Week 12: Assemble a 72-hour kit, Part 2

This week's tasks:  Add a 3-day supply of food and a change of clothing to your 72-hour kit

Add food to your 72-hour kit:

How much food do you need?  The easiest way to figure that out is to count calories.  An adult needs 2000-2600/day and kids need around 1500-1600 calories/day.  If you are the mother of a nursing baby, click here for more information about keeping backup supplies on hand.  Once you add up your family's total caloric needs for 3 days, you are ready to go shopping - just add up the calories of everything you choose and keep buying more until you get to your total.  Remember that a post-disaster situation will be stressful and being hungry will make it harder to cope.

You have two broad choices for emergency food: (1) Emergency rations designed for long-term storage or (2) Regular, familiar food that has to be rotated regularly.   I have some of both.

Emergency Rations:  There are various options out there.  Here are a couple I'm familiar with.

1. High Calorie bars - These give you a lot of calories/square inch (the package has 3600 calories - inside the foil, they are wrapped in individual 200-calorie units). These particular bars taste like coconut shortbread cookies, but I've also seen lemon-flavored ones. They have a five-year shelf life.  
2. MRE's - These are what military personnel eat in the field.  This site has a large selection.  Keep in mind that the entrees only have 200-300 calories each, so 3 entrees are not a full day of food for an adult.  The 'side' dishes provide the extra calories (mixed nuts, peanut butter, crackers, drink mix, etc).  Shelf life is generally at least five years.

Buy real food I know my family likes:  Look for non-perishable items that have a lot of calories per unit of volume and have a shelf-life of at least six months to a year.  To make rotation easier, I keep my food list in a spreadsheet.  Along with the total calories, I write down the expiration dates so that I can scan the list every six months and replace the things that will expire soon (I wrote about my rotation plan in more detail last week).

Here is my food list for my family of 2 adults, 1 toddler and a baby: Excel spreadsheet, pdf.

Also, remember to include whatever dishes and utensils you will need to eat your food, open cans, etc. If you will need to wash dishes, include dish soap, a large ziploc bag, and dish cloth.

Add clothes to your 72-hour kit:

The Red Cross suggests that your 72-hour kit should include an extra change of clothes, a hat, sturdy shoes, and work gloves.

If you have kids/babies, consider items like blankets, jackets, burp cloths, diapers and wipes, and warm pajamas.  Often, a child doesn't have 'extra' pajamas, jackets, shoes, etc. that fit and can go in an emergency kit where they will rarely (or never) be worn.  I've gotten around this in two ways - for my baby boy, I put his big sister's old things that are too girlish for his regular use in the kit.  For my oldest, I put things in the kit that are a size too big - baggy clothes will work fine in an emergency.   I check the clothes at least once a year when I rotate the food, pull out the stuff she has grown into, and replace it with new stuff that is too big.  Shoes are more of a problem, but flip flops are a good option that are more forgiving if they don't fit right (especially if they are too big rather than too small).  If you have other ideas, put them in the comments.