I like that they at least have a decent shelf life. I've seen a bunch of these prepper kits that include items with 3-5 year shelf lives, which means you need to be eating your doomsday food regularly and restocking it. That's not ideal since most of this food is designed to keep you alive, not to taste great.
Of course you'll have the same problem with these kits in 24 years, having a year of eating nearly expired lentils and dried cranberries if the world doesn't come to an end.
And of course this kit seems to forget about the 1 year worth of fresh water storage. Hopefully whomever buys it doesn't.
I feel like people who are seriously concerned about this should make an effort to live exclusively how they imagine for at least a week each year. Going through a preliminary dry-run will probably uncover a number of issues, some of which may be bad enough to make all your planning for naught.
> Of course you'll have the same problem with these kits in 24 years
If you use and replace 1/25 of your annual consumption with them each year—about a day's consumption every other month—this is less of a problem (with 3-5 year shelf life, the gradual replacement strategy doesn't work as well.)
> Doesn't seem like you can (easily) buy a 25th of one of the kits
There are similar long-shelf-life food products on the market that aren't kits of the same size; it's true that Costco doesn't sell exact 1/25 increments of the kits (but they do sell a 30-day supply, 30-year-shelf-life kit from the same maker as one of the one-year kits, which lets you do the same rate of replacement with a purchase every two years.)
From the ad copy, the kits appear to be put together from Thrive products: https://www.thrivelife.com. You don't have to buy it $6000 at a pop. Buy a box of dried beans if that's all you want. I've purchased their stuff in the past, not bad for freeze-dried.
Seems a good opportunity for a startup, if they can solve the
problem of how to deliver the stuff without knowing the delivery address (if you are into this, you don’t want anybody to know where your food is)
Such a startup could also offer to take in that 25 year old 1/25th part to give it to a food bank, making the purchase deductible as a gift to charity.
Unfortunately, customers only need to start replacing stuff after years (you may want to replace 1/25th a year on average, but do you really want to start doing that a year after buying this?)
Maybe, I mean it's a very cost-effective “i need to eat but not think about it” alternative to something like Soylent (assuming you have the storage space), so there may be a non-prepper market, but...
> Members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) are taught to build up reserves of food and other resources.
Pointing to a group for whom being preppers is a religious practice (and maybe even a doctrinal obligation) is not support for the idea that the market for a product isn't just preppers.
The Mormons are a great deal more practical about it than these food kits though. Mostly just encouraging canning/home cooking and keeping a rotating inventory of anything that'll keep a few years.
Prepper food isn't really practical unless you've got 100 people to feed and can genuinely use industrial food in industrial quantities.
It’s worth noting that they’ve sold these kits for at least ten-ish years. I remember seeing them on the website and thinking how cool it was that you could buy a year of food as a unit.
I recently re-read the story of James Kim, and got interested in the "toy" question: If I am stuck in a blizzard or a disaster, what should I be worried about? The rule of thumb is I can be cold for 3 hours, be thirsty for 3 days, be hungry for 30 days. There have been stories of people who are stuck in a car in a blizzard for months, didn't eat much and were OK. Being hungry sucks, but it takes a long time for hunger to kill you.
If the wasteland has hazards or hostile people, I need to worry about my physical security so guns with lots of ammos will go a long way too.
So I keep in my car a lighter, an old dumb cell phone that has microUSB lead I can charge easily with my car cigarette lighter or anything that has USB out, a knife, a super bright flashlight, and a first aid kit. I don't store cans of food. That sounds pretty stupid.
What do you think about storing some water in the car? On the one side, it's the most critical resource after wound treatment and shelter - you won't survive more than a few days without it. Also, if you're just semi-hibernating in a closed environment (and possibly cough recycling), you'll need much less water than normal so you can realistically keep enough water for a week or more. On the other side, most "stuck in a car" scenarios (at least in the northern hemisphere) involve rain or snow, and if they aren't and they last a month or more, your water reserve won't save you.
I keep a bottle of water too. Yes, I think realistically the only reason that I'm stuck that way is because of a blizzard. Melting snow is going to be the solution. In any case I think given I don't die right away, the best chance to be found and rescued is to have a radio transmitter device. So the cell phone, even when it doesn't work, is the next most valuable thing. There are tons of stuff we can do with the cell phone or ham radio. Kim was searched for, just that they couldn't find him. I think being searched for is the most realistic scenario if something like that happens to me.
Shouldn't they store things like vegetable seeds or other products you can grow yourself so you're not worried about shelf life, it takes less space and is healthier?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 71.4 ms ] threadRegardless of the motivations, if this gets more people prepared for an emergency, I think it's a good thing.
Of course you'll have the same problem with these kits in 24 years, having a year of eating nearly expired lentils and dried cranberries if the world doesn't come to an end.
And of course this kit seems to forget about the 1 year worth of fresh water storage. Hopefully whomever buys it doesn't.
If you use and replace 1/25 of your annual consumption with them each year—about a day's consumption every other month—this is less of a problem (with 3-5 year shelf life, the gradual replacement strategy doesn't work as well.)
There are similar long-shelf-life food products on the market that aren't kits of the same size; it's true that Costco doesn't sell exact 1/25 increments of the kits (but they do sell a 30-day supply, 30-year-shelf-life kit from the same maker as one of the one-year kits, which lets you do the same rate of replacement with a purchase every two years.)
Gradual replacement is eminently practical.
Such a startup could also offer to take in that 25 year old 1/25th part to give it to a food bank, making the purchase deductible as a gift to charity.
Unfortunately, customers only need to start replacing stuff after years (you may want to replace 1/25th a year on average, but do you really want to start doing that a year after buying this?)
https://ldsblogs.com/9618/mormon-faq-why-do-mormons-store-fo...
Maybe, I mean it's a very cost-effective “i need to eat but not think about it” alternative to something like Soylent (assuming you have the storage space), so there may be a non-prepper market, but...
> Members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) are taught to build up reserves of food and other resources.
Pointing to a group for whom being preppers is a religious practice (and maybe even a doctrinal obligation) is not support for the idea that the market for a product isn't just preppers.
Prepper food isn't really practical unless you've got 100 people to feed and can genuinely use industrial food in industrial quantities.
If the wasteland has hazards or hostile people, I need to worry about my physical security so guns with lots of ammos will go a long way too.
So I keep in my car a lighter, an old dumb cell phone that has microUSB lead I can charge easily with my car cigarette lighter or anything that has USB out, a knife, a super bright flashlight, and a first aid kit. I don't store cans of food. That sounds pretty stupid.
What do you think about storing some water in the car? On the one side, it's the most critical resource after wound treatment and shelter - you won't survive more than a few days without it. Also, if you're just semi-hibernating in a closed environment (and possibly cough recycling), you'll need much less water than normal so you can realistically keep enough water for a week or more. On the other side, most "stuck in a car" scenarios (at least in the northern hemisphere) involve rain or snow, and if they aren't and they last a month or more, your water reserve won't save you.