Emergency Preparedness - Food

I've already written a few thoughts on shelter and water needs in an emergency. Today, I plan to share a few thoughts on food during an emergency. You should begin with a goal to put together a 72 hour kit of food and supplies to help you survive a disaster. This kit should be packaged in such a way that you could very quickly load it into your car and evacuate the area if called on to do so. We store our kit in the garage in 2 Rubbermaid bins.

The food in a 72 hour kit should be high in protein and very easy to prepare. We have canned chili and beef stew in our kit since these meals are actually fully cooked so we could eat them straight from the can if we needed to. My kit contains an emergency stove and a little fuel so we could heat a few things. I also have a can opener in our kit so we could open the cans. We also have granola bars, peanuts, beef jerky, crystal light mix, crackers and peanut butter and a few comfort items like gum and hard candy. I have a menu typed up that is included in our kit to help us know how to ration the food to last the 72 hours. A quick internet search for 72 hour kit menu will give you a few more ideas.

Here is our Menu - some of the kids prefer beef stew over chili, so we have substituted for them.

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3
Breakfast	1 granola bar 1 fruit snack 1 apple cider	1 oatmeal 1 apple cider	1 oatmeal 1 juice packet
Lunch	Ramen soup Crackers	Beef stick Applesauce Nuts	Chili Crackers
Dinner	Pork & beans Applesauce	Ramen soup Crackers	1 apple cider 1 applesauce 1 granola bar
Snacks	4 pieces candy 1 piece gum	4 pieces candy 2 pieces gum	4 pieces candy 2 pieces gum

Add to your kit:

1–2 gallons of water

Be sure your family kit contains:

Small stove and fuel w/matches or another way to heat your food

Mess kit or small saucepan and utensils

Can opener

What is important is that you include items that everyone will eat, especially when you are responsible for young children. They are not old enough to understand that they have to eat even if they don't like what you have. The food should be rotated about every 6 months to make sure it is fresh. We pull it into the house and the kids take the snack items in their lunches and I put the canned items in the pantry to rotate through with meals at home. We then restock the kit. By having the kids help with this process, it gives me an opportunity twice a year to talk about our emergency planning. A few weeks ago, we were reading about earthquakes and one of the kids said, "But we'd be OK right Mom - we have what we would need." I was able to assure them that we had planned as best we knew how.

It was one of those moments that makes you grateful you take the time to go through the preparations.

Once you have your 72 hour kit taken care of, then you should begin planning a 3 month meal plan and collect the food you would need to feed your family for a longer period of time. Many recipes and ideas already posted on this site will help you in that process. Each family cooks and eats uniquely enough that your food storage should not look exactly like anyone else's. I've really found over the years as I've coached many through the process, that taking the time to make it your own plan gives you confidence that you could cook the food and that your family would eat it. This confidence brings a great deal of peace to the entire family.

After you have food in a 72 hour kit taken care of then you need to work up to a 3 month supply or more.