The Survival Diet: When You Must Bug-Out

Posted On July 23, 2024

By P.J. Beaumont

Staying put may be the best strategy if you are in a suburban or rural area during a time of societal breakdown, but no matter where you are you might be forced to head for safety on foot.  Natural disasters can happen any time and anywhere.  Even if you have a plan for where to go, you may be forced to flee in a different direction and hope that you can make it to a safe area before your supplies run out.  Either way, education and careful planning can help you survive longer.

In this guide, I will break things down into three sections:

-Section one will be general knowledge and realities about survival diets.

-Section two will be practical preparation strategies.

-Section three will be strategies for maintaining your health and strength on the trail.

Note that, with a few minor exceptions, this will NOT be a treatise on survival foraging or hunting.  It is meant to educate you with a strategy that will give you about an additional 2-5 days of food before your initial supply runs out.  Also, this article will not cover water, but will assume that you have the proper means to keep yourself hydrated.

In general, for a 72-hour bug-out situation, think calories.  Longer than 5-7 days, you’ll need to take overall nutrition into consideration.

THE REALITIES OF SURVIVAL DIETS

The “Rule of Threes” says that the average person can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three hours if exposed to cold weather without proper clothing, but that is for a sedentary situation.  If you need to keep moving you will need calories to maintain your strength, and if you have to hike long distances with no food or water, the distance you will be able to walk will shorten drastically.

(One more aspect of the Rule of Threes is that you can suffocate to death in a dusty or smoky atmosphere in less than three minutes, but that is beyond the scope of this article.  For more on that, see “The 24-hour Contingency.”)

While you can subsist on very little food for up to 72 hours of long-distance hiking, the general rule is that a long-distance hiker will require about two pounds of food a day, which works out to around 5000 calories.  That’s eating a conventional diet of 40% carbohydrates (by calorie count), 40% fats, and 20% protein.  However, I personally know one hiker who required double those amounts just to maintain his weight.  Pushing his or her body to the max, in an extreme emergency a person who has not conditioned themselves for hiking might be able to hike up to 30 miles or more with no food, but there are tales of explorers who went 50 miles or more without eating.

Another thing to take into account is that if your survival situation goes on for a long time, you will need more than just carbs, fats, and proteins.  You will also need vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, amino acids, and fiber, just for basics.  If you don’t have those things for a few days it’s not much of a problem, but if some are missing from your diet for more than a week it can start to be an issue.

Then there’s salt.  How important is salt for health maintenance?  The members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the entire winter boiling sea water to condense salt for use on their return journey.  If they didn’t have salt, they knew they would die.

Absolute minimum calorie intake for a forced march is 2000 calories/day for men and 1500 calories/day for women, but after a few days your strength and stamina will begin to fade.  A man might be able to go for a week or more on 3000 calories/day, but if you’re carrying a 20+ pound backpack for 20 miles/day you’ll run a calorie deficit.  If the diet includes proper general nourishment, 3500 calories a day might allow a skinny hiker to go for three weeks, until his or her body fat reaches a critical level.  Note that the average person would lose about three pounds a week under these conditions.  This is one situation where having a few extra pounds on your frame could be an advantage.

If you prepare your kit properly you will be able to maintain your strength and health, and pack more calories and nutrition while taking up the same weight and space in your pack.  When you’re fleeing from danger a few miles or hours can make a difference, my goal here is to help you go that much further.

This assumes you’ve been conditioning your body to this level of endurance.

PRACTICAL PREPARATION STRATEGIES

Budget is always a factor, and survival preparation is no exception.  You can either spend lots of money on freeze-dried foods, or spend a moderate amount of money on a food dehydrator and a vacuum sealer and do more work, or try to use food from a grocery store, which can mean you’ll be spending less money but hauling more weight (see more information below).

What about military MRE (Meals Ready-to-Eat)?  One MRE is about 1250 calories, which is about one-quarter of a long-distance hiker’s daily needs, and costs at least $10 each.  They’ll work fine, if you feel like spending $40 a day for food.  For two weeks that’s nearly $600!  Freeze-dried backpacking meals cost even more and have even fewer calories.  There are much cheaper ways.

THE KETO BRICK HACK

A company called Keto Brick makes ketogenic-diet-friendly food bars that weigh under six ounces and contain 1000 calories each, which comes to 3000 calories for a little over a pound!  You can go as many as five miles a day on 3000 calories without running a deficit, and at 20 miles a day you might run a deficit but you should at least be able to keep up your strength for a while.  You should bring along some other things like vitamins and fiber, but if you need to bug out fast and far, three pounds of Keto Bricks in your 72-hour bag should fuel you for up to 60 miles.  They are shelf-stable for as long as six months, and freezing can extend that almost indefinitely.

