Mountain (of cash) House dehydrated vs. dry food

Here's my rant:

They are selling 30 day dehydrated food supplies for $350, plus SH. That seems excessive to me for what you actually get.

A personalized 30 day food strategy would depend on several things such as, how many people, what kind of storage is available, and whether you plan to carry it or shelter in place.

My opinion is that dehydrated food is best for backpacking, but dry food is best for a 30 day home cache.

Standard food packaging has come a long way in the past few years. Look at tuna for example. The heavy foil packaging keeps it fresh for 2 to 3 years at a cost of 89 cents. There are many dry foods that you can buy off the grocery store shelf that are cheap, nutritious, and store well. Rice, beans, pasta, coffee, honey, saltine crackers, peanut butter, dry milk are some examples. There are also endless 'just add water and boil' packets lining the shelves. If your local grocery store is a small one, it's worth the trip to a large one to take advantage of the increased selection.

We had discussions last winter on canned meat on this forum, and many of us like it. Canned Turkey Spam for example, is cheap, stores for years, and it tastes pretty good out of the can, pan fried or cubed with rice or beans.

Something to consider: 'Dry'vs.'Dehydrated' For way less money than dehydrated food, you can set yourself up with water containers (30 to 60 gallons total...buy 7 gallon size if you want to transport), and 5 or 6 - 5 gallon sealable buckets. In those you can put dry rice, beans, pasta, flour, rolled oats, etc in their original containers, and stack them in a basement or closet. Buy canned meat such as Spam, tuna, ham, and chunk chicken.(skip the canned bacon). Fill out with a half dozen big plastic jars of peanut butter, and 2 or 3 gallons of canola oil (replaces butter). Of course, you can customize this as you like, as the choices are almost endless if you give it some thought.

This strategy requires some vigilance, but can actually save some money on staple foods. When we get low in the kitchen pantry, we raid the cache, rotating and eating the oldest of the stored food. Because we have a cache, we rarely pay full price for these foods. We replenish it in quantity when it goes on sale at the grocery store.

I'm with you on that rant Except,The canola oil!Canola oil Does NOT replace Butter!Ever try canola oil on a toasted English muffin,or corn on the cob,or a bowl of porridge,in place of Butter?Try packitgourmet.com, they have powdered butter,of which taste's a Whole World Better than Canola oil! That site has a lot of powdered alternatives,of which will store,for Long periods of Time,No Affiliation with the above site,just a happy consumer!

If I recall mountain House is Freeze Dried ( Vacuum sublimation, Lyophilization ) a form of dehydration.

why does it cost so much
Lee

Like you said, the quality of today's dry/canned goods negates the need to buy tons of freeze dried food. It may not store as long but its cheaper to replace and you can rotate it much more easily. It would take me a year to eat a #10 can of freeze dried green beans for example. One canned oddity I do love though is canned butter. Good stuff.

You make a good point, and I don't argue that. I didn't mean to imply that canola (or any) oil tastes as good as butter. However, I have been to Italian restaurants that serve warm bread with seasoned olive oil for dipping instead of butter. It's pretty good.

My point was only that in a survival situation, oil is easy to store in quantity, nutritous, and serves a similar purpose as butter in cooking. You can substitue oil for butter in almost any survival recipe with acceptable results.

LED, I have no experience with canned butter, so I will buy a can online and give it a try.

My point exactly. Why would I pay $6 plus $5 shipping and/or sales tax for a bag containing 121 grams of freeze dried 'turkey tetrazini" a concoction I would probably never eat at a restaurant anyway? They advertise it as two 270 calorie servings. Are you kidding me? In a survival situation, you would have to eat TEN of those meals (5 bags@$6 + shipping@$5 = $35) to reach the minimum daily calorie requirements for men. Maybe your wife could get by on only 4 bags...add $24 to the cost of this daily feast.

Assuming that you expect to get roughly half of your MDR from this meal you have dinner for two eaten out of a bag with a total of 2700 calories for for only $30.00!!!

