“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
―
Was up at CostCo and beheld this:
Five Day Meal Kit, eh? Hmmm. Lets run some numbers. First, lets grab the data off the back of the box:
So, this is supposed to be five days of food for …I’m guessing one person. Without evidence contrary to that, let’s run with it – five days for one person.
According to the box label, you’ve got a total of fifteen pouches in there. Makes sense, right? Three meals a day for five days is fifteen meals.
The next thing of interest is the caloric value of each meal. This is going to be a tad misleading. Lets take the first item listed on the box…Beef Lasagna. The box says 220 calories. Thats about 1/10th of your daily recommended calories (if you follow USDA guidelines of 2000/k per day). But keep reading…each container is two servings. So, each pouch of that Beef Lasagna is actually 440 calories, or about 1/5th of your daily calories. Slightly better.
So keeping an eye on those calories-per-serving and servings-per-container, you can see that if you add up the entire caloric value of this box you get…an average of 1488 calories per day. Thats about 75% of your daily 2000 calories. And thats 2000 calories for just sitting there doing nothing. Factor in chainsawing downed trees, hanging looters, hauling supplies, etc, etc, and you’ll see that 1488 calories is better than nothing but you better plan on adding a few notches to your belt.
Does that mean that a package like this has no value? Heck, no. I’l take 1488 calories of freezedrieds stored in a 5-gallon-bucket in the back of my truck over the 2500 calories of food that got destroyed/looted/washed away/burned in my house. Something is, usually, better than nothing.
Now, if you took this box, dumped out the pouches and sealed ’em up in a five gallon bucket with some pouches of tuna, packets of oatmeal, instant coffee packets, Gatorade pouches, and maybe a few small cans of Dinty Moore….well…you’re sitting pretty when the dinner bell rings in Heleneville.
The takeaway from this post isn’t that freeze-drieds arent the Perfect Solution. You should already know that. The takeaway here is that you need to read the labels and do the math. Don’t plop down $320 for four of these, stick ’em in a closet, and pat yourself on the back thinnking you, the wife, and kids are now ‘taken care of’.
Two thousand calories per day is a baseline. And there are a lot of people who think that number is of questionable value. Only you know what kinda caloric stockpile will work for you. Run the numbers. Being prepared is sometimes a pain in the butt, but do it anyway. We can all probably stand to miss a few meals and wind up being the better for it, but in a crisis there is very little that calms you down and gets your brain on an even keel more than a tasty hot meal at regular intervals.
So, yeah, pick up some of these at CostCo…at $6 per pouch its not a terrible value. But don’t think youre done once you throw that box in your cart.
I commend to you the Humanitarian Daily Ration for cheap meals with sufficient calories, about 2200 a day, or slightly more, for about 5 bucks a day.
Admittedly, they are meat poor (IOW there is none) and pandering to Third World religious preferences high, but they do work.
I’m sure we’ve ll seen the one year, all you need, kits that give under 900 calories every day.
This is why I love CZ’s blog so much. Before we know how we need to know how much. Amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. Six bucks per pouch is pretty good when a single one at the local hiker snob store is about $15 and $10 on Amazon before shipping. . Food, water, PMs and ammo are looking like pretty good investments right now.
Sounds like the Stalingrad Diet. Or the Dutch Winter of ’44 45 diet.
I read through the Nutrition Facts. That information can be interpreted in several ways. That is the information shown. The information NOT shown is just as important. That one is left to guess smacks of duplicity; it would not be difficult nor costly for MH to add the information required in the consumer’s decision making. This even though it is universally understood that information is necessary. It is left out on purpose.
For risk management, I lean towards reducing or eliminating the unknowns. Risk management enters here because these products are intended for extremis conditions. This is in addition to the typical decisions in determining value, if the product is worth purchasing.
True, something is better than nothing. That’s why I am known to not toss, say a broken mop until a new mop is procured. But this MH something is not your only choice for something in the larder. So I’ll pass on this offering simply because it is not clear just what I would be buying.
You state that “The information NOT shown is just as important.” but you don’t say what information you feel is being left out.
2k calories is enough to make most people fat if they’re not doing anything. Not enough to do much work with, but I think that would be adequate to supply a sedentary body with enough energy to subside. Not enough mass though to make your belly feel full.
Well, yes…..but in the sort of disaster where you’re compelled to break into your food storage it seems pretty likely your going to be anything but sedentary. I don’t think anyone rides out a hurricane or earthquake and then winds up not being pretty physically active in the immediate aftermath…I mean, someone has to be out there clearing trees, moving debris, manning roadblocks, stringing wire, shoveling mud, carrying supplies, etc, etc.