Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I like to be prepared, and am pulling together food storage and emergency kits for the family. I thought I'd give this a try. Overall it's pretty good, but there are some shortcomings. My family cooked some of the food in this kit for dinner and breakfast, and here are our thoughts. In short, we think it's best suited for people who have a good supply of water and fuel on hand for preparing food, and is better for families (not one person). First, the good: The food is easy to prepare. In most cases it's just a matter of boiling water and adding the package contents. The food is also sufficiently tasty. You can't expect emergency food to taste like "mom's cooking", and this doesn't. But the flavor was good and everybody ate everything without complaint, including my daughter (who can be very picky). We liked the potato soup, and my wife liked the maple outmeal--it wasn't too sweet. There is a sufficient variety of food that it won't get too monotonous. The food comes packaged in tough pouches and a reasonably sturdy, stackable bucket. The food has an advertised 25-year shelf life, and while I'm not going to wait 25 years to verify it, based on what I've seen I believe it. That said, this food kit makes some assumptions, and how useful this kit is depends on how well your situation fits those assumptions. First, it's advertised as a 30-day, one-person supply, but the pouches contain 8-person servings. So if you purchase this food kit for single-person use, you're going to need a way to store the prepared food and keep it fresh for a day, or measure out the contents of the package carefully (and seal what remains--the pouches are not resealable) to prepare one-serving amounts. Personally, with the 8-serving pouches this looks more like a kit for feeding the family for a week, than one person for a month. Second, the kit assumes you're going to have an ample supply of water and fuel on hand. This may not be an issue if you're sufficiently prepared, but if you don't have a decent supply of water or fuel on hand (some of the food reauires 8-10 cups of water and 20 minutes of cook time), this kit is useless to you, because you have no way of boiling water. Third, the kit appears to assume you'll have a working refridgerator! There's one pouch of instant milk (20 servings), the instructions of which indicate the milk should be chilled after reconstitution.