How about this alternative from my food cache;

Byrd's Survival Turkey 'Tetrazini' for two

One can Turkey Spam, cubed.................$3.50
one can mixed vegetables...................$1.00
one pound cooked pasta, your choice........$0.75
dash each; salt, onion and garlic powder...$0.10
2 tablespoons olive (or any)oil............$0.75
Got canned mushrooms? Toss em in...........$0.75

Total calories..............................2600
Total cost for two......................$6.85

This meal is best presented with a green and orange garnish on a blue, fine-china plate lightly warmed, however an inverted Frisbee works good too.

Byrd - bottom line - you're right. Now imagine you're someone with a bunch of money and very lazy and/or very busy - order up some mountain house and a bunch of bottled water and you at least think you're all set.

Your plan would result in better food at a lower price, sure, but this is more of a marketing scheme than a survival one I think.

R

The canola oil part brought fear to my tastebuds,It is probably the most tasteless, of the common food type oils,though healthy as it is!The trattoria factor,ie-Warm bread with Olive oil is Absolutely Delicious!Red Feather Brand canned butter,& Canned cheese,Made/produced in Australia is Outstanding stuff,However... Once the can is opened,Storage become's tricky,Should the power be out,At least here in the Sun-belt region anyhow.Mountain House is Just that,It belongs in a House in the mountains,for Last Ditch nourishment,at Best,possibly excepting the Freeze-dried Neopolitan Gelato,of course!

on this Springs two week solo canoe trip one third of the meals were MH dinner in a bag.MRE meat packs and some sort of side another third or so and freeze dry chicken and rice or noodle sides another third.the freeze dry meals only advantage was that it's easy to make and called for just a couple cups of boiling water.there were times when after a hard day just boiling water and dumping it in a bag was a major effort.this was a vacation,if you think long days on stormy lakes and hard slogs into remote backwaters over nasty portages rates as a vacation.the point is that you may find yourself in a survival situation that is not far removed from that and a fast,easy on the fuel,meal could make things feel somewhat better.wet,lost,alone,hurt and heating water over a scrap of wood and dumping it in a bag and getting Orange Chicken could make you ready to face another day.cooking is for camp outs,not survival.

For long term prep storage I tend to go dry, but I certainly find a place for dehydrated. Face it, rice and dried beans ain't got nothing on MH Beef Stew.

That's a pretty unfair comparison Byrd. Turkey spam does not equal mountain house turkey or beef. You are also comparing a ready-to-go meal just add water, to one you have to "MAKE". That's like comparing prices on a hamburger you make vs one at Red Robin, or In-n-out.

With that said- I have both Mountain House meals, and canned food (among many others). They both have their place, and you are paying for convenience, quality, and storage period to name a few when you buy mountain house.

I don't think you can go wrong with either as long as you pay attention to expiration dates, and know what you are getting and how to properly utilize them.

Glad you made it back in one piece. I have been in the BWCAW during stormy weather...very memorable, especially the ping pong sized hail and the trees crashing down in our camp followed by two days of howling winds.

About the food, I don't argue with you when in the woods. I was talking about long term storage of food at home, not wilderness survival food. I agree with you that lightweight dehydrated rations are great when in the woods or on the waters. In our part of the world, we have a lot of water. In some other areas, not so much. If you use the minimum amount of water to rehydrate the food and don't have any to drink, you will become a 'brick layer' for the next 24 hours.

Byrd..my reply went a bit astray,as some do.i look over the site late at night waiting for my pain meds to kick in so i can go to sleep..no big deal,just DJD in a knee.but as for long term storage i think the thing to do would be to make a big buy of your normal food and when you shop take from the front of the stored food and put the new in the back.if you want just a heap of food put away i would do the rice,beans,flour,canned meat,--so on, route.just looking around the web for camping food i have run across too many to count suppliers of all sorts food for long term storage.
as i'm sort of fuzzing out now i'll leave with an idea that just came to me..get a bread machine,i found a good one at a yard sale for $5,and set aside several ten pound bags of real flour and yeast packs.if the grid is down you can make bannock.
my only issue is short term wilderness survival so i don't get too deep into this subject.

