Nutristorage: Cheap Eating for Doomsday

I spent the last several days in Clarkston, Washington for work. My boss and his family put me up at their place for two nights and fed me. All this and a paycheck, too? It would be tough to beat the job I've got these days.

They sent me away with some food, too. I've got a big Tupperware container full of homemade cookies, several cans of food that they had purchased and decided they would never get around to eating, and a few packets of freeze dried food.

Freeze dried food? Yep, all from here: Nutristorage.

Nutristorage sells a bucket of freeze dried meals, 55 mylar pouches full of ingredients that only require water to prepare, each of which provide 5 servings. This works out to 275 servings, the cost of which is roughly $110 (and for you veggies out there, these are 100% vegetarian meals).

My boss and his wife disagree as to the flavor and quality of the Nutristorage meals - he likes them, she does not. I'm up for trying any food, so I asked if I could sample a few. They sent me away with a packet of Western Stew, Corn Chowder, and Rice Lentils.

I decided to try the Western Stew and to add one pound of hamburger to it (I'm not a veggie). I browned the hamburger in a pot along with some garlic powder, then added the seven cups of water needed for the Western Stew packet and brought it to a boil. I dumped in the packet, added some black pepper, and then I turned the heat down and covered the pot. Twenty minutes later, I was ready to render a verdict...

...it's good!

The flavor of the product is a bit dull, so I added some cayenne pepper sauce to my bowl. I ended up eating three bowls of the stew, which I thought would probably use it all up, but to my surprise I discovered that I had two servings left (one bowl here is two standard ladles full; when they describe a "serving" on their packaging, they mean a real serving, not a French restaurant sized "serving")!

Based on the current asking price of a Nutristorage bucket, each serving costs roughly .40 cents U.S. I paid $1.98 for the pound of beef that I added, which divided by five also equals about .40 cents. As such, each serving of the Nutristorage Western Stew plus ground beef equals just .80 cents! If you don't pig out and eat more than one or two servings at a time (which I do just about every time), you can really shrink your food budget using this stuff. And it may get even cheaper than that depending on which meal you're eating and what you add to it (if you add to it). For example, my next meal will probably be the Corn Chowder with some canned salmon or canned clams mixed in (I don't know what those might cost, so it could be more expensive, but I doubt it would be by much!).

So when the bombs start falling, keep this in mind. A bowl of hot, good food is just the thing you'll need after a long day of fighting radioactive mutants.