“One Month” Food Buckets – Good? Bad?

“One Month” food buckets are everywhere. They are in big-box stores, wholesale clubs, on the internet…

Are they good? Are they bad? Somewhere in between? Is “One Month” the truth? 

“One Month” – Truth or lie?

It’s not that the manufacturers lie, it’s that they’re so anxious to put the best spin on every bit of information the reader can get dizzy from all that spinning.

Most prepper food reviews center on three topics: 1) Taste, 2) Shelf life, based on packaging methods, and 3) Cost. We’re not going to say much about taste; yours isn’t the same as mine anyway. Shelf life is good for every option in this piece. Instead, we look mostly at what the foods can do for you: Nutrition and ease of use. We start by showing you how to sift the grain of useful information from the obscuring chaff of the nutritional labels.

There are a lot of ‘bucket’ kits for emergency food out there. How can you find the ones that deliver what you really need?

The first trick involves what’s used as a ‘serving size’. Some companies list size by dry ingredients, others by how much it is once prepared. Well, is two tablespoons of mix a realistic serving?

The neat thing about this for the companies is that if they want it to sound like there’s a lot of food in the bucket, they just list lots of (really small) servings! One cup prepared is a commonly used serving size. That’s about a third of what most Americans would pile on their plate if having spaghetti for dinner.

In other words, many ‘serving sizes’ are so small they don’t in any way reflect what most readers would think of as a decent serving. 

Spilling the beans

How can you sort this out? Well, if most entrées by a company run around 200 calories (which many do), that’s about 1/10^th of the calories most people would need to not lose weight quickly. If the bucket doesn’t give you 10 of those entrees per ‘day’, it’s not fully feeding you for a day.

But how much do the kit producers expect you to eat? I waded into the information on several kits, and came up with values ranging from 1000 to 1,650 calories/day/person. 1000 calories a day isn’t just a ‘weight loss diet’, it’s considered a starvation level diet in the nutrition community; meaning calorie intake is so low the person isn’t just using a lot of body fat, but is probably burning a lot of their own muscle protein just to survive. 1,650 is considered a moderate weight loss diet; and might keep a smallish woman who was sedentary from losing weight at all. I’d call 1,650 calories a reasonable ‘day’, but not 1000/day.

Well, I doubt there’s really 966 cal from fat in a 968 cal day, as this label claims…but from what I could add up, the 1.6+ g of salt per day and a bit under 1000 cal per day is what they’re offering. Yeah, that would qualify as a food emergency.

Looking deeper

Another aspect to look at is if the packaging allows reasonable use. Most of these ‘bucket kits’ advertise as being convenient pouch meals, just add water and eat!

Well, that can be great, but only if the number of servings per pouch is reasonable. One kit I looked at offered 24 pouches in a one month ’30 day supply’… but that bucket was 236 ‘servings’. So, almost 10 ‘servings’ per pouch is how the math works out. 

This for an emergency food supply, where it’d be unreasonable to expect people to be able to refrigerate and reheat leftovers. I guess you’re expected to fix your pouch of entrée, eat it all in one day, then not eat until noon the next day to make up for it? Hope that pasta dish was really filling! In short, make sure the servings per pouch is a reasonable number to eat at once.

Might work if you were feeding several people by combining several buckets, I suppose.

Other companies are more realistic, with two small servings per pouch and the math showing you the company expects you to eat two servings per meal.

Labels

Here’s a copy/paste from one such product’s nutrition label. I picked one that looked pretty average.

Nutrition

Nutrition per meal is also worth paying attention to (more on what you might look for there in another article). How do you even sort that out with such silly serving sizes? My approach is this: If what they call a ‘serving’ is, say, 200 calories; that’s about 1/10^th of what I need in a day.

Therefore in this case, the servings should average at least 1/10^th of the stuff I need, and not more than 1/10^th of the stuff I don’t want much of. A 200 cal serving with 20% of vitamins and 8% of sodium would be a winner; a 200 cal serving with 2% of vitamins and 31% of sodium is a problem.

When I started doing this with the bucket kits, my blood pressure started to go up just from the reading. Just reading about eating that much sodium was doing it! Many prepper foods have too much sodium, and every kit I looked at was on that list. There’s also a lot of carbs, not much fiber, and ‘ok but just’ protein. Vitamins are often low, minerals worse. Honestly it’s not worse than what many people eat now, but it’s not good either.

What kinds of foods do you get?

So what’s in these kits? It varies of course; but I can tell you this: “Pasta with sauce” dishes will be a mainstay eating from these buckets. Expect a lot of “Cream soups” in your life too; but No Crackers For You! A lot of the calories are liquid. Milk-centered powders abound, as do flavored fruit drinks.

When you start looking at these labels for one month emergency kits, you may be less enthusiastic about their contents. If so, you might look at other options.

The bulk buy alternative

One option is buying bulk long term storage items, such as #10 cans of vegetables, TVP, etc. These bulk buys have a serious downside of taking more preparation. Most are not just ‘add water and eat’. It’s not too bad though. They’re often ‘mix a little from three different cans, add water, and eat’. 

The bulk cans have serious upsides too. You can get a lot more fruits and vegetables, in addition to the ‘pasta and sauce’ as so many bucket entrees are. It’s easier to up the protein too, by adding more TVP to the casserole and soup type foods. You can stock some crackers and canned bread. I suspect people would really miss those on the bucket diets. 

Food’s much cheaper in the cans. It’s also easier to customize your food supplies to meet special needs, such a allergy avoidance or a diabetic or hypertensive diet. (There is way less salt in most bulk foods!) You can also get a lot more variety in the diet by combining the bulk foods in different ways; and that’s a big deal in the long term.

These ‘big can, simpler ingredients’ products take more prep, but add versatility and have better nutritional profiles, especially for persons with high blood pressure who probably don’t need 5 g of salt per day.

In fact, here’s Salty’s idea for a prepper business, as a gift to you: Figure out how to mix and match the offerings of various food packagers, provide combos and recipes with clear and helpful nutrition information, and help your customers get the combos. I bet it would sell.