Emergency Foods

Emergency Foods Should Be Stashed at Your Home, in Your Car and at Work

Emergency foods can be those foods you have stored away, such as in 72 hour kits, to grab and eat on the run or while waiting for a disaster to go away.

Therefore, you want food that will taste good, because having your life and home threatened in some kind of catastrophe is bad enough, you don't want to have to force some yuckie slop down your throat too.

Yet it shouldn't be so delicious that it's not there when you need it, because somebody snacked on it secretly when there was no need.

Emergency foods should be generally healthy. Of course, there's a lot of dispute as to what kind of food and diet is healthy. That's the subject of hundreds or even thousands of bestsellers and diet books and programs battling for your time and attention.

Emergency Foods Should Not Make Your Problems Even Worse

We can agree that high carbohydrate, low nutrition snack foods such as candy bars are not healthy. However, a candy bar at the end of a meal may be something that raises morale for someone tired and discouraged. The dangers of raising your insulin level with a high glycemic chunk of chocolate may seem insignificant when you're not sure you're going to live through a hurricane.

On the other hand, managing your body's resources may be the best way to make it through problems. Gorging yourself on high glycemic carbohydrates -- such as a big bowl of spaghetti, for example -- may feel good at the time, but make you tired at an inconvenient time. It could rob your muscles of the strength they need to make a superhuman survival push.

Most survival foods and freeze dried meals companies design their meals for average Americans, and therefore include some meat, a grain component and a vegetable on the side, with maybe some fruit for dessert. They want to appeal to normal American tastes and expectations, and therefore are not trying to target the markets of people on the Zone diet, South Beach diet, Primal Blueprint or others who emphasize protein and healthy fats and fruits and vegetables over simple carbohydrates from grains -- even whole grains.

A disaster is not the time to adopt a new diet or eating plan, even if it healthier than the average American diet. You want to have on hand foods that will appeal to you and everybody in your family. You don't want a frightened child going hungry because, in their fear, they're superpicky about what food they're eating.

Make sure you have a large supply of emergency foods in your home, packed away in the trunk of your car, and at your workplace. You never know what may happen.

Next: Emergency Foods -- foods for any emergency.