What it’s Like to Live Completely on Your Emergency Food Storage? by Scipio

In late December 1999 the office building my business (securities sales) was located was broken into, and my office was one of those targeted. Thieves probably thought because of the nature of my business there was cash in my office like a bank.  Not finding cash they took my computers with all my client management information as well as proprietary software.  It took me a month to reconstruct my client contact information, mostly by combing through old phone records.  Vendors helped provide me with client records.  Having just started out in business with all the inherent start-up expenses, I decided data back-up (fairly new and expensive at the time) was an extra expense I could skip for the moment. That was a fatally wrong decision.

The month it took me to get back into business after the robbery (BTW the thief was caught and given a suspended sentence although he had a record a mile long), I had lost over half my customer base because they were mostly active in the stock market and needed to be able to trade.  They understood my situation but had to move to another firm where they could conduct their business. After working furiously, I had the business up and running by the end of January 2000.

Almost two months later, March 2000 the Dot.Com Bubble burst sending the stock market into a tailspin.  Tech companies, where most people were investing in at the time, crashed.  Many companies such as Worldcom went broke or lost significant value. For example, Cisco Systems lost 80% of its value.  Clients were like deer in headlights, they didn’t know what to do, so for the next six months the retail investor did nothing, and I was forced to file for bankruptcy.

My car was repossessed, and for almost a year my house was in foreclosure proceedings.  The odd jobs (security guard, janitor, transport driver, etc.) and part-time work I did for other firms didn’t leave a lot of extra money for food. Our ill stay-at-home son’s medical bills became our responsibly when he could no longer work and he lost his health insurance coverage. But he still needed medical attention, and we had to pay.  $5,000 ER visits were common.

Fortunately, I was, for lack of a better word, one of the early “preppers”. I had put away a year’s worth of food.  It was mostly freeze-dried/dehydrated in #10 cans, but also MREs, bulk items, and canned items. For the next six months we ate exclusively from that stash except for small sums we spend on dairy products, fruits, and veggies.  About the only meat protein, we had during this time was from what I had stored.

What was it like? Tasty food became a distant memory. Stored food, no matter how good the quality, is not the same as fresh food in its taste although it may have the same nutrient value.  Frieze-dried meat is rubbery and without seasoning, not very flavorful. “Food taste fatigue”, tiring of eating the same thing, was particularly depressing. Regardless of what the product on the can looked like, it wound up being mostly like soup.  Lasagna was lasagna soup really, and so on.  The texture of real food was missing, and to our surprise, texture is very important in enjoying your meal. Ice cream and sweets were such a treat, just like when we were kids.

You ex-military folks stuck in the field for extended periods of time with only your rations have a glimpse of what we went through. When I was in the infantry there was always hope we were going to be sent a hot meal from the mess hall, and someday we would get back there for some real food. But in our situation that hope wasn’t there.  We were stuck with what we had.

Of the few people who knew of our situation, few helped except for giving “advice” on how I could have avoided this. Some accused me of mismanaging our finances. After all, aren’t you a “financial planner”?  Except for the stock market decline, the economy was strong and most people were doing fine, not like now with so many people struggling. We didn’t get a lot of empathy, basically neglect and ridicule. Our favorite reaction came from our church friends, “we will pray for you”. That was it, no help with food at all. One thing we learned is, except for our family, we really didn’t have any real friends. We have new friends and a new church now as a result. They have been vetted.

Although I had put away a year’s worth of food it was amazing how quickly three people went through it.  It seemed like the pantry shelves were emptying overnight, and a fear came upon me. I often asked myself, “what do we do in six months when we run out of food.”

We learned some freeze-dried/dehydrated foods could be quite tasty if you had the right ingredients to add.  A valuable lesson was the need for more and greater taste varieties of food enhancers and seasonings. I thought I had planned for enough variety and adequate portions, but to my dismay, we learned that we didn’t have nearly enough fruit and cheese, especially fruit since it was such a treat. We have since experimented with canned cheeses and found some (Bega for example) to be an excellent alternative to freeze-dried.  We dreamed of bacon, the sizzle from the pan, and the aroma.  We have since found several sources of long shelf-life tasty bacon (Yoders for example). We learned to buy more canned meat products (Keystone  for example) and especially lots of high calorie MREs.  Be sure to mix eating your MRE’s with freeze dried/canned products because in reality “MRE” stands for is “Meals Reluctant to Exit”. Although freeze dried/dehydrated meat has the necessary protein you need, it’s not the same as the natural state of meat. You will need to mix the size of cans up between #10 cans and smaller ones between 15-28 ozs.  Once you open a #10 can, it has limited shelf life and we found we had to keep eating somethings over and over before it spoiled. It will last longer if you refrigerate it, but sometimes we had the power cut off.

An unwelcome and unintended consequence of eating this way is you will find that you will be cutting air more often. For some of my old Army buddies, they would see that as a benefit!  Remember what I said about MREs? We experienced some constipation also, so we have put aside extra Miralax and Smooth Move tea to take care of that.

A great source of reasonably priced long term ford storage is local LDS canneries.  You can locate the nearest one to you online.  You do not have to be Mormon to buy from them.  Their non-fat dry milk is as good as real milk! I blind-fold taste tested it on five of my grand-children (Mikie types!). Three liked it better than real milk, one thought it was the same, and the outlier thought real milk was slightly better. Most all LDS’s products are in #10 cans. They have over fourteen food choices at the location I go to.  I have gotten flour, sugar, spaghetti, oats, apple slices, potato slices, and carrots for example. Prices range from $4.98 – $9.58 per #10 cans.  They are also available by the case.

To prepare yourself to survive the way we did, I would tell you to stop eating what you regularly eat and go cold turkey and live on “survival food” exclusively as a training exercise. But it would not be the same as the real thing even if you did it for a few weeks.  That’s because when you are in the midst of it, and you see no end in sight to what you have to live on, a desperation sets in that makes you even more hungry.

Having said how gut wrenching the situation was and how tasteless the food, not counting the time planning meals were, we lived healthy lives. We patched meals together from what we had.  It could have been a lot worse.

Like NCScout says on Radio Contra, “You don’t have enough food.”  Start putting things away, even it is half of a Bo-Go purchase of food from your last trip to the grocery store.  You don’t know what catastrophe may befall you.  Get Jack Lawson’s book, “Civil Defense Manuel”, and you will realize how much tunnel vision you have without knowing it.  The food emergency situation we experienced was far different than what I expected it would be when I put my food storage aside. I had tunnel vision and didn’t know it even though I had my plan and exercised it.