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Testing 3 Different Emergency Foods (So You Don't Have To)
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May 21, 2024
Not all emergency food is created equal. That was clear to see based on the taste, convenience, and pricing of the 3 different brands of emergency food I tested for this video! The Food in This Video Mountain - Costco (in-store only) Be Ready - https://goto.walmart.com/c/1723429/565706/9383?veh=aff&sourceid=imp_000011112222333344&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.walmart.com%2Fip%2FAugason-Farms-BE-READY-1-Week-1-Person-Emergency-Food-Supply-Survival%2F151110890%3Fathbdg%3DL1600%26from%3D%2Fsearch Ready Hour - https://www.mypatriotsupply.com/collections/short-term-food-storage/products/1-week-food-supply-ammo-can Pantry Preparedness is a trademark of Income School LLC, an Idaho Limited Liability Company
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0:00
Hello, my friends. Today I want to share with you some interesting things I learned
0:05
testing some emergency food. Emergency food, right? This is something that a lot of us are
0:12
concerned about making sure we have plenty of. But there's kind of different situations for
0:16
emergency food. There's the, there's maybe some kind of emergency or maybe the emergency is just that
0:22
like I lost my job or, you know, can't provide income. So we need to live off of food storage
0:27
food that we've set aside for emergency situations. And a lot of us have food storage
0:34
Then there's emergency food like there's been an emergency. I have to leave my home now
0:40
And so I have food that I've literally put into like a 72 hour kit bag that's ready to just hit the road and go
0:47
And then there's kind of in between, right? There's the emergency food that maybe I'll just use it for camping and backpacking too
0:54
and just make sure that I have a regular stock of it that, you know, maybe you know, maybe it's like a weak supply of food in case there was some kind of emergency, right
1:02
Maybe we just can't get food from the store and we just need some food
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Maybe we do need to load it up and leave and take it with us. But, you know, it doesn't have to just be what you can fit in a 72 hour kit
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So there's kind of those different scenarios. And based on those scenarios, there's a lot of different kind of emergency foods out there
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And I've seen a bunch of them, right? I walk through the aisles at Costco
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If you're a Costco shopper, you may have seen this before. This is the Mountain House Adventure Meal Kit
1:30
It's not even really like listed or labeled as like emergency food
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but it's a really good use case for emergency food. So let me tell you a little bit about this first
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With the Adventure Meal Kit, what you're getting is essentially four days worth of food
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So you get four breakfasts, two granolas, two biscuits and gravy. You're getting nine kind of lunch and dinner type meals
1:53
Okay. So you kind of have like an extra one in there, I guess. It's kind of weird that it didn't work out to be exactly four days
1:59
There's like one extra meal that's included. So kind of an interesting thing there
2:04
With the Adventure Meal Kit, where it is kind of typical camping food, right
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It's these packets of food that's freeze dried in individual packets. The packets are the milar material
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You just open them up, remove the oxygen absorber, and usually pour in boiling your hot water
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So that's all you need to be able to do is generate some hot water. So if in your emergency stuff you have a lot of water, you have a lot of water
2:26
a camp stove and you have access to water, you can prepare these meals and they're super easy
2:31
Each one of these is a couple servings and, you know, legitimately it can be a couple servings
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It can be enough food to satisfy maybe two people, but realistically, based on like a 2,000
2:43
calorie diet, you really should eat the whole thing yourself. So there's that
2:48
I guess if you had kids, you could split one of these between two kids easily enough
2:52
When I'm camping, it's usually more food than I want to eat, but I'm, you know, I'm camping. really it calorie wise you should eat it then there's like the granola where you
3:00
just add cold water and eat it like cereal right away and it's pretty good
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right okay so that's what you're getting with the Adventure Meal kit four days
3:07
worth of food it comes out to being 1,650 calories per day that's kind of what
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you're getting with this so it's not even a 2,000 calorie diet the next one I
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came across on the website my patriot supply.com this is the one
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week food supply. It fits in an ammo box, which is actually super convenient. It does have
3:31
like a rubber seal, right? So it makes it water resistant. And it's just a nice convenient
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carry case. One week's worth of food for one person. Pretty cool. And it's this ready hour brand
3:43
The meals, though, I didn't realize this. I assumed, and this was not a fair assumption
3:49
this is just me was assuming, right? As emergency food, it would be kind of like with the mountain house
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it'd be freeze-dried food. It's not, right? This is just meal kits where in most cases you just
4:03
add it with water, but like the mac and cheese here. In fact, all three of these meals that
4:09
I tested out that I tried, I didn't try all the meals in the box yet, but all three of them
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you had to add it with water and then actually cook it like on the stove for a certain
4:19
amount of time. The oatmeal was only like three minutes, but the others were 20. This is 20 minutes
4:25
Mac and cheese is 15 to 20 minutes. So it takes a little bit more, right
4:30
You can still do it in a camp stove, but it takes a little bit more
