Dear Survival Blog,
I have been reading your blog for several years. You have a lot of great information, and I am glad that you are putting this information out on the net. However, I have a couple of questions. I want to start my stocking up, but my family does not eat canned food. Is there an alternative to canned food? I know about MRE’s; would that be a possible solution for our food storage? What do you do when there are items listed on the list of lists that you either don’t eat or don’t have access to? Thank you for your time – H.T.
HJL Replies: We tend to stay away from commercially-canned foods. Several years ago, we began to restrict our salt intake as it was causing my wife considerable issues. We haven’t looked back since. One of the easiest methods to take control is to use fewer commercially-canned foods, as they are generally packed with salt. When we can’t have fresh vegetables in our diet, we generally prefer the texture of frozen vegetables over canned items. Last year, one of our new advertisers came to us with a home freeze dryer. After reviewing it, I couldn’t give it up and have been running it nearly non-stop since the review. The freezers are now just temporary holding space until I can run the foods through the machine. It is expensive, but so is commercially-prepared, freeze-dried foods. If you don’t want to bother with the process yourself, quite a few of our advertisers offer pre-packaged freeze-dried foods as well. I personally don’t care for the MREs (mostly due to the salt content and the massive caloric content of the individual meals), but many people like them. Whatever process you use, you should rotate your stock regularly. We live by the mantra “eat what you store; store what you eat.”