Survival Foods

There are Many Kinds of Survival Foods

When it comes to survival foods, a lot of people think first of freeze dried foods and other emergency preparedness foods.

But in reality anything you can eat will be a survival food. However, good planning will help people to prepare. But that brings up the question of just what kind of disaster to prepare for.

A lot also depends on who and where you are.

The Department of Homeland Defense suggests that every American should keep a 72 hour emergency kit on hand, one for every individual. That is emergency food to last up to 72 hours, or three days. That is based on the assumption that help will arrive within those three days.

Of course this is an optimistic assumption for most scenarios. It's ok for relatively small, shortlived disasters such as electrical outages, floods, and storms. Though even then, you don't know. Weren't many Katrina victims in New Orleans left on their own about five days?

If you're planning for an extensive disaster, you should have a longer time horizon in mind than three days -- perhaps forever, if you believe the United States government is in potential danger of collapsing (whether from within or without).

Survival Foods are Anything Edible - for Now

You may survival foods to get by in case of: hurricane, electrical blackouts, tornado, blizzard, forest fires, flooding, nuclear war, terrorist attack, biological or chemical warfare, influenza pandemic, collapse of the world's financial system, collapse of the United States dollar's spending power, revolution, civil war, coup d'etat, imposition of martial law, shortages of food in stores due to breakage of worldwide supply lines, and energy shortages. Or add your own favorite paranoid script. Takeover by aliens maybe?

Some of the above list are more likely than others and some do indeed do happen every year to somebody in the U.S. And disasters don't have to be obvious. I've heard of people buying a year's worth of survival food kits to be ready in case of a disaster, only to eat the food because they were laid off.

The first survival food to go to is whatever you have in your refrigerator and freezer. A few years ago in St Louis an ice storm struck on the second day of December, creating a widespread electrical blackout that last for days in many areas. Because many food stamp recipients had just gone shopping for the month, put the food into storage and then had it ruined, they were given an extra issuance of food stamps.

You can't eat a whole month's worth of food at once, but do what you can. Meat, milk and other perishable items should be at the top of your menu until they do spoil.

You should also have many canned goods stored in your kitchen. Whether it's tuna and green beans, or spinach and stewed tomatoes, have a large number of cans stocked away on your kitchen and pantry shelves. Every time you go to the store, buy a few extra cans. That's long shelf life food.

If you're on a farm or you have your own garden, the produce you grow is another form of emergency food.

You can can it yourself the way Grandma used to do. You can also use a food dehydrator to dry many items to store them. You can buy electrical ones to use now, and keep a solar powered dehydrated as backup for when there is no more power in the grid.

You Can Store Only So Much Freeze Dried Foods

You can also keep supplies of survival foods such as the #10 cans of freeze dried foods that have been dehydrated and vacuum packed. They're available for survival food supplies and as camping and hiking food.

For the long term, you must plan for to return an earlier way of life, where we hunted, fished and farmed.

There is not as much animal wildlife as there was in the days of the pioneers, but more than there used to be thanks to preservation laws.

For example, deer like people, because with their antlers they don't thrive in thick woods. Therefore, there are a lot more deer now than when the land was covered with trees.

However, the nature of the disaster would make a difference. There's a lot of small animals such as rabbits and squirrels around the cities in suburbs, but if we all started hunting them for dinner they'd soon be a lot scarcer.

And it will take years for a really massive comeback in larger animals, though we have eliminated a lot of their natural predators such as wolves.

So raising food for survival would be very important. And then you'd need not only food dehydrators and grain grinders, but other survival supplies. And of course the seeds of vegetables and fruit that will thrive in the climate of the aftermath of the disaster. Will that be changed? Who knows for sure?

When it comes to survival foods, we must think short-term, mid-term and even long-term, just in case.

Next: freeze dried foods in post-nuclear world -- Swan Song dramatizes life during a nuclear winter.

Next: Survival Food Storage -- storing up food for emergency meals.