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I going to talk a little bit more about the differences in these and sort of how they how usable they were in just a minute But I just wanted to introduce you to that You get a full week supply and with the ready hour
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You do get a full 2,000 calories per day. So you're getting more energy consumption
4:52
And it's, again, a full week in a convenient bag or a convenient case. The third one here, this is the Be Ready brand
5:00
This is, I came across this literally just at Walmart. Okay? they just sell it at my Walmart
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You can buy it on their website. It's really cheap, right? It's the cheapest one here
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In fact, this whole thing is about $20. And that's another, it's a weak supply of food for $20
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Okay? But it's very similar to the ready hour. It's not freeze-dried
5:23
You know, here you get the oatmeal. You have to cook it for two to three minutes with just kind of like your instant oatmeal
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Except instant oatmeal packets, you just add it to boiling water. But in this case, you cook it in the water
5:34
water for two to three minutes. You got some like, this is soup. I had to put it in a bag because
5:39
this one didn't have a zipper to zip it back closed. It's weird. Most of them do, but this one
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didn't. Or like this one, this is a creamy chicken flavored rice. So pretty cool there
5:52
So I did some testing. I made three meals, three different meals of each of these
6:00
and I tried them myself, but I also shared them with four of my friends
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And basically, I just had each person write down a number, one through 10
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One meaning from the very first bite, I can't stand it. 10 meaning, I would like to go home and eat this for dinner right now
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That would be fantastic. And so every single one of them gave me that
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And then they gave me some notes. And, of course, I did the same thing. But also in the process, I made some observations just about the user
6:30
ability of each of these in an emergency situation. So first things first, let's talk about
6:35
the taste test. Of all the foods here on the table that we tried, the least favorite was actually
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it was a tie between the two oatmeal from the two different, the be ready and the ready hour. And I'll tell you why
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The reason that it was the least favorite was because it tasted incredibly plain. Now, it wasn't
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supposed to taste incredibly plain. Both of these have flavoring mixed in with them. The problem is
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that even though we kind of shook them up and tried to get some of the sugar to spread throughout
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it didn't spread evenly. And so there's still like more sugar at the bottom of these. And you would
7:13
say, well, that's your fault. If you were to just make up the whole packet, that would, you'd be able to get all the flavoring out. But since we chose to only get out like a half a cup
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or a third a cup at a time to make an individual serving of each of these, we couldn't
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We couldn't get the actual flavoring to be dispersed evenly enough to make it taste right
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And so some of the flavor, some days you're going to end up eating way too sweet oatmeal
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and some days you're going to end up eating really, really plain and bland oatmeal. And that's one of my problems with both of these kits and the ways that they're set up
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This oatmeal, and I think even this oatmeal in both cases, yeah, this is your breakfast
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for the whole week. it's in a single packet and not individual servings
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And so you have to divvy it out. Nobody's going to make oatmeal, mix it all up at once, and then eat cold oatmeal for the
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rest of the week that's been sitting for five, six, seven days
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That's not how you eat oatmeal. You eat it when it's fresh, otherwise it's extra nasty
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So that's a problem for me. You have to take out just one serving at a time
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But again, in order to make that work, you have to do a great job of mixing it all in
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And that was actually the case to some extent with all of them in these two kits because each one
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of these bags is intended to be multiple meals, multiple servings. And so you had to scoop some out and not just mix up the whole bag
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A little bit problematic. Whereas with these, the Mountain House, you just open up one packet, pour in some hot water
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and that is your one meal. And you have enough individual packets
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uses up a little more packaging. I get that, but you have enough individual packets to last all your meals
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And so you eat food that was prepared fresh. So that was the first thing
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The least favorite was the oatmeal, but it's not entirely fair because the oatmeal really
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wasn't, probably wouldn't have been that bad if we'd actually gotten all the flavoring. Okay, let's talk about what people really liked
9:16
The most preferred meal on the table across you know everybody was actually from this B ready this ultra bee kit and it was the creamy chicken flavored rice believe it or not
9:28
It's pretty good. It's basically kind of like a rice errone packet and had good flavor
