Has anyone lived off of their survival food in a real emergency?

Yes we lived off saved food about a month during the first panic in 2020 when grocery store shelves were empty.

@KNOWITALL Did you get sick of the food? Did the non- parishables taste ok? Day in and day out?

My brother had a survival food room as the year 2K approached. A lot of people were saying it was the end of times. I laughed at him, but of course had it been true, I would have been over to his house shopping in his “Y2K” room.
Anyway, of course nothing happened and he used as much as he could, but a lot was wasted.

@chyna I ate all 14 packages of my sample bucket of Mountain House meals. They were ok. I prefer the Mountain House blueberry granola and milk. I have 3 packs left.

I don’t have survival food.

We all tried the earthquake supplies when we were moving offices. I would have to be damn hungry to eat one of those again.

I try to keep new purchases in the back of our emergency cabinet so I continually use up the oldest first. We label all items, and I don’t let any go past two years old, which means sometimes we have an odd mix of foods as I have to use them up.

I wouldn’t call it emergency food in a shelter, but I have spent days eating food in my house after a hurricane. Electricity out so trying to eat up any cold food, and winding up eating pantry food that wasn’t the greatest combination. Also, a lot of the pantry food isn’t great for health, or doesn’t taste good if it can’t be heated. I always try to store up on fruits and veggies that will last without very cold refrigeration like carrots, pears, apples, clementines, so I don’t eat only chips and other garbage.

Luckily, hurricanes we have warning. We stock up on pantry food all hurricane season, but add more if there is a storm out in the Atlantic that is headed towards us. We start eating freezer food 3 days ahead of a storm. Then a few to several hours ahead of the first bands I cook the frozen pizzas before the storm and any raw meat so it will last a day or two in styrofoam containers or coolers.

@RedDeerGuy Nope, it was only a few weeks. But we did stock up on more frozen venison for jerky as needed. We want to dehydrate more fruit and veggies this year so it’ll be better.

@KNOWITALL Do you have a special dehydrator appliance or you use your oven?

We have a 10 rack home dehydrator. Its my favorite appliance! :)

Our survival food is canned soups and dry noodles. We rotate them out, so end up eating them as normal food. I have Mountain House dehydrated food for backpacking. They have gotten pretty good these days. Used to taste like cardboard.

@RocketGuy How are the MRE’s? I’ve never had any but thought about ordering some.

There is a technician at work who gets them regularly from the Army surplus store. He says the BBQ pork MRE’s taste pretty good. I think he said the beef ones were like beef jerky, so not fun to eat.