Of all the random things, it looks like Better Half and I will be reviewing some of eFoods Direct‘s offerings.
Even better (at least for my ego), they contacted me!
Anywise, not being familiar with the company (and there seem to be so many long-term-storage food companies these days), I did a little digging into them, as I am wont to do. To begin with, they are BBB accredited and carry a rating of A, with 10 closed complaints in the past three years.
Then, I dug around to see what kind of previous reviews I could dig up, and there are
some positive and some middle of the road… and some fairly bad if you go back to the 2008-2010 range, but that may not necessarily be representative of the current state of the company or its products. The primary contention seems to be that they require "too much" water and boiling time to fully reconstitute (which could definitely be a problem for post-disaster preparedness, but that is why we have a rain barrel, a hopefully good filter, and a multi-fuel stove) and that they use too much salt (a common problem with long-preservation foods, but also a matter of taste).
And, finally, I did a little comparison. Mountain House is pretty much the king of storage foods (in my opinion), but the important distinction is that they freeze-dry their materials, versus the dehydrated foodstuffs of eFoods Direct (see here or here for discussions on the respective merits and problems of both). So, just to pull some randomness out of a hat, I looked at Mountain House’s Beef Stroganoff with Noodles and eFood Direct’s Beef Stroganoff (which also has noodles). The former weighs 4.8 ounces and provides 2.5 servings of 250 calories (100 from fat), 11g of fat (4g saturated, 0 transfat), 40mg cholesterol, 820mg sodium, 29g carbohydrates (1g dietary fiber), 3g sugar, and 10g protein. The latter weighs 2.7 10.8 ounces and provides 4 servings of 270 calories (50 from fat), 6g of fat (2g saturated, 0 transfat), 5mg cholesterol, 571mg sodium, 41g carbohydrates (4g dietary fiber), 4g sugar, and 12g protein.
Now, to be fair, those two companies are market to two different groups of people (as evinced by their preparation methods – for the Mountain Home pouches, you add boiling water to the pouch and wait until it cools enough to eat, but for the eFoods Direct, you have to add significantly more water to the product in a pot and boil it all for ~15 minutes), but it does show they are roughly comparable, while also showing the interesting differences between "freeze-dried" and "dehydrated" (predominantly: weight).
I will be honest – my experience with shelf-stable/long-term-storage/preparedness foods has been exclusively limited to the Meals Ready to Eat I had the opportunity to consume in the military, and maybe it was that we had the "newer" versions, or maybe my taste buds are just that uncultured, but I rather enjoyed them at the time (the "at the time" part may be key too…), so I offer no guarantees that if I say something is good, it is actually good. Food is definitely a "taste" thing, pun completely intended, and everyone will like different things. However, this stuff is not exactly going to be your daily diet, and if it is this or going hungry… well, that is why you plan ahead.
One last thing – I do promise to take real pictures of the food we prepare. I always hate how menus or advertisements show these gloriously-staged, mouth-watering glimpses of pure decadence, and then the stuff that ends up in your hand or on your plate looks like got scraped off someone’s shoe, so I am not going to do that to you all. I cannot say as though "presentation" should rank terribly highly for survival food, but we will cover it.
[Update] As AuricTech found (and I overlooked – sorry) all eFoodsDirect products are meatless, which does not really matter to me, but I would prefer they made that abundantly clear, given they refer to "chicken" and "beef" products… [/Update]
(And speaking of reviews, I still owe you one for the UVMatlite I was able to talk The Amazing Light into sending me – thus far, we have been remarkably impressed with just how bright it can be, and I have been struggling to find a good way of representing that (photographing glow-in-the-dark stuff is hard). However, I think we have hit upon something, and I hope to have a comprehensive post up this weekend or next week.)
(Obligatory Middle Finger to the FTC: No items, money, or goods changed hands for this post. Sure, I was told a company would be sending me something, but I have not received it yet, and the receipt of that "something" is not dependent upon this post. In other words, find a real job.)
So, just to pull some randomness out of a hat, I looked at Mountain House’s Beef Stroganoff with Noodles and eFood Direct’s Beef Stroganoff (which also has noodles).
While both meals have noodles, the eFood Direct Beef Stroganoff lacks, well, beef. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with vegetarian dishes, it seems a bit disingenuous to call a dish “beef stroganoff” when cow flesh is notable only for its complete absence.
As far as reconstituting dehydrated food, I’ve found that instead of boiling the food for an extended period of time, simply soaking it for an hour or two prior to heating tends to negate the need for any boiling at all. Assuming that the product is cooked before dehydrated, etc, which mine always is cause I make it myself.
@ AuricTech: Good catch! I completely missed that… But, to be fair, it looks like the Mountain House stuff might not either – the first ingredient there is “Cooked Beef”, but immediately afterwards it has “(beef flavoring, salt)”. “Beef flavoring” could be damned near anything these days.
In any case, I agree – a little more honesty would be good.
@ Heather: Ahh, good to know. That is what I figured, but it still takes a lot more time (in that case, a lot more time) than freeze-dried stuff.
