Does anyone stock food like the long time freeze dried ready to make? I have not. But seems the crazier it gets the smarter this seems. Am I the only one??? Live in the city so home is the place, but no real gardens or anything.
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Yes sir I for one do.
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Right now the best place to buy from, been doing business with them since 2005.
And yes… Right now, everything is much more expensive. FJB! 
I will be starting 2024 soon. Stay tuned. 
September Is National Preparedness Month 2023 - Bullet Points - USCCA Community (usconcealedcarry.com)
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Yes. I Also have water stored, but I also recommend something called a water Bob for additional storage. If it looks like things are going bad you put it in your bathtub and fill it. Most places are on a gravity feed from the water tanks, so you’ll have a little time until the tanks run dry if power is gone. But if you are one to act quickly you’ll have about 90 gallons per tub. While the masses are wondering, you’ll be filling.
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I am way too old to have 25 year shelf life food. I do keep emergency supplies in cans and repackage dry food into durable containers.
Some things to keep in mind,
If power is out do you have emergency lighting and window coverings? You don’t want to stand out.
A means to cook food? Most canned food can be eaten out of the can without heating. Freeze dried will have to be reconstituted. Cooking smells may attract unwanted attention.
A way to get rid of waste?
Are you prepared to say no?
Do you have a stockpile of meds?
Tradable items?
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Yep, enough to get me out of town to the “muster Point”…
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I do not have freeze dried food stored. What we have been doing essentially since Covid, is buying a bit extra of shelf stable food and stocking up. I bought a vacuum sealer and have been using that to save space and extend shelf life on some things. For example, boxed macaroni and cheese can be taken out of the box, vacuum sealed to save space and to keep humidity out. (We have an old dresser and a drawer is full of that.) Other stuff we store would be cans of tuna-buy them on sale, they will last longer in the can than the product label indicates. I store peanut butter. We eat it regularly so I buy extra and keep it put back. If we make a recipe and it calls for 2 cans of something, we buy 4 and store 2 of them. Baked beans are a cheap shelf stable thing to buy. Pasta and canned sauce are another relatively cheap yet stable food to store. My wife does most of the grocery shopping, but I shop the sales at another store and essentially only buy bargains.
How long could we eat off of our food storage? I honestly have no idea. Longer than many, but not long enough.
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One freeze dried item I do like is tomato. Wet tomato products are high acid and can eat through cans. We go through a lot of it so it does not get too old but I keep one can of freeze dried. If you use milk, get some powdered milk. Dollar Tree sells some shelf stable milk. I am lactose intolerant so I keep shelf stable soy milk on hand. Costco has a very good product and price.
Mix tuna with BBQ sauce for a quick tasty meal. Keep different BBQ sauces for some variety. Works for other canned meats too.
If you eat at fast food places, save the condiment packages. You can also buy them at restaurant supply stores. Small shelf stable servings with no leftovers.
SHTF and I will be making a lot of jerky. You can also salt meats to preserve them without refrigeration.
Keep lots of beer on hand. You can sub it for water in a pinch.
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I used to package fairly large quantities of fish - typically around 50 pounds of yellowfin tuna from an average trip to the otherside. I started out using a vacuum sealer, but soon discovered the bag materials available at the time were fragile once frozen. If we moved anything around in the freezer, then we ended up with freezer-burnt tuna.
I changed to using freezer zip-lock bags. I now follow this process for all meats I need to freeze. Dry all meat with paper towels, put the meat in the zip-lock, zip it almost closed, and push it down into a body of water right up to the edge of the zipper to expel all air, and finish the zipping while bag is still in the water. I have finger mullet I caught 7 years ago that still smell like the day I caught them and I will continue to convert them into larger, more edible fish until they are depleted 
Maybe vacuum sealer materials have improved since I changed to zip-locks, but my mileage has been better with them.
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I think it’s a good idea to have at least a couple weeks of food/water in case grocery stores have delivery issues. I would think that after a day or two many groceries would be wiped out from normal shopping if their deliveries were cut off temporarily… add on a week or two if people start hoarding.
