English: In an emergency food these rationing strategies you must know:

If you are old enough or if  a student of history, you may know about wartime rations. Then, you are aware of the fact that people can survive (and even thrive, as population actually grew during those times) on diets consisting of as little as 300 grams of rice/bread per day, and an egg a couple times a week. Nowadays, 40% of US adults are obese and food is plenty, not to mention dirt cheap, hence rationing strategies as a topic of conversation may sound surreal even among preppers. What would you do with a limited food supply in an emergency, when you don’t know for how long you’ll have to lay low and chew the fat, together with your family and/or friends? Obviously, in such a scenario, food rationing is a nondebatable topic, but how would you implement your plan? Who you’d have to prioritize? Does everyone get an equal share?  The current “US diet” consists of approximately 2500 calories per day, give or take, which is a lot compared to the rest of the world. By the way, that’s why Americans are among the fattest people on Earth: we eat way too much. However, in an emergency, one’s nutritional intake may very well be cut in half, or even worse, and that’s on top of the increased psychological stress and physical workload. That simply means that you willll be hungry, scared and tired, with anxiety, depression, apathy, and  your body will begin to fail, the body fat will go first and then the muscle. The thing about low calorie diets is that they can keep you alive for a long time, but there is a lot of bad effects on your state of mind and overall health. Now, considering a 2000 calorie a day diet, which is what is normal, a reduced diet would consist in 1500 calories, while the lower limit would be 1200 calories. Depending on how much supplies you do have and knowing that you will not be capable of getting more food, you should start from here, i.e. gather all your food supplies, create an inventory, t group foods into categories, in order to determine which ones would have to be eaten first (the perishable stuff, obviously). For example, you could use categories like vegetables and fruits, which are perishable, followed by dairy products and meats, cured/canned/dried goods, pasta and grains, cooking/baking supplies and so forth and so on, you got the idea. In the next step, is to determine (as in count) how much food you have but the easiest way would be to weight the food and have a general idea about how to convert X amount of Y food into Z calories.

Here are some basic guidelines:

•    a cup of white rice has 686 calories •    a cup of oats has 147 calories •    a cup of cooked spaghetti has 221 calories (2 oz dry) •    an egg has ~100 calories (it’s size dependent) •    100 grams of ground beef will provide 164 calories •    pork has 250 calories if fresh and 541 if cured •    chicken meat has 200 calories per 100 grams •    3.5 oz of corn have 354 calories •    17 oz of baked potatoes have 255 calories etc.

Here’s [link: https://whatscookingamerica.net/NutritionalChart.htm] a comprehensive food nutrition chart, just take a look and you’ll see what’s up with almost every imaginable food’s caloric content. Considering the fact that carb-rich (as in calorie-rich) foods are cheap and easy to store for a long time, do keep that in mind while reading the chart. Speaking of low calorie diets, even in an emergency, less than 1000 calories a day is very dangerous for one’s health, and a long-time caloric intake of fewer than 1200 calories/day would be very hard to implement, as the “subjects” would face having difficulties in focusing on topics or making decisions, and they would be drained both mentally and physically. But I saved the best part for last: most people tend to believe that even in desperate survival scenarios, the right thing to do is to equally share what food is left among the people in the group. As I already told you, people are far from being equal in this regard, as different folks burn different amounts of calories. If you make equal rations for all the people in the group, smaller people who eventually do less work will get more food than necessary, while bigger/more active people will not get enough food, and that’s not good.

And there’s always the ethical (and sometimes emotional) point of view: in a normal situation, a parent would go to sleep hungry so his/her children could have enough food to eat, but in a survival situation, children and other members of the group (sick people, elderly, women etc) would be relying on others to work and keep them safe, hence it would be a terrible idea (as in suicidal) to keep those people malnourished. As always, stay safe !

- Bird.

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