The Best Emergency Food

If you need your food to be ready-to-eat quickly, but you don’t want to deal with rotating out expiring food every couple of years, the Mountain House – Just in Case emergency food supply kit is our top pick. Freeze-dried provisions are easy to use, and this kit is guaranteed to taste great for at least 30 years in storage.

Mountain House is the best-known brand of freeze-dried food we found, with meal pouches that are popular among backpackers and preppers alike. All the food in this box is cooked before freeze-drying, so you can prepare it quickly — even if all you have is cold water.Read more…

If you had to eat out of these pouches every day, it would be a bit salty and too rich for sedentary life. There’s not much fiber on offer, either. But if you’re just preparing to get through a few days of trouble, the balance of high-calorie staple ingredients and flavor-enhancing sauces and seasonings is the best we tried.

If you want an emergency meal that you can keep in a bag and eat anywhere, a military-surplus Meal, Ready-to-Eat or “MRE” is your best bet. We bought a random lot from Western Frontier and a few individually selected (and package-date-guaranteed) meals from Ozark Outdoorz. These pouches are packed with an average of 1250 calories each, so two pouches per person per day will be more than enough food if you’re just waiting out a storm.

The downside to ready-to-eat food is that it’s heavy, and it doesn’t last as long on the shelf. These meals make the most sense as just one day worth of your emergency supply, with dried food making up the rest. That way you have something on hand if you get really stuck, but you’re not dragging around extra weight.Read more…

Compared to canned soup or pasta, MREs are far more expensive, but they offer a more balanced meal and they’re easy to open. The downside is that a reliable place to purchase them is tricky to find: Amazon and eBay have dozens of sellers with cases of surplus military cases, but you’ll pay a premium from sellers like Ozark Outdoorz if you want date guarantees or to pick and choose which menu options you want. We looked at “civilian label” MRE suppliers, but most of the biggest companies are selling less-complete MREs at higher prices than we paid for hand-picked surplus.

The shelf life of an MRE is good, but you should still eat these and replace them every five years to avoid the risk of something going bad, and every three years if it gets hot where you store them.

If you want the most compact, energy-dense food possible, ration bars are a simple answer. The Datrex – DX2400F multi-purpose ration bars will keep for five years (or longer) and are very easy to store in a car, boat or cabin. They’re the easiest ration bars for small kids to chew, a bit powdery but otherwise like shortbread.

If you’re in a situation where you don’t know how long it will be until you find food again and you need to keep moving or stay warm, this is basically as good as a ration can get. Each individually wrapped bar inside the package contains 200 calories of fat and carbohydrates, so an entire package of 12 should keep a person going for three days.Read more…

You wouldn’t want to subsist on this for longer than those three days, but rations are only designed to give you the energy you need to find shelter, then water, then a more sustainable food supply. You could keep a box of slightly more-palatable rations on hand, but everything we tested in our review of the best protein bars would need to be replaced annually.

Finding the best value in a ready-to-use meal kit was tricky, but the Augason Farms – Breakfast and Dinner Variety Pail is our pick at a cost of about $1 per 400-calorie serving. This kit includes a balanced set of menu items inside, and you even get some mood-boosting treats like milk and chocolate pudding.

The downside to a budget-friendly kit like this is that the meals are just uncooked pasta and parboiled rice with a sauce mix mixed in. You could eat this stuff after soaking in boiling-hot water — that’s how we tested it — but you need to simmer them to get the best texture. It’s about as appetizing as the ready-to-cook side dish packets you’d find at the grocery store for a similar price.Read more…

If you want to DIY-assemble a kit like this one, you could include a custom selection of dishes, but you probably won’t save money unless you really load up on plain grains and generic macaroni-and-cheese boxes. Like most grocery-store options, these pouches aren’t resealable, so you’ve got to plan on eating your supplies one pouch at a time or finding a way to clip the pouches closed and keep all moisture out of the pail.

Like the Datrex bars, the S.O.S. Food Lab – Emergency Ration bars are a reliable source of easy-to-carry calories for situations where you have to keep moving. Unlike the individually-wrapped Datrex bars, the S.O.S. rations come pressed together in one big chunk that you need to pry apart with a knife. You should definitely pack these inside a resealable bag so they don’t get dirty once the foil-lined pouch is open.

The S.O.S. rations are closer to shortbread than the powdery Datrex rations, and they come in either cinnamon or coconut flavor. Our test-toddler couldn’t figure out how to eat them, though; he just sucked on the chunks we gave him.

Halfway between the basic uncooked food from Augason Farms and the tasty freeze-dried options from Mountain House, the Wise Company – Emergency Food Supply pail claims you don’t need to cook these entrees, and the sauces are on par with brand-name side-dish pouches you’d buy at the grocery store (at a similar price — about $2.50 per 400 calories.)

You’re not saving any money buying dried food this way compared to a DIY collection of sides, and you don’t get breakfast or dessert options the way you do with Augason Farms. That said, the Wise Company entrees have thicker sauces and are slightly better-tasting when you’re just adding water and can’t simmer the food.Read more…

This food still isn’t as palatable or easy to prepare as the offerings from Mountain House, but it’s nice to have a middle ground that you could use to supplement other emergency supplies. The pouches don’t re-seal, so this kind of kit is best for a family or group that plans to eat four servings at once.

The Survival Tabs – ST-96T emergency ration is one more option for easy-to-store emergency food supplies. Unlike the Datrex and S.O.S. bars, this is really the most basic form or caloric intake you can find, just sugar, oil and milk solids with some mineral supplements pressed into a capsule. They’re surprisingly tasty, and very compact. The pouches contain 24 loose tablets, which you’re supposed to eat at a rate of one per hour when you’re walking or working to get shelter.

Surviving on these would be better than starving, but for most people that would take weeks; remember that storing some water should be a priority above raw calories. The Datrex bars are a bit easier to handle and more economical to stock up on, but Survival Tabs are a viable alternative.