I like to cut Keto Bricks into smaller pieces so they are more convenient to eat on the trail.

GROCERY STORE SURVIVAL FOOD

It’s possible to find food appropriate for hiking at your local grocery store.  While it won’t keep for as long as freeze-dried MREs or commercially-made hiking food, you can cycle through it on a regular basis to keep it fresh.  Every 3-6 months you will need to buy an identical item to one that’s in your BOB (CHECK THE EXPIRATION DATES!), put the fresh one in the BOB and use the old one for a regular meal.  Again, a little more work on your part for less cost.  Of course, this is much harder to do if your BOB is kept in a remote location.

The main concept for backpacking foods is that you don’t want to be carrying items that contain water or come in heavy containers.  For items that have a bag inside of a box, remove the box and discard it, then get as much air out of the bag as possible.  Here are some ideas for food you can put in your bug-out bag:

• Ramen noodles
• Dried pasta
• Nuts
• Peanut butter (in plastic containers)
• Rice.  Cheap and simple.  Requires cooking, but can be pre-cooked and dehydrated.
• Instant mashed potatoes.  Lots of carb calories and even less cooking than rice.
• Oatmeal.  You can get variety packs at most grocery stores, but they are small.  I like to get a big container and split it up using zip-closure plastic sandwich bags for single-servings.
• Instant breakfast/protein drinks.  Pour in some MCT oil for fat.
• Pop tarts.
• Crackers.
• Dried fruit.  Toss it in while cooking oatmeal for flavor and to re-hydrate it to make it less chewy.
• Candy bars.
• Tuna in packets.
• Chicken in packets
• Spam comes in foil packets called Spam Singles.
• There are numerous types of meat that don’t need refrigeration, including summer sausage and jerky.
• Trail mix.
• Pancake mix.  Add powdered eggs if desired (see below).
• Annie’s Shells (similar products are made by other companies).
• Instant coffee and/or tea.
• Fruit Squeeze (like for kids lunches), not a whole lot of calories per packet but a nice change of flavor on long treks.
• Bear Naked Granola.
• Breakfast Essentials breakfast powder
• Cups of Mac and cheese that you only need to pour hot water into.
• Powdered cheese.
• Olive oil packets.
• Energy/granola bars like Cliff Bars, Kind Bars, etc.
• Dried beans (NOTE- kidney beans and their close relatives are POISONOUS unless properly prepared. Dried beans you purchase in a plastic bag must be soaked for hours and then cooked AT A BOIL for 30 minutes or more. After cooking they can be dried and frozen until needed. They will keep for a several weeks if put into zipper plastic bags, and longer if packed with a vacuum sealer. Alternatively, you can get canned beans, which are fully-cooked before being canned, and dry those. They work well for backpacking, but you need to be careful.)

If you need some flavor:

• Idahoan Hearty Soup Mixes
• Bear Creek Darn Good Chili (and other Bear Creek products)
• Tomato paste in a tube
• Tasty Bite Indian Entrees
• Starkist Chicken Creations can jazz-up Ramen Noodles
• Taco seasoning packets

Don’t eliminate cans just because they are metal:

• Cans of tuna don’t add much more weight than the packets, so if cans are all that’s available don’t be afraid use them.
• You can get cheese and butter in cans for long-term storage.  The issue with canned butter is that you’ll need to use it up within a couple of days after you open it, so I would only bring it if I had a group of four or more people and could use it as a fat supplement at breakfast and dinner.  The cans add a little bit of extra weight, but a can of butter is a lot of calories in a small package, and unopened it will last for years.

One item that is carried in a few grocery stores, but which you can usually find in backpacking stores (and of course, almost everything is available on Amazon these days) is powdered eggs.  In the factory-sealed packets they will last for a year at least, and after you open them they will last for a week if carefully re-closed.  I like the Ova Easy brand, but there are other good brands to choose from.

For more info on grocery store backpacking items, see the article on “Cheap Backpacking.”

MCT OIL

I call MCT oil the Super Survival Fluid (see article here).  It can add lots of calories to your pack for not much room or weight.  Factory-sealed bottles will last a long time in your BOB, or transfer them into tough Nalgene bottles for more leak protection.  Use it in coffee, breakfast powder drinks, or you can even swig a tablespoon every few hours to keep you going.

