Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.
Theres a little bit of discussion swirling around the blogosphere about Mountain House and the availability of #10 cans. This has been, as of late, pretty cyclical. About every year and a half some announcement goes up that MH is ‘restricting’ sales of their #10 cans of freeze drieds and all sortsa theories start flying around. Most of them revolve around the company’s entire production being bought up by the government (ours or someone elses) and it is thus a sign of the Great Impending Doom(tm).
Mountain House is s division of Oregon Freeze Drieds (OFD). OFD makes freeze dried (FD) food and sells it under several names, one of them being Mountain House. In addition, OFD also sells freeze dried ingredients to other manufacturers. The chicken in that little cup o’ soup packet? The apples in your instant oatmeal? The strawberries in your breakfast cereal? The blueberries in your granola mix? Yeah, its like that.
They do sell, of course, to the government as well. Probably guys like you and me, preparedness folks, are the smallest portion of the customer base. When production capacity becomes tight who do you think is going to be the guy who gets put on the waiting list? The company that buys $300,000 in freeze dried strawberries every year or the guy who buys $300 of camping food?
This is a bit similar to the magazine situation, though. I can count at least three similar bottlenecks from MH in the last several years. The lesson to be learned? Once the bottleneck is gone, buy what you need so that youre not standing in line with everyone else. I genuinely think about 40% of the people who are complaining about this current bottleneck are people who didnt decide to buy the stuff until they read about the delays. A case of “Huh..I better buy it now since its becoming hard to get” which is definitely not the time to go shopping…for anything.
FD’s may be disparaged as ‘yuppie survivalist food’ but it’s a lot more appetizing most of the time than ramen or rice/beans. Of course, the smart person would buy a little bit of everything and have a mix of FD, retort pouch, rice/bean/grain, and canned foods. Although you could certainly buy a years supply of food that was exclusively FD you’d be laying out a staggering amount of coin. However, if you can afford it, go for it. Canned tomatoes, FD vegetables, retort chicken, stored rice and youd have an excellent meal that covers the major food storage subgroups. Its all about infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Previous posts on the subject:
3/11/2010 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=1429#more-1429
6/26/2009 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=1033#more-1033
9/12/2008 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=622
11/20/2007 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=78#more-78