@ Linoge:
It could just be a missing comma, as other Mountain Home entrees that include beef list it as “Cooked Beef (beef, flavoring, salt).”
*Scratching head*. What am I missing, here?
Fat is about 220 calories per ounce, and they are claiming a 2.7 ounces gives you 4 270 calorie servings. Ummm… either I’m mis-reading what you wrote, you wrote it wrong, or they are managing to get more calories in there than its weight in pure fat would allow.
Hmmm… Ah, each package has 4 servings, at 2.7 ounce per servings. About 1080 calories per package. Makes more sense. Each ~1C serving has about 1/10 the amount of calories an adult male needs per day in anything resembling a survival situation, so 3 packages per day would be about right for total calorie count. So, about $18 per day per person, for a decent emergency calorie count.
The reason many soldiers revile the MRE is there were only 12 choices in the originals. Pretty much everyone had two they wouldn’t eat, dropping the choices to 10. Spend two weeks in the field with only those and you find you don’t want to eat any of them anymore.
That’s a concern with any of these long term storage food plans. The lack of variety can be brutal.
Update:
I just got back from the local Big 5 Sporting Goods store, and the “Cooked Beef” listed on an actual package of Mountain House Beef Stroganoff is, in fact, “Cooked Beef (beef, flavoring, salt).” So at least that’s settled.
Of course, the real question about the eFoodsDirect products is not whether they contain meat (for the record, all eFoodsDirect products are meatless), but how they taste. After all, even if someone were to concoct the most nutritious food in the world, it would be worthless if people would refuse to eat the stuff. Variety is also important to prevent food fatigue; the eFoodsDirect list of entrees seems to have enough variety to avert food fatigue.
@ Rolf: Nope, that is all me screwing up – Mountain House provides the total weight of the bag, eFoods provides the weight of the serving. I will go back and correct that – sorry for the confusion.
@ McThag: Now that I can understand, but that is also why we keep a very well-stocked spice drawer. “A man can live on packaged food from here ’til Judgment Day if he’s got enough rosemary.”
@ AuricTech: Thanks for checking on that! Those sneaky little punctuation things are annoying…
And, likewise, thanks for digging into their meatlessness – I completely missed that, and will be updating the post accordingly. As for taste… well, I guess I will find out
.
On a completely unrelated note, Big 5s are pretty much the only thing I miss out of Kalifornistan – Mosin Nagants at an extraordinarily reasonable price for brick-and-mortar stores is a good thing indeed.
Yeah, it does take longer, but it reduces fuel expenditure significantly and you can also do something else while it’s rehydrating, another bonus!
I always figured that flour was one of the great “disaster foods.” Buying bread flour at Costco for $0.25 per pound, at 1700 calories per pound, with ~15% protein, means that you can use it as a base to make bread, tortillas, biscuits, et al, for a cost of ~16 cents per 1000 food calories. Assuming that cooking time/facilities will be available (which IS reasonable to 95% of scenarios, given even basic planning), there is no cheaper to fill stomachs than good, home-made bread. My sourdough oatmeal stuff sets me back less than 50 cents total cost per two pound loaf of high-fiber, quality protein, and complex carb goodness, with about 3000 calories per loaf. Flavor and texture can be modified to avoid apatite fatigue by grinding and adding a variety of other grains and legumes, like quinoa, beans, lentils, rice, barley, etc, and all manner of things can be spread on top, from peanut butter to scrambled eggs to jam to just plain old butter.
For long-term storage, it’s also a good idea to keep whole wheat berries by the bucket, too; they also boil/soak w/o grinding to make an acceptable food to eat, too.
@ Heather: Point! Hopefully they will give us enough options to test out various cooking methods.
@ Rolf: Hm. It would be interesting to see what the energy differences are in baking enough bread to feed four people versus preparing one of these meals. Granted, you can batch bread up in a stupidly-easy way (yay big ovens with lots of shelves!) so you would have to look at the data both by itself and in a larger batch, but I do not know how it would work out…
@ Linoge:
My standard batch of bread is about four, two-pound loaves (I’m pretty casual about measurements these days, which also makes for more variety, and the kids always snag some dough), but I could fit 8 in the (standard sized) oven if I had enough pans. I hand mix and kneed (which is both fun, and exercise, and helps involve the kids w/o worrying about power-tools sucking them in – give them as big a chunk as they can work). Grinding good flour by hand is tedious, but with a powered grinder it’s not a problem. (I have both). Actual labor time per batch (not counting hand-grinding, raising, and baking) is only about 20 minutes, including clean-up. Rising doesn’t NEED any extra energy, but it’ll go faster if you can keep it warm. Baking in an oven for 40 minutes doesn’t seem to be very energy intensive – the element / flame will be on for less than half the time – rough guess would be 1/4 to 1/3.
Well, like Heather said, you do not necessarily need to boil the dehydrated stuff either, and warm water can arguably be achieved with nothing more than the sun and some black pipe.
Of course, baking in a solar oven is not impossible either!