Food: Nutritional and Caloric Needs

Daily Caloric Requirements

Generally, your goal for your emergency household food supply is to meet the daily caloric requirements of every member of your household, including pets. In general, these are as follows:

Adjust Calories Based on Activity

To avoid starvation, most adults need to consume a minimum of 1,200 calories per day. (Water is an even higher priority. Read more here.[insert link to Water here; location: Journeys > Water > Introduction.]) But the minimum number of calories will not help you get through a disaster when you are experiencing high stress and working hard to clean up debris, help injured people, set up a camp, prepare meals without a kitchen, and so on. Even though you may not feel like eating, you will need to consume enough calories to keep up your strength.

If you start losing weight, your metabolism will drop, potentially affecting your physical, mental, and emotional state and worsening any physical problems, like blood pressure and cardiac issues.

If, however, you get to the point in the disaster recovery at which your activity level is reduced, you can cut back on your intake to save food. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)  says, when food is in short supply, people can survive on half their usual caloric intake.

Calculating Calories

How will you determine caloric intake? For packaged food, you can use the required nutritional label. But be careful here because it is easy to confuse servings and meals.

• A meal is breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

• A serving is a component of a meal, like a side of vegetables or a main spaghetti dish. So each meal may include a couple or several servings.

A bucket of emergency rations labeled 24 servings does not mean you can get 24 meals from that one bucket. If you ate just three servings from that bucket in a day—one as breakfast, one as lunch, and one as dinner—you might be consuming far less than your needed daily calories.

By looking at the calories per serving on the label, you can get a better idea of how far the food in that one bucket will go.

Daily Nutritional Requirements

In an emergency you do not need to meet the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamins and minerals. You will not be striving for optimal health at this time; you will be striving simply for staying healthy. Think instead of the entire span of the emergency. 

However, you may be able to approximate ideal nutrition by adding vitamins and supplements to your emergency food supply. In addition, adding variety to your supply will ensure you get adequate macro- and micronutrients. You don’t want to eat only oatmeal for 14 days or more, for example. But you would be fine if you only ate oatmeal for a few days. On the other hand, you might not enjoy it very much. So, again, variety is important.

Macronutrients

Over the post-disaster time period when you and your housemates are on your own, you will need to make sure you get the following macronutrients:

• Carbohydrates (fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, legumes)

• Protein (meat, eggs, fish, dairy, beans, legumes, nuts)

• Fats (nuts, fish, meat, peanut butter, dairy)

Micronutrients

You will also need to ensure you get the following micronutrients that support basic survival: 

• Vitamin D: Essential for bone health, calcium absorption, and immune function (cow, soy, and almond milk; tuna; yogurt; orange juice; salmon)

• Vitamin B12: Necessary for red blood cell production, nerve function, and DNA synthesis (eggs, cereal, chicken, beef, cottage cheese, clams, sardines, tuna, nutritional yeast, yogurt)

• Vitamin C: Supportive of immune function, collagen production, and wound healing (oranges, grapefruits, most berries, kiwi, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, potatoes, spinach)

• Zinc: Crucial for immune cell development and function (meats, nuts, and whole grains)

  
  

If you have children, their tolerance for certain foods may be lower. Make sure that your children will eat the food you have in your stored supply. Test it! Also, make sure that your emergency food supply doesn’t contain allergens that would affect your particular household members.