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The Ready Hour had a version of this. In fact, it's called exactly the same thing
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creamy chicken flavored rice. The difference is this one tasted really bad. Nobody liked it. In fact
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it was one of our least favorites. In fact, yeah, it's the second least favorite to the plain oatmeal
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Nobody was a fan of this, unfortunately. The next favorite was actually a tie. It was between the
10:01
chicken terriaki for Mountain House, and then they also had a chili mac, which seemed a little
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surprising to me. When I see chili mac, I'm usually like, I'm not sure I'm going to want to eat that
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right? But it was actually really good. So the chicken terriaki, this had actual like ingredients in it
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actual chicken, actual vegetables that I could see. Peppers and onions, carrots, like I could actually see them, green peas
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The chili mac was really good too. I'm usually concerned with a chili mac
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And honestly, I even wrote on mine, if I ate that for dinner when I was like camping or ever
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And then I went to bed, I would definitely end up with heartburn. That's one of my concerns with chili mac as like a camping food
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It's always one of the ones included in the kits. And I'm always like, I'm not sure that's going to be a great idea
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But I digress. Okay. Now, I will say that the granola is actually really good too
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In my taste test, this dragged it down because we didn't eat it fast enough
10:59
We were doing taste testing, right? So we were kind of divvying it up. This says right on it, enjoy immediately
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It's kind of like cereal. If you add milk to a bowl of cereal and then let it sit for 10 minutes, it gets kind of gross
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It's kind of how the granola was. It wasn't very good. but I've had the Mountain House granola before several times, and it's actually one of my favorites
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You just add some cold water and just eat it right away. So that dragged down the score a little bit
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So let's talk a little bit about overall scoring between the three. Again, each one had three meals, one breakfast, and then kind of a lunch, two lunch dinner type meals
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And I tried to be similar in terms of the kinds of foods I got
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It's the most similar meals, right? So in the case of here, I had a chicken flavored rice from each of these
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This one I had a soup and this one was like a mac and cheese. I had a chili mac, a chicken terriaki, and then the breakfast had granola
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They didn't have an oatmeal. And score-wise, taste test. This won. It was the best
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And honestly, it probably would have won by more if we'd eaten the granola fast enough. But in second place and not that far behind was actually the chicken
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cheap, Walmart, B-ready meal kit. So flavor-wise, it's not a bad, not a bad thing. We didn't like
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honestly, the mac and cheese was also quite gross. Somebody wrote on it, how do you mess up mac and
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cheese? The cheesy stuff ended up having kind of a gritty texture to it. The noodles, in order to
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took it the amount of time that it said, the noodles were actually overcooked. Macaroni noodles
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usually only take more like nine or ten minutes. I know I've made a lot of math. and cheese before. So the 15 to 20 is too much. I don't know why they say to do that
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And again, this one just had a really weird, the creamy chicken flavored rice had a really
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weird, weird flavor to it. Just didn't like it. Not the preferred. Now we got to talk a little
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bit though about some of the other factors. Like I said, the only one here that gives you 2,000
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calories a day for a seven day meal kit or any day meal kit is this one, the ready hour
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The others do not give you that. The Adventure Meal Kit gives you 1,650 calories a day
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And this B-ready kit, it does say it's for a week. It's only 1,263 calories per day
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It's a bit light for any sort of like longer-term situation. For a week, you might get by on that, but most of us adults are going to end up losing weight
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in that kind of emergency situation and probably not be able to do as much physical activity
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as we might need to do in an emergency. Like I said, these two are both seven day meal kits
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This one only cover you for about four with one extra lunch or dinner meal
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The next thing I wanna talk about is shelf life. These two tout a 25 year shelf life
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I assume just because they're sealed and packaged in mylar, they're out of the sun
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they out of the air they have oxygen absorbers so it last 25 years These being freeze dried but also in these bags and free from oxygen and free from the sun these had this has an
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expiration date out about 30 years. So the shelf life on it from the time it's
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manufactured, I assume to be 30 years based on the expiration date on this box
