Eating Our 72 Hour Kits

Eighteen months ago, we put together our 72 hour kits including packets of food. I had just been to a meeting that talked about 72 hour kits and was encouraged by what I learned about the food to put in. This was our menu:

Day 1
1 cereal bar, 1 juice box, 2 cracker pkgs., 1 fruit cup, stew, 1 water bottle, 1 trail mix, 1 fruit snack, 1 hot chocolate, 1 lifesaver package, 2 packages cookies

Day 2
1 oatmeal, 1 juice box, 1 ramen, 1 fruit cup, 1 MRE (meal ready to eat), 1 water bottle, 1 trail mix, 1 fruit snack, 1 hot chocolate, 1 lifesaver package, 2 packages cookies

Day 3
1 pkg poptarts, 1 juice box, 2 cracker pgks., 1 box raisins, can of chicken, 1 water bottle, 1 trail mix, 1 fruit snack, 1 hot chocolate, 1 lifesaver package, 2 packages cookies

When we put our food packets together, we were all excited to eat them. We all thought they looked great and had a good variety of foods that we would actually eat.

This weekend we took out our 72 hour kits and decided to eat them. The plan was to only eat the 72 hour kit food for 2 days (Saturday and Sunday). As it turned out, we were invited out to dinner both those days, so we only ate our kit food for breakfast and lunch each of those days.

I'm going to tell you how it went, but need to put a few disclaimers. First, food should be rotated more than every 18 months. The original plan was to eat it once a year, but the year came so fast, I thought pushing it off 6 more months would be fine. Second, eating all the food for 9 meals in 4 meals isn't really a true representation of how your food would work for 72 hours, but it was eye opening anyway.

Here's how it went. Most of the food was old and stale. The crackers and trail mix weren't very good at all. We each had different MRE's. None of us had eaten them before, so we cooked each of them, put them on the counter and had everyone try them and rank each of them. The ranking system was don't like, ok-, ok, ok+, and good. No MRE got better than an ok from anyone and most were in the ok- or don't like category. The lifesavers were going soft, the fruit cups looked old, but tasted good, the raisins had dried out, the juice tasted like it had fermented. My kids loved the fruit snacks and the oatmeal was a good choice for breakfast. Ramen was the favorite choice for lunch, although everyone wished for some cheese to put in it. Some of the cookies were lemon sandwich cookies and they were a good choice because the lemon taste was stronger than the stale cookie taste. I ended the first day starving and with a headache, and I ended the second day with a stomach ache.

It was a very eye opening experience. We are in the process of reworking our 72 hour kit food and I"ll let you know when I figure out how it will change.

It was a good thing for us to experience this before we actually need to use our 72 hour kits. We're happy we could try it out in a situation that wasn't too extreme.