Sunday, October 10, 2010

Emergency Supplies

I purchased the below MRE's just to see what they are, what their shelf life is and what sort of meal they would make.



These are paks offered by Emergency Essentials out of Utah. Each pak contains:

Main entree
Side dish
Dessert
Drink mix
Cracker or bread
Peanut butter
Jam or jelly
Two pieces of hard candy
wet wipe & napkin
Plastic spork (spoon/fork)

There was also a salt and a pepper in each pak.

The main entrees in these four paks were: Chicken with tomatoes and feta cheese; Marinara sauce with meatballs; Cheese Tortellini in tomato sauce; Spaghetti with meat sauce.

The side dishes were: Cornbread stuffing; Refried beans; Refried black beans; Garlic mashed potatoes.

The desserts were: Fig bar; Fig bar;
Chocolate covered chocolate chip ranger bar; Apple-cinnamon flavor energy bar.

The drinks mixes were: Sugar-free Raspberry; Pink lemonade; Sugar-free raspberry; Another sugar-free raspberry.

The cracker/bread option in all four was wheat snack bread, great for the peanut butter and jelly.



Pretty fancy eating for somebody in a survival situation.

Whether these were actual military MRE's I do not know, and I couldn't find a use by/expiration date anywhere. Perhaps the sealed pouches in the cardboard boxes have them.

Each pak had an MRE heater to heat up your main entree which required a bit of water to activate, but no cooking was required for any of the items.

My plan would be to take each main entree and use it as a "sauce" on a bowl of rice. This would flavor the rice and double the mileage out of each entree.

I am looking at cheaper options for longer term periods, since paks like these would be in our BOB's. Buying a bunch of the MRE Main entrees would be much cheaper and go further, especially with the added rice option.

At any rate, these food paks seem to be pretty neat items to have around in case of a unexpected emergency.

My next step to to try a couple using my emergency charcoal/wood stove to prepare the rice and see how good these things are. If they're edible, great! I'm not looking for world-class taste sensations here, just nutritional food that you can swallow without puking, although good taste is somewhat of a priority.

Let you know how this turns out.

2 comments:

Erik said...

as far as the MRE being military issue, they don't have the correct outer pouch. so, i think that the manufacturer is just using excess production for the civilian market. could be wrong, but all the rest of the packaging appears the same.

Bob said...

Thanks Eric.

That helps me to think that this stuff is at least recently packaged.

no taste test yet...