I read a mention over at SurvivalBlog that the Wise lawsuit has come to an end and Wise lost. (Some backstory and details) The gist of the lawsuit, as I understand it, is that Wise said their food would provide enough food for X number of people for Y number of days. Someone with a calculator and a knowledge of human dietary needs must have read the labels on the packaging because it was discovers that the whole X-days-for-Y-people thing only works out if those people are getting Bataan Death March portions and nutrition. Succinctly, on Wise’s schedule you would be getting less calories than many concentration camp prisoners.

What’s going to happen to Wise? Beats me. Maybe they’ll survive this, maybe not. What will be much more interesting is the repercussions throughout the industry. I guarantee you that the guys at Thrive and Mountain House are sitting down with their lawyers and nutritionists and double checking their packaging to make sure they are n’t setting themselves up for a similar problem.

Who got burned in this? Most likely the ‘casuals’. The not-really-survivalists who wanted to make one phone call, order one big pallet of food, and then say they were done with the food storage part of their plans. I’m all for turnkey solutions and one-stop-shopping, but having a backup plan for when the grocery store is empty is a serious enough task that perhaps a bit more homework is needed.Who can you trust? No one. So when ABC Food Co. says their package will feed three people for a month you should…do what? Correct answer: read the labels and do the math. Anyone with basic math skills and a modicum of intelligence would have realized that 450 calories a day is significantly less than the ‘2000 calorie per day’ mantra that’s been drummed into our head by government food label laws. Sure, 2000 calories is a one-size-fits-all approach that isn’t necessarily accurate, but it does at least give us something of a baseline.

Sitting in a bunker for three weeks waiting for the fallout levels to go down? Might get away with less calories. Snowshoeing to the lake to get water to haul back to your hidden cabin? A lot more calories, please. Even using the somewhat questionable 2000 calorie yardstick, you could see that some of these prepackaged kits were way, way down on calories.

I’m a huge fan of the long-term foods. I’ve got cases of pork chops, spaghetti, corn, apples, chicken, teriyaki, etc, etc. But those are part of a layered approach. I add up all the short-, mid-, and long-term food and thats the yardstick I use. And I use that 2000 calorie baseline as my minimum standard. I have absolutely no intention on subsisting exclusively on freeze-dried food made twenty years ago. I figure on using some of the expensive and exotic stuff (freeze dried meats) to complement the cheap and boring stuff (bulk packed rice and pasta) with the everyday stuff (canned vegetables, jarred sauces, etc.)

Im sure most of you guys are doing the same thing, right? On the one hand we have nitrogen-sealed #10 cans of Pasta Primavera and on the other we have #10 cans of wheat and dried onions from the LDS cannery.

 Moral of the story: avoiding starvation, and the desperate choices forced upon you by the threat of it, is too serious an issue to hand over to some marketing guys at a long term food company. Read the labels, do the math, make the spreadsheet, check other vendors, review other brands. It would be awesome if we really could make one phone call, write one check, and be done with it but that just ain’t gonna happen. Read the fine print, always.

Not Plan ‘A’