What caught my eye was the expiration date: "Best by 10-20-11." I bought the Chunk Light Tuna in Sunflower Oil ("Fresher Tasting! No Draining.") 6.4 ounce packs for $2.16 each. I also picked up ten 2.6 ounce packs for $.86 each. Bought ten of each as that was all the disposable income I could afford. Most of my "disposable income" is already disposed before the check gets here.
Still, they are handy, require no can openers and are as light a package of tuna as you are going to find. And they last almost three years.
If any other Three Percenters have other ration ideas (or better yet, know where I can get these cheaper than WalMart), please post them here.
11 comments:
Another tried and true (I still have edible buckets from Y2K days that are good for another 10 years or so in stable temperatures) form of cache food supplies is the old 6 gallon bucket with wheat or beans or rice with a vacuum seal. In the bucket, you can also put a vacuum sealed bottle of Tobasco, & pound of salt & a pound of pepper. All you need to season beans or rice, especially if you make your bean selection "red".
Each 6 gallon bucket, when properly prepared and all oxygen taken out of it through packets or the dry ice method, will provide several months of food for two people. Placed inside another container large enough keep it from being crushed by geological shifts and placed below the frost line, it's a great way to ensure you have food at either a rally point enroute or in your main AO.
Just a thought....
Sorry ~ I did not know where to post this. Just making sure you are aware that Congress is attempting to pass another restrictive gun law.
H.R.45 is demanding that each and every gun owner be federally licensed; pass a test, submit a photo, and be finger printed.
If this law passes, it will become illegal for a father to pass on a hunting rifle to his son... or to buy a shotgun from your friend.
And to add insult to injury, all licensed gun owners must report to the Attorney General a change of the address within 60 days.
Failure to comply will earn you two to 10 years in prison.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-45
Idahoan instant patatos, in the individual packets. Small,lite,Doesn't freeze in cold climate. Comes in different favors. Personal favorite recipe is to add bacon bits, dried onion bits, and extra water to my jetboil cup for a tasty patato soup......mthead
Two words: Spam. Singles.
I've seen them range from $.99 (Fred Meyer/Kroger) to $1.29 (Safeway). They're about 1/4 the amount of food in a can of spam, but they're vacuum packed in a bag. The ones I bought six months ago are dated best by 6/11.
Thanks for all of your work and I look forward to the rest of Absolved!
I've been looking at this problem for a while. I bought a couple MREs at a gun show for $5 each and couldn't bring myself to finish them, so I felt challenged to find a better solution.
Uncle Ben is a great man, as he makes microwaveable rice packets in multiple flavors. They're $2 at my local grocery store or $1.50 at WalMart.
Ronzoni makes pasta packets that I can get on sale at the local grocery store for $2.50.
I can also get pudding cups, cheese crackers, dry cider mix, hot cocoa mix, and lemonade mix, all for less than 67¢ per piece.
Put all of this (or some combo of it) together with a spork, napkin, and flameless ration heater from the surplus store in a zip-loc bag and you have a better homemade meal than what the troops eat, for less than you would pay for a discount MRE at the gun show.
I have been making homemade MREs for awhile. You can get the tuna packs on sale a little cheaper sometimes. I also buy the Zaterans pouches which is rice in a sauce and some come with meat too. Usually a couple of bucks each. I invested in a seal a meal and went a little crazy. Crackers, individual packets of instant mashed potatoes with salt and pepper added, cream of wheat with dehydrated milk added pinch of salt and a couple of sugar packets liberated from Burger King. The little cans of potted meat for .35 each dumped into the mashed potatoes does add a little meat flavor, tabasco is a must. I always carry 2 canteen cups with the risers for cooking. I also buy good instant coffee I make small packets with my seal a meal and add two teaspoons of coffee( I like mine strong) and a proper amount of a flavored creamer ( ya gotta experiment) makes a fine cup of "joe" in my canteen cup. I have also used this same idea for my medical kit and have packets with antibiotic cream and pills etc carefully labelling them with permanent marker. Saves money and space, plus it is all water proof.
Restaurants are great sources for containers for bulk foods. Buckets, 1 gallon plastic containers with screw lids are all for the taking if you ask. Big reataurants buy in bulk and throw almost everything in the dumpster. Prep cooks if you give em a few bucks will save this stuff for ya. The bulk oil containers in cardboard cover would make excellent water containers if they will save the lids for ya. Olive drums are really neat they will hold about 25 lbs of rice. That should get ya thinkin.
The "best by" date is always very conservative. You probably have two-four years after the "best by" before you would be advised not to eat it.
There are tons of similar items now available, stew, soups, etc. all in lightweight little plastic packages, that keep for years. Any grocery store will have them.
As for other items that provide food for even cheaper, and are lighter, good ol rice (worked for the Vietcong), and good ol oat meal keep long, long time, are light-wight and can be cooked up over a small fire or even with heat tabs.
You can go to any Mormon cannery and buy big bags of oatmeal for less than $15.00 and large boxes of rice packed away in plastic bags. Those will keep fine for a couple years. Want longer term storage? If you have Mormon friends, you can go along and use the cannery to can it all in #10 cans. Those will keep 30 years!
you can carry a bunch of both rice and oatmeal on your back without hardly a notice and then supplement them with whatever else you can scrounge up.
The vietcong lived on cached rice, and supplemented it with scrounged vegetables and whatever fish and meat they could also russle up, and often even hunted and trapped small game for some supplemental protein. But rice was their mainstay.
rice is dirt cheap, so no excused for not having several hundred pounds socked away, and not all in one place. cache, cache.
Yes, food is vital, and denial of food has been used as a weapon all through history.
As Hank Williams Jr. put it in his song, A Country Boy Can Survive:
"Because you can't starve us out,
and you can't make us run,
cause we them ol' boys raised on shotguns
… we can skin a buck, we can run a trotline,
and a country boy can survive."
Here is the bad ass video to that song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4s0nzsU1Wg
Watch it for a lift of your spirits.
Hello Friends.
I'm new to the prepping mindset for when TSHTF situations but I've learned alot over at Frugal Squirrels forums. They have an impressive knowledge base from preppers, survivalist, etc.
No Mom, it may earn me a burial if they come to enforce it on me. But I will do my best to make sure it is a mass grave type of thing.
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