"This meal is best presented with a green and orange garnish on a blue, fine-china plate lightly warmed, however an inverted Frisbee works good too."

You forgot a bit of detergent to wash off the dog spit...

Sue

Why isn't anyone storing Ghee, which is clarified butter? This lasts fairly well, I am guessing fats really only last about a year anyway before they go rancid. I was reading off of an lds site that shortening will stay for several years. When it comes to a fat I would go with the shortening.

We on this forum have divergent opinions and survival strategies, and there is no perfect answer, as we all are dealing with different facts, assumptions, needs, and scenarios.

In our household we shun hydrogenated shortening, as we aggressively avoid trans-fats. There's nothing wrong with ghee, but it's very expensive, we don't use it in our daily diet, and so we feel that we don't need it in a survival situation. Any food oil will do in an emergency.

Having heard about the results of long term static food storage from the 'bomb shelter' days, we select standard dry and canned foods with long shelf lives of 1 to 3 years and store those in sufficient quantities to survive for thirty days or more. For example, Skippy Natural peanut butter; No trans-fats, shelf is a year or more and it requires no refrigeration when opened. Dense in food energy, it is a great survival food. We maintain a full year's supply of it. Add par-boiled rice, dry pasta, honey, canned meats, dry and canned beans, oil and flour, and any variety of canned veggies and you have a full survival pantry. The trick is to use it daily by freshness date, and replenish it in quantity when you see it on sale. We also maintain a 100 roll supply of toilet paper; use some, and buy more. An added advantage is that you can replenish everything at sale prices, as you never have to 'run to the store' for the things you have in your cache.

A word on 'expiration dates". Those dates are 'freshness dates'. The 'human consumption dates' are much longer and vary by food type.

We feel that the best food to have on hand is the food we eat anyway. We calculate that based on our location and the risks that we perceive and plan for, it is most likely that we would 'shelter in place' (80%) as opposed to 'bug out' (20%). The one concession we make to 'bug out' scenarios is that we keep half of our water in five - 7 seven gallon totes for portability, and we have the means to transport our entire food supply if we had to.

I totally agree with you on keeping the food you eat around. As far as the Ghee goes, making it is much cheaper than purchasing it. My thoughts on that would be that it would be a nice treat for bread. 4 pounds of butter from Costco is reasonable. I have been tempted to put some up for storage to see how long it would be viable.

So do oils have a longer date than 1 year? I was watching a couple of videos put on by the LDS, and their comments were they don't save oil because it goes bad. I personally don't think I have had shortening in the house for years now.

Love that you keep that much toilet paper. I have something very close to that in my garage. If I thought it would store ok up in the attic, I think I would store it up there as well.

The canned KTC Ghee available in the UK has a best before date of 2 years from purchase. I would expect that it would be usable up to 3-4 years from date of purchase.

2Kg can costs around $15. 15,000 calories for $15 is very cost efficient in terms of survival food.

Butter in a deep freezer can last around 6-12 months but is best stored in a stackable food grade airtight containers within the freezer.

Good quality extra virgin olive oil again has a shelf life (best before date) of around 12 months. Glass storage bottles are preferable. A 500ml bottle typically costs around $3.50-$4.00 in the UK.



Shopping Pantry list for Survival Ration for 1 person for 10 weeks for around $15/week.


Edit - Forgot about canned Duck fat. Again a very long shelf life and makes the very best roast potatoes.

Whoa, Stephanie, just back up a little: you can MAKE clarified butter?

That's new to me. Cough up the details SVP!

Doug,the folks over in India have been making that for--ever,i guess.it's called Ghee and it keeps in the hot weather.Google Ghee and stand by for heaps of info.

You can absolutely make clarified butter. Put your butter in a pot and heat it until it just begins to bubble, a creamy foam will form on the top of the butter, that's what you want to get rid of, skim that off. Do that until no more comes back up, and there you have clarified butter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CvI_tmEU...=1&index=77

How to can butter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmmyS7z1U...t=1&index=6