A BIT MORE WORK

Dehydrating and vacuum-sealing may cost about the same as the grocery store method if you are prepping for one or two people, but if you are putting together kits for multiple people it can save you money.

With the aforementioned beans and many other foods, pre-cooking and preparation can save lots of time and fuel on the trail.  Rice that has been pre-cooked and dehydrated, for example, only requires boiling water to bring it to edibility.

While it is possible to use a fan and screens to dry food, a purpose-built food dehydrator has the advantage of applying controlled heat, which gets the job done faster and in some cases more hygienically.

If you have an oven with temperature control below 170 degrees F and a fan, it may be possible to use that to dehydrate some foods.

Zip-close plastic bags might be able to substitute for vacuum-sealing, but vacuum sealing will keep things fresher longer and is more secure.  As well, vacuum-sealing bags are thick enough to protect against freezer burn.  However, vacuum sealing is not nearly as long-lasting as commercially-done freeze-drying for some items.  For both zip-close and vacuum-sealing, buy some small bags of desiccant to throw in the bag before sealing.

In general, dehydrating and vacuum-sealing will preserve most non-meat foods for six months to a year, and even longer if they are kept in a freezer.  Meats can be kept for about two months unless they are properly made into jerky, which will last longer.

However, it can be hard to determine how long dehydrated food will keep.  One of my batches of dehydrated beans got moldy after just a month in a zipper bag, so lately I’ve started keeping my bug-out food in the freezer.  That way I can be sure that it will last a nearly indefinite time in storage, and still be edible if I have to bug out.

Putting all food in a dry bag (of the type used by boaters to keep things from getting wet) is an excellent strategy for any food used on a long hike.  It keeps the food in its own separate container, hermetically seals it so any odor is much reduced (which reduces the chances that an animal will smell it), and works as a ready-made bear bag when you need to hang it over a branch away from the big four-legged critters (though note that it is NOT “bear proof” like some specialized bags).  The lighter-weight bags aren’t as durable, but for use in a backpack that’s not as much of a consideration.

MY BUG-OUT FOOD STORAGE STRATEGY (Big BOB)

I consider beans and rice to be staples, but I also add spices for flavor and variety. I might also bring along powdered eggs, one-minute oatmeal, trail mix, and pasta. If I include tuna in a bug-out bag, it will be in cans because they have a longer shelf life.  If I’m bugging out and not backpacking, I’ll bury the empty cans as best I can.

• I cook and dehydrate several pounds each of beans and rice.
• Weigh the food carefully before bagging, and put the calorie count on the package.
• Vacuum seal individual servings with a desiccant pack in each one.
• Carefully mark the date and contents.
• Put them in a dry bag, and stick it in the freezer.
• Note that beans and rice are my main staples but not my complete diet.  I also bring along MCT oil, iodized salt, nuts, canned cheese, dried fruit and maybe canned butter.  I also like to bring quick-cook oatmeal (a hot breakfast can really boost your spirits), along with vitamin pills and some dietary supplements.

STRATEGY FOR USING THE BUG-OUT FOOD

• My 72-hour bag doesn’t require any prep, it’s ready to go.  I can add more food if I have the time and I feel like it’s appropriate, but generally I’ll save that for the Big BOB.  (See the article on FAST BOB-BIG BOB here.)
• If things start to look dicey, like a forest fire, hurricane, impending thunderstorm, or political instability, I’ll move the food from the freezer to the Big BOB.
• If things blow over, I’ll move the food back into the freezer.

IF I HAVE TO BUG-OUT

• The Fast BOB is light enough (20 lbs.) that I don’t need hiking boots.  Walking shoes or athletic shoes will do fine.  Since I work out of the house and wear slippers or sandals most days, I tie a pair of old-but-still-useable athletic shoes and socks to the outside of the bag.  If I need to get away really fast I can go for a while in whatever I’m wearing, then change when it’s safe.  Of course, if I can use my vehicle then that’s even less of a factor.
• Everything in the Fast BOB is inside of a plastic bag.  If I determine that I might need to be in survival mode for longer than 72 hours, that plastic bag gets moved from the Fast BOB to the Big BOB, which is already loaded with more equipment and supplies.
• That plastic bag does more than provide a fast way of shifting the contents of the Fast BOB, it also acts as a rain shield for the contents.  External pack covers don’t work all that well.

Good luck, and hopefully none of us will need to “bug out.”