MREs and Other Premade Foods
Not every survival situation calls for immediate hunting and trapping. Sometimes, you may only have to bug out for a few days. In this case, you don’t have to settle for squirrel or fish that you caught – you can just bring along some freeze dried food.
Freeze dried food has long shelf lives, with some packages from the Vietnam War still being okay to eat. It’s very simple to make, and tastes surprisingly good – especially when you’ve been outdoors all day.
There are a few different kinds, and plenty of different flavors.
A popular commercially available freeze dried food is Mountain House premade foods. For under $10 per bag, you get two servings of freeze dried meals. They have a wide variety of flavors, ranging from breakfast foods to dinner meals.
For breakfast, you might have hash browns and scrambled eggs with some pork sausage, bell peppers, and onions mixed in.
Then, when the day’s coming to a close, you can have some chili macaroni with beef and beans. All of the meals are calorie dense, so they’ll sustain you throughout the day while you’re building shelter, hiking, fishing, or doing any other activities.
The Mountain House meals come in different packages, as well. You can get pouches, which are usually one to two servings of food, which is usually better for people out by themselves.
The instructions are fairly simple, but you’ll need boiling water from your camp fire. Simply open the pouch, take out the oxygen absorber packet, add the recommended amount of boiling water, stir, and let it sit for about ten minutes. Once it’s ready, you can open it up, stir, and enjoy.
The other packaging option is their #10 cans, which are good for about 10 servings. This makes it a better choice for those out in the wild with their families. The instructions are almost identical to the pouch – you just have to add more boiling water as recommended.
Other choices of freeze dried foods include:
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Finally, you might choose to get some military-standard MRE meals.
These MREs, or meals-ready-to-eat, are a bit more complex, but give you a wider variety of items inside. They usually come with a main course, side dish, spread with crackers or bread, desserts, candy, drinks, and sometimes seasoning.
They also come with accessory packets with a spoon, salt, gum, coffee, matches, toilet paper, and creamer. There’s over 20 different meals to choose from, and they are calorie dense.
Each meal contains around 1200 calories, which is mostly carbs, followed by fats and then protein. MREs also don’t require boiling water – they have a flameless heater in the package that works chemically to heat up your food, allowing you to use regular, room temperature water.