Civilian MREs

Our civilian MREs arrived in the mail on Thursday. We ordered from MREFoods.com last Friday, so shipping speed wasn’t too bad (< 1 week). As I mentioned on a previous post, civilian MREs have crazy long shelf lives and contain everything you need for a meal in a single package. Our house is generally 68 F to 80 F, depending on the season, so these should last for 3 to 9 years.

They are also calorie rich, which is important in an emergency situation where you are likely under a lot of stress and doing a lot of physical movement. However, they are incredibly unhealthy for normal people. We’re talking 50% of your daily sodium, 85% of your daily fat, thousands of calories… Like I said, great in an emergency (or even for camping), but not something you want to eat everyday.

Anyways, Becca agreed to eat MREs for dinner yesterday so we’d get to see if they are a viable option for our 72 hour kit. We opened the packages and began to heat our meals. The instructions are pretty straight forward. You add a packet of water into a pouch, wait 15-ish minutes, and BAM! Hot meal.

We explored the rest of the goodies while waiting for the main course to heat. We had pop tarts, raisins, saltines with peanut butter, and oatmeal cookies. There was even lemonade drink powder. The oatmeal cookies were a little hard, and we should have diluted the drink powder more, but overall it was filling and tasty.

The main courses were also pretty good. Definitely not on par with a home cooked meal, but definitely edible for camping or an emergency situation. There was plenty of food for the three of us. We even had left overs, which in an emergency would be great for snacks or to save for breakfast. We’ll definitely be including these in our 72 hour kits.