[icegreentea2]

The DoD procures MREs at about 80 bucks a case of 12. You could probably stretch one MRE per day for survival situations (~1250 calories), though 1.5 or 2 would be much more comfortable. Taking it to be 1 per day, one month is 200 dollars.

MREs have a 3 year shelf life at room temperature, so each person you supplied would need to be topped off every 3 years - so like 65 bucks per person per year. So fits in their current budget, but would displace like... a lot of what they're currently doing.

One month worth is probably also not really worth it from a value perspective? Push down to 5 days of MREs + water per person, and you'd probably capture like 98% of the value.

[vel0city]

> So fits in their current budget, but would displace like... a lot of what they're currently doing

Yeah, right? Like sure, we could just eliminate FEMA and instead use that budget to just hand out MREs. But then they wouldn't be doing their emergency management training and standardization that they do. They wouldn't do disaster housing assistance. They wouldn't be working on hazard mitigation activities.

There's a lot of things FEMA does that isn't just hand out some crackers after the storms pass.

Personally, if my house gets destroyed in a tornado I'd prefer FEMA to come through and cover a hotel for a couple weeks while we figure out what to do rather than just hand me some MREs a year ago that also got destroyed in the tornado.

[dredmorbius]

The recommended shelf life may be three years, but the meals can almost certainly be used long past that point, with only modest degradation.

I'd agree that a month's supply is excessive. Three days to a week would be far more reasonable in most cases. The goal is to tide over until other resources can be found, which in most cases will be a few days.

Where longer-term nutrition is required, far more conventional long-lived foods will be more appropriate: bulk grains, dried beans, canned goods, powdered or dried foods, and freeze-dried foods. These can come from normal household stocks, and simply be rotated as part of normal food purchase and preparation.

Refrigerated or frozen goods will of course spoil quickly without power in most cases (though could be viable for cold-weather climates where cold storage ... comes with the territory).

[dredmorbius]

Not to put undue weight to YouTube's reliability, but there's at least one channel devoted to eating long-out-of-date MREs and other military emergency / survival rations. From as long ago as 1906 (117 years ago):

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=562nQKR3_3M> (1h35m runtime, first bite at 16:24).

There are multiple selections from the 1940s (WWII era), and selections from numerous militaries (US, UK, Canada, Vietnam, China, Japan, Sweden, Israel, South Africa, ...).

<https://yewtu.be/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA>

[dredmorbius]

And ... having developed a new hobby ...

Not all experiences are positive. A 1986 MRE prototype, tested in 2018 (32 years old at the time) is decidedly stale:

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qhCmUoDnzmk>

Watching a sampling of videos might give you an idea of what to watch for in terms of damaged / stale / degraded food. There's also good information on nutritional choices in emergency situations, including "metabolic water", the amount of water that's consumed or released in consumption of carbohydrates and fats (net positive) vs. protein (net negative), as well as caloric density by unit weight (4 kcal/g for protein and carbohydrate, 9 kcal/g for fats), vitamin, and fibre content.

A friend also reports that organisations often sell or auction out-of-date rations which can remain usable for some additional time.

With careful storage (cool, dark, dry place, low humidity, no degradation of packaging), emergency food should store well.

[idlewords]

MREs are not meant to be eaten for more than 21 consecutive days; even eating them for a couple of days will make the diner uncomfortably aware of why they've been given the nickname "Meals Refusing to Exit"

[array-species]

Great points.

Just thinking of MRE and water is narrow, but in my region the most likely broad critical event is total supply chain cut, so it would be a long term shelter in place situation. So I got to think for myself on that point.

For example people in Amish country aren't going to give a crap in the first place and have some of their own supply chains.

I am glad about the alert system test and think it's a great use of funds!