This will probably be the shortest of my six bug-out bag deep dive posts because I don’t pack a ton of food in them. Remember, a bug-out bag is supposed to last you 72 hours – well, humans can survive without food for weeks! While you could technically survive without any food in your bug-out bag, it’s better to be reasonably comfortable and not have your belly grumbling every five seconds.

I used to have MREs (meals ready to eat…s) in my bug-out bags. MREs are good for a couple of reasons: they tend to have a long shelf life, so you don’t have to replace them often, and they’re ready-made (it’s right there in the name!) so you don’t have to boil water to cook them.

But they’re pretty damn heavy, and they take up a lot of room. And if I have to bug out with my little pink backpack, I don’t want 30% of the space to be taken up by bulky MREs.

So I got rid of them (aka, added them to my food stores in the basement – they’re still handy for emergencies!). And in their place, I put…a bunch of Clif bars.

That’s right, Clif bars! They’re so much smaller, they’re yummy, and they’re reasonably calorie-dense. (Sadly, the Clif family or whoever is not paying me anything for all this wonderful advertising.)

Here is a picture of some of my Clif bars, in case you’ve never seen one.

Other items include some sweet metal sporks from Gerber that have a can and bottle opener attached, tiny flat cutting boards, and stainless steel pots for cooking that fit around my 40oz water bottles. I also have a small book on foraging in one of the bags, but I don’t know if that’s worth the extra weight – I go back and forth on it.

There are a couple of drawbacks that I’m mostly okay with: Clif bars go bad much faster than MREs, so I have to swap them out regularly. A stale Clif bar isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever eaten; I just bring the old ones to work and snack on them until it’s time to swap out the next round. The other drawback is that it’s not much food. Each of my bug-out bags has to last me and one of my kids for 72 hours, and I only have 12 Clif bars in each one. So we’ll be pretty hungry, but I have to balance that against the weight of carrying more food.

Do you think I’m making a huge mistake with this plan? Let me know any ideas you have in the comments!