I basically store a few gallons of extra water, a few extra cans of beans and bags of rice, and slowly accumulated a few freeze dried meals from WMt. I would just grab two or three of their Mountain House meals until I had a week or two supply of them. Mountain House tends to be a good mix of flavor, volume, and price when compared to other options. WMt has these packs individually for competitive prices, too.
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Nope. Powder not chunks and I already have some.
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I believe it wold behoove every one of us to ‘Stock-Up’ (even a little bit helps)
Costco: If your into them sells a Box of MRE’s (12?) for about $100
Every time we go we buy (3) cases of Sparkling water, Occasionally a (50) lb. bag of Rice or Beans.
(Sister uses the Rice as weight pouches for her Crochet animals. So turnover is good.
I bought ‘a couple’ of MY PATRIOT SUPPLY (4) wk. supply AND their ‘specialty’ packs
(dried fruits, Veggie’s etc.) They taste REALLY Good!
These aren’t your Mama’s MRE’s some of those are disgusting! 
The Beans and Shrapnel (Army Issue) is supposed to be Beans and Ham chunks is inedible.
Big5 (a local Dick’s SG’s kind of store sells Potable water jugs for $10 each. We have several.
I won’t go into everything it would take too long, Just be smart folk’s, Everything you buy gets you a day ahead of most folk’s.
Survival is hard enough when you have food, Being hungry and Thirsty makes it more difficult to do everything, Paying attention, staying focused and sharp. Not to forget EVER NOT having clean Water you will die faster!
Being under stress makes you burn mega calories, drink more fluids, Go to the bathroom more!
Stock up on Butt-Wipe! Garbage bags to hold ‘used’ toilet paper/Paper towels in case you can’t flush. Remember SH** won’t work if it gets really bad. Basic necessities will be used up FAST! Batteries, Propane, Gas, etc.
Disruption WILL happen, Guaranteed! Just how bad and how Long it will last is any bodies guess.
Stay Frosty Folk’s
Check6.
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We should all be as well stocked as our budgets and storage space will allow.
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Food, water, ammo, firearms, solar charging capability, small electronic devices with Faraday cages. Potable water and water purifying capability. All weather gear, boots, socks (many, many, socks.) Medicine and medical supplies.
Ramen Noodles, with multivitamins, is an excellent cheap idea for food.
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A thread about prepping??? WOOHOO!!!
I may seem a little more excited than most about prepping for SHTF, but prepping has saved our butts more times than I care to remember and before I launch into another long-winded post, let me be the first to say I am going to protect my family first. If anybody comes to take what we have squirreled away, one of us will die. Just sayin’.
Anyway…
We have three different layers of items stored away for emergency use depending on if it is short term (a few weeks) long term (a few months) or extreme long term (until the end of time).
The short-term prepping is all the canned food in the pantry and frozen food in the freezers. Having a deep freeze is nice when you have power to run it, but in most SHTF situations one of the first things you will lose is electricity. Down here in the part of Texas I live in we don’t have very cold winters, but every now and then Mother Nature decides to teach us a lesson and gives us single digit temps for a week or so. During those times we have rolling blackouts because the power grid isn’t good enough to support all the electric heaters people plug in to stay warm. Or so they say…
Anyway, you will likely have no power for the deep freeze, so all that food is going to thaw eventually. It may last a few days, or it may last a couple weeks if you stay out of it, keeping the door closed, but eventually all that food will thaw. All that is short term.
We have probably 200 cans of food in the cabinets and a weeks’ worth of frozen meat in the freezer. We can last a couple weeks.
I have a question for the members reading before we get into the long term: Do you have cats, and if you do, do you have a cat pan in the house? This may be a strange question to ask on a prepping thread, but it has validity. We have 6 cats. All of them are in-door/out-door. They all eat inside. They poop inside when they feel the need. They are outside when the weather is agreeable. I am buying another bucket of cat litter every two weeks, the buckets are FREE with the purchase of the cat litter and those empty buckets stack up. Really. They stack.