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Okay. So freeze-dried food will last you a little bit longer but there's
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another factor we have to consider and that factors the price. Given that these
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aren't for the same amount of time. I decided to break out the pricing on a per day basis
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So let's talk here. The mountain house here comes out to $19 per day for your food. That's quite
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a bit. It's a lot to spend on food. For having an emergency kit with enough food for a whole
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week, I'm okay spending a little bit more money on that, especially if I know the food's
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going to be edible, that my kids will eat it. I'm okay spending a little bit more money
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but that it definitely is more. The ready hour, on the other hand, came in at only $11.30 a day
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That's actually quite a bit less expensive. But comparing that to this be ready kit from Walmart
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I know it doesn't come in an ammo box, but this one's only $2.80 a day
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That's just incredibly inexpensive. I didn't get to try the fetichini Alfredo
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I wonder if that's any good. But so far, actually, the meals that we tasted were good
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with the exception of the oatmeal that tasted plain because again, the seasonings aren't divvied out
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on a daily basis and you're not gonna make a week's worth of oatmeal at once
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And again, same is true for all these other meals. So this is way cheaper
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Let's talk because you don't get as many calories per day here. So let's talk about price per thousand calories
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So that'll kind of level the playing field now here for the amount of food you actually get for the price
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This one here is $11.51 per thousand calories. This one is only $5.64 per thousand calories
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So again, about half the price of this for your calories. But this one's only $2.26, less than half of what this one costs
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So there you have it. That's the comparison between these different emergency foods
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Do whatever is going to be best for you and what's going to be most convenient for you
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Something like this is easy to grab and take with you, but just know that if you're going
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to take something like that in an emergency where you've got to go and you're going to go and on the road, you better make sure that you have some, at least a pot that you can boil water in
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and a stove that can handle it. Here, as long as you can heat up water, you don't necessarily
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have to have like a pot to cook in, as long as you can heat up water. And if you have like a jet
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boil type stove, it's going to have that built in so I can just heat up a bunch of water
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you know, fill up a bunch of my family members bags with, put some water in each one and
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we're done. I don't have to cook up an entire pot worth of food
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Just something to keep in mind. But again, if you're looking to do this on a budget, I would absolutely go with that
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So that's where we're at. That's where I'm at. I'm probably going to be using this more just because I know it's going to be much more convenient
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This you can pick up at Costco. They don't sell it on their website, but you can pick it up in the warehouse
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I've seen it at multiple different Costco's in a few different states, so hopefully you can get it
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This by far, by the way, is the best deal I've ever seen on like freeze-dried camp food
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You go buy it like at a sporting goods store, even Mountain House brand. It's going to cost you more
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The ready hour you can pick up at my patriot supply.com. It does come in an ammo box
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Or you can buy an ammo box and buy this at Walmart. They do, I believe, sell it on the website
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I will put a link to both of these in case you happen to be interested in either one
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I'll make sure I include that here in this video. This channel is all about helping you be prepared no matter what life
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has to throw at you. Preparedness means more than just having lots of food and more
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than having lots of gear. It means knowing how to use those things and it also means
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just being prepared for any reasonable situation that life could throw at you. And
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that's what this channel is about. I'd love to hear your comments below on what you
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thought about this video as well as other things that you'd like to learn about because that's what I want to make sure I do is share everything that I and the
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people in my life who are also very preparedness focused, everything that we know and
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everything that we can share to help you be more prepared. And I also hope to see you in our next video
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