Survival Tetris: Packing a Go Bag for Food Allergies
Everyone should keep emergency supplies in case of a natural disaster. Yet few published guides plan for food allergies and the ones that do are written with strange priorities. Games and chocolates would be nice but what really matters during an evacuation is having a safe food preparation surface — none of the food allergy evacuation guides mentions packing a cutting board.
Standard advice to the public is to keep a three day supply of emergency food; while researching this post I decided it was wiser to aim for longer. Wrote to FEMA asking what contingency plans they had to accommodate people with rare food allergies. FEMA‘s reply directed the question to the FDA. So I emailed the FDA and also wrote a followup to FEMA; neither agency