By M.L. Lewis

Food is the second most important part of your disaster preparedness plan. The average person can only live three weeks without it. Many people have at least three days worth of food put aside for disaster emergencies. This is a good starting point for a beginner prepper.

The next step for more serious preppers is to have three weeks of food in storage for disasters. It’s because of this recommendation we tend to take advantage of the wrong food sales and untrue foodie myths when storing our precious goods.

Snack Cakes

We all know that in a nuclear apocalypse the only things that will survive the blast are Twinkies and cockroaches. As much as I love snack cakes they have a very, very short shelf life.

When Hostess first closed in 2012 I like thousands of people rush to the store to buy the last Twinkies and my favorite Chocolate Chip Mini Muffins. I put them in a cool, dry place with the rest of my food storage and moved on with my life.

When they announced there come back months later I pulled the snack cakes only to discover they were hard as a rock. When I bought new cakes to replace them I tried to vacuum seal them and it was a cream filled disaster. So my best advice is to avoid them.

Dried Pasta

A lot of sites say dried pasta is a good thing to stock up on. Sure it has long shelf life when stored properly, but it requires a lot of water to cook it. One handful of dried pasta requires one quart of water to cook. Once it’s done cooking you can’t really reuse the water for anything since it’s going to be dirty from the starch residue from the pasta. Water is scarce enough without having to use it to cook one thing. Also you can’t bulk cook pasta because when it cools it can become a gooey congealed ball of fat yuck.

Potato Chips

A couple preppers I know stock up on this crunchy snack and I will never understand why. Chips are super high in salt and can increase your chances of dehydration. Plus they are easily breakable making them unable to be transported safely. Similar to the snack cakes they have a very short shelf life and when they go bad they taste off and hard to chew.

Only One Thing

I was talking about disaster readiness with a friend of mine in Florida when a hurricane was approaching her town. She reassured me that she was fine and just bought three cases of canned sausages. I told her she should buy more variety to prevent her body from developing food fatigue.

What is food fatigue? Well, have you ever eaten a food so much that the sight of it makes you sick, that is food fatigue. It occurs when your body can no longer digest a certain food because it’s been overexpose to it. So instead of processing the food the stomach rejects the food violently.

Damaged Canned Goods

Many grocery stores have a certain displays where they put there damaged cans and sell them for half price. You might be think this is a sweet deal, instead of getting eight cans of corn for eight dollars you can get sixteen for the same price. So, the can isn’t pretty but who cares the food is still good right?

Actually, you can get food poisoning, like botulism, from dented cans. The lining in the cans can leak into your food if the can is dented and can lead to lead poisoning. Damaged cans can rust faster causing even more health problems for you.