Do you have Emergency Survival kits?

[moonsky]

Did you make them yourself or buy them? Where did you get them from? I wonder how the food in the kit taste like. Are there any brands that are better than others? How many kits do you have? One for home and one for each car?

http://www.amazon.com/Deluxe-Emergency-Person-Disaster-Survival/dp/B000Y9DENM/ref=sr_1_23?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1300751957&sr=1-23

[Tondi G]

personally I think you can put together something for cheaper and know exactly what the quality is of the items and add additional items for the number of family members you have etc.

I have a feeling those food in a pouch things are not particularly tasty. I think my kids would rather eat a cliff bar or peanut butter or freeze dried fruit etc.

[JElaineB]

I have purchased Mountain House (http://www.mountainhouse.com/) 7-day food kits before (for Y2K :o - I also had a lot of other food storage and emergency supplies then as well). They also have 72-hour food kits. Looks like some stuff is out of stock on their website though. It is basically freeze dried food that some people use when camping. Their food tastes pretty good and you can probalby get it locally if you wanted. We ate most of ours like 8-9 years after we bought it. I should probably buy some more but I haven't gotten around to it. I agree other supplies would be better purchased individually in general, though getting an idea of what to buy from the kits can be helpful.

[geochick]

We have a store called Emergency Essentials near us. I bought a bunch of these:
http://beprepared.com/product.asp_Q_pn_E_FM%20R044_A_name_E_Lemon%20Mill ennium%20Energy%20Bar

bars in different flavors, and had my family do a taste test. I bought enough for 72 hours for my family of these bars (in the flavors we voted on). We also store water. I've also collected all sorts of stuff in bins (on wheels) and in suitcases with wheels. I took a CERT class last fall, and we got a really thorough checklist. I'm almost done buying everything on the checklist.

I don't think there's any real reason, other than convenience, to buying a pre-assembled kit. Plus, you don't know if your family will like the food in it. My kids would rather starve than eat an MRE. That's why we opted for the energy bars in lots of flavors. We don't need gourmet for 72 hours, we just need energy. Bars are really easy to pack in backpacks with bottles of water.

Here's a CERT checklist like the one I've been going through:
http://www.fostercitycert.org/documents/CERTChecklistFullPage.pdf