrated/freeze dried foods? What Brands?
MREs? What brands?
Water?

ETC??????????


For us, we live in a major metro area. We keep about 2 weeks worth of various canned and dry foods that we use regularly and replace as used from the store. Nothing specific to "survival"

We have 3 weeks worth of boxed military MREs stored in the home climate controlled, changed out every 7 years

We have about 3 weeks worth of SOS Water packs (expired taken from kits I repack, perfectly fine) + 10 gallons which is changed out yearly

We have about 3 weeks worth of SOS brand survival rations (expired taken from kits I repack, perfectly fine)

We don't have any freeze-dried long-life foods

Greetings Mr. Ritter. Here's my long-winded, rambling answer to your short question.

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In many urban areas, barring zombies or total nukes, I suppose supply chains might start to rebuild within three weeks. There is big money involved, and they are highly motivated. You might not get what you want, but you are likely to get enough to avoid hunger. It helps if you have the option to be mobile -- not everyone has that option.

There is a growing movement to move city lots back to what they were a century ago -- with a big kitchen garden up front and laying hens in the back yard. Local busybodies and bureaucrats push back, but I think they are slowly losing as people fight tooth and nail against the rising cost of everything. Cities don't have to be deserts.

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We're in different circumstances: we live in the country (by choice) and we grow a portion of our food anyway, and harvest wild goodies, and store it all. We could easily ramp that up in case of interesting times. So our "preps" are pretty much part of normal operations, in line with what my parents and grandparents did, and their parents and grandparents before them.

We have water sources on site or within a few minutes' walk, and given our infinite firewood we can boil up as much as we need. I cook my own charoal (biochar) which can help with filtering if needed. If we ever need to bug out for a week, we have family with similar resources within an hours' drive. And bins of wheat, if it comes to that.

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I've chatted with people who have a bunch of freeze-dried stuff in their basement. Set it and forget it they say! Well maybe it's a good idea -- hungry people do desperate things. But I am not convinced it is wise. Those packages that claim "a year for four people" look like about 2-3 months' food to me. After that, they say their plan is to hunt and plant a garden. If they haven't put in the time and effort to learn those skills, the results will not be happy. Game that is relentlessly pursued will be as hard to find as the Loch Ness Monster. Gardens (a.k.a. micro farms) don't magically kick out protein and the necessary millions of calories even if you do have a few packets of seeds.

I notice that in the fall, storable staples like potatoes, carrots, and beets are cheap like dirt. Onions too, if you dry them down for a couple of extra weeks. Every house could have a cold room, if they had the will, with a 6-month store of essential calories for pocket change. Saves money, adds resilience.

I personally think anybody who makes an effort to learn pioneer skills and to use the dirt-cheap dried goods (peas, lentils) at the supermarket couldn't starve if they tried.

I maintain a few cases of MREs — one of the Magnets is an avid camper and likes to pack MREs for some meals, and I do the same on long range days. Generally speaking there’s one open case that the kid or I can root around in, and three unopened cases, at any given time. I’ve been very pleased with the XMRE brand having tried several.

I have two buckets of long-term freeze dried foods, kept in a corner of my home office for temperature regulation.

There’s a stack of cases of bottled water from Costco. It’s a big PITA to rotate stock, but I do that.

Mrs. Magnet maintains a kitchen garden and our pantry is always reasonably well stocked with canned foods, snacks and staples. The Young Magnets aren’t home all the time any more but they eat like locusts on meth when they’re here, so we’re still learning how to shop for that.

Being able to keep at least one room warm is critical — I have an indoor-safe propane space heater and a stash of propane bottles if that was a problem, along with plastic sheeting and duct tape. I’d have to drain the water pipes and we’d be confined to one warm room, but it would be do-able (Mrs. Magnet and I were forced to do this once for several days, before we were wed).

Water is our most limited consumable, we’d be rationing immediately and planning to leave within a couple weeks at most if that became unavailable. We’d have full bellies (if not eating as well as we usually do) for three weeks or more. We could go quite a while without power, natural gas service and motor fuel, if it isn’t very cold.

We maintain a one-month "autonomous" level of food, dry goods, and fuels at all times. We also maintain 25 gallons of drinking water, and small supply of over-the-counter medications and we try (not always with success) to keep a 90 day supply of prescription medications on-hand.

We buy whatever ordinary grocery store brands that we normally buy. We shop to suit our budget and taste.
Most packaged grocery store items have a very long shelf life. For example, the jars of sauce we bought today are "use by" February 2029. Dried foods have an excellent, well-beyond their "use by" date when kept cool and dry. I routinely eat 8 year old packaged foods.


They go into our "emergency pantry" in the basement.

For food management, we put color-coded dots on each container, each year has a different color, and we write the "use before" month on the dot. Each year has its own shelf. We "shop" from our emergency pantry, using up the stuff that is in the "will expire in the next 6 months" range for our day-to-day.

I no longer keep MRE's