My Wife and I started years ago storing dry goods in the extra buckets. We wash them out. Paint them. Label them with what is in them. And we stack them up.
The items we store in these buckets are our long term food items. Rice, Beans, Pasta, Sugar, Peanut Butter, Natural Honey, Salt, Pepper, Herbs, Spices, Coffee, Tea, Jerky…the list goes on.
A quick note on the rice we get…it is Par Boiled (partially boiled) and it lasts a L O N G time. Most packaged rice you get will only last a few months due to little bugs and things already in the package when you buy it. Par Boiled rice, being partially boiled already, kills all the bugs in the rice before packaging.
Back to our story…Gary_H mentioned Zip-loc branded freezer bags. They work well when storing your dry goods in buckets also. You can usually get 2 bags of rice or beans into a gallon Zip-loc, maybe 3. The little square ramen noodle packages can be stored with 8 in a gallon Zip-loc. you can then take those gallon Zip-locs and store 7 or 8 in a cat litter bucket. 4 lb. bags of sugar can be stored in the larger 2- or 2.5-gallon Zip-locs and then store 4 Zip-locs worth of sugar in the cat litter bucket.
In our kitchen, we have a rolling shelf I built able to carry 8 buckets of dry goods. If needed, we can roll the whole thing out the front door and down the walkway to the truck to load it up if we have to bug out.
The Honey, Peanut Butter, Sugar and all those items can be used to barter for other items. “I’ll trade you a jar of honey for 6 rolls of toilet paper.” It happened all across the country when Covid first hit. All the grocery stores were out, NATION WIDE, of paper products because people went nuts.
The extreme long term - or until the end of time as I described earlier - items are going to be your bushcraft skills. Hunting, trapping foraging, fire building, shelter building, water purifying, etc, etc. All of your short-term food items will be gone in a few weeks, your long-term items - all the buckets of emergency food you bought from that prepper website - will be gone in a few months. You are going to be down to your last box of twinkies and your Wife is looking at your arm like it’s a rack of ribs. You will need to break out of your shelter and go foraging.
The most important item to look for first is a source of water, even if it’s dirty water. You can boil it, you can filter it, you can purify it. The average is 3 days without water, and you are finished. Average 3 weeks without food. In your bugout kit you should have at least three different items to assist in building a fire and something to boil water in.
Get on the internet NOW and look for basic plans covering how to build a water filter and BUILD A WATER FILTER. Remember the stackable cat litter buckets? Stack two of them together, use the top one for the filter and the bottom one for storage. You can also mix in a small amount of potassium permanganate to purify the water if you so choose. Potassium permanganate is a water treatment chemical for softening and purification of water. It can also be used to start a fire if you have glycerin available. The glycerin also had medicinal properties. CAUTION: A LITTLE BIT OF POTASSIUM PERMANGINATE GOES A LONG WAY FOR WATER PURIFICATION. A light pink tint to the water is fine. Purple is too much.
OK…I’ve covered a lot of info here and I can hear Don snoring in the back. Somebody wake him up. We need to take our prepping as seriously as we do our firearms training because it will save our lives should the correct set of unfortunate circumstances present themselves.
DO NOT EVER TRUST THE GOVERNMENT WHEN YOUR LIFE IS IN PERIL. I have seen the government DESTROY entire semi-trailers full of bottled water in emergency situations because they could not “verify the source of the water”. They did it when Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. They did the same thing 3 years later when Ike hit Galveston in 2008.
REMEMBER: The scariest 11 words in the English language - I am from the Government, and I am here to help.
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Appreciate the tip. We haven’t had ours long enough to compare notes. But I’ll let you know if we have issues. Enjoy the fish!
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Coffee, Rice, Flour, Dry Goods work really good for vac seal. But as suggested above, once frozen, if not handled gently, they’ll leak and let air in. We’ve done just fine freezing in ours. We just package and stack in the freezer and don’t mess with it until use.
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My brother works a second job at Wal Mart. With the recent computer glitch the other week, he thinks 2 days max is what they have in stock. After that, expect it to be empty just like you said.
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What you do??? Snort them??? 
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