https://www.thereadystore.com/mountain-house-6-month-lunch-dinner-entrees

Was cruising around looking for some things to add to my food storage and came across this "6 month supply".....The ad states that this is primarily Entrees etc...provides two "servings a day"......Huh, lets run some calculations....

A person (adult, performing usual activities) will require 2,000 calories a day.

This "pack" provides 91,280 calories which is supposed to last and is advertised as a 6 month supply.

Simple math time- 91,280/6= 15,213.33 calories PER MONTH. By my calculations, (7 days per week, 2000 calories per day) that's slightly more than a WEEKS worth of food, not a MONTHS. It breaks down to a little over 500 calories per day or 1/4 of what you need. Basically, they are providing TWO, 250 Calorie "Meals" per day......the equivalent essentially of a couple of Snickers bars....


Know what you are buying. Someone could easily buy that and think, "Gee, I've got all the food I need for 6 months".....Not even close....Now to be fair, they say these are the entrees, but nobody is going to have 1500 calories of "sides" per day...

Solution: Store real food

Very true. That was my point. A person could easily THINK they were buying 6 months worth of food but it's actually SIX WEEKS worth if that was all they ate. It's a SMALL part of what 6 months of food would look like-  a quarter really of Six months of food, and to your next post- yea, expensive at that for what you get.

That's $31.00 per can

It would probably keep you alive for 6months.

Probably more food than some people in Venezuela eat in a 6 month time period.

2000 calories?  I burn that without physical activity.  You add physical activity and I would probably need 4000 calories a day.  

Starvation diet

It's survival rations, not a full-blown, regular diet, and probably not intended to be your sole source of nutrition for six months.  In a pinch, though, I 'spect you could indeed survive for that long on that many calories.

That being said:

Enhanced.

Anyone storing food long term with the idea that they might really need it....probably isn't planning for a "starvation diet" existence.

A couple of things on the subject.

First, you're correct that calories per serving, and servings per day are a better indicators than claimed "number of days". Another thing you should look closely at is the macronutrients of the food. The vast majority of freeze dried food "kits" like that are mostly carbs and fat. Very little protein, and of that, it's almost all plant protein.

Second, I disagree with the person who said buy real food, kinda. Rotating stored food is pretty challenging for a number of reasons. It requires meticulous tracking of what you have and what you eat. It also assumes that you're willing to buy the correct variety to match what you eat, and that your preferences stay consistent, as well as your consumption rate. Food ends up going bad, or you decide you don't like "beans and weenies" anymore, so you're stuck with 15 #10 cans of it. I've lived that life, and it's huge pain in the ass.

Unless you're able to seriously rotate your food, which is much harder than you think, you should buy freeze-dried foods sufficient to meet your goals. 90 Days is what I'd suggest, which is a shitload of money and space. The math is pretty simple, as others have mentioned. I would suggest you use calories and price per calorie to find the best deals. Also, as I mentioned earlier, you'll want to buy freeze dried meats separately.

You can buy the large kits to make up 65% of your caloric needs, then augment it with 35% meat, as an example.

Here is one example.

That is 343,920 calories.

For one person to last 90 days on 2000 calories per day, you'd need 180,000 calories. Of that, you'd need 117,000 of non-protein calories, which means this "kit" would feed nearly 3 people for 90 days, with meat augmentation. You'd still need 63,000 calories of protein.

This would cover that, for one person.

The extra calories would make up for the few thousand you'd be missing from the 340k in the previous kit.

All in all, you'd be looking at around $9,099.96 to purchase 3 months of food, for 3 people, that would last for 20+ years in storage.

That's honestly pretty reasonable for that level of insurance, and it's buy and forget. Then you just have to figure out where to put it.

In any case, my experience and opinion of this is worth precisely what you paid for it.

We had the same experience. It was really more trial and error on technique and learning what works and what doesn't.

Had we been required to "learn to farm" in order to survive, we'd have starved for the first 3-4 years.

Yup, you need both. 

We may or may not have 4 chest freezers full of real food (meat), plus 2 fridge/freezer combos, plus the pantry, plus the root cellar, plus the dry good stored in LTS, which may/may not include 4 barrels of grains and stacks of other stuff.

The way I see it, you need to have ideally at least 1 year of emergency food. Should SHTF, I would not want to be out being an easy target working the gardens. The first year should sort out lot. Also, shit happens where you loose an entire crop. 

I do like to keep a lot of MREs though. As in 2 cows, almost 100 chickens, 2 pigs...... Come fall we would be able to ration our food on hand for about 3 years, longer on a starvation diet. 

After while, it is no longer about having stocks of stuff on hand, its about living the lifestyle of fresh real whole foods and SEASONAL cooking. The massive storage just goes with that. Up here, you get about 1 month of big harvest, then the rest of the year is winter or still growing. You need a year on hand just to get through!

This makes much more sense in this context.

It's much easier to rotate food and use your own as stores when you're living off it as a primary source.

We struggled because we have a family of 5, and rotating through 3 months of store-bought food was difficult-impossible.

For your normal working mom/dad raising kids, working full time, barely having time to cook-etc, it makes much more sense to buy and store freeze dried. Then again, as others have said, that's not a long-term solution.

We have the ability to produce larger portions of food, but are in what would be considered "maintenance mode" with the fields and livestock. We don't lean on any of it for a primary food source, and it would take months to get a point where anything would produce enough to start living on.

No argument from me; that's why I said "enhanced" rather than "fixed".

I've been working on it for over fifteen years, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm not sure we wouldn't starve if completely left to our own devices.  It is an eye-opening lifestyle.

I do wish more people would take an interest, though.  I think many of our problems today come from a slow degeneration of our instincts, and the skills, to be able to provide for ourselves.  We've become almost 100% interdependent upon each other, society and government... to the detriment of us all.  It is shocking how many people don't have the first clue of how to feed themselves without a grocery store or fast-food joint.

Those are damn near Gander Mountain prices

I don't see anything in that "Deal" that can't be bought as ingredients and stored for a whole lot less than $1200 and a lot less salt.

Chickens, raised bed gardens, small fodder system, small hydroponic microgreens system and ammo fort of mountain house I can last awhile on my own ,1/4 acre city lot.

Clicked ad, looked at nutrition label on the nutrition and ingredients tab. Your math is what you want it to be, not what they used. 
The clue you should have used when running numbers is it tells you the number of servings RIGHT above where it gave the total number of calories. 

Concur.  MH is notorious for high sodium content.

Have you actually done that? I mean, really lived it?

Because it's not as easy as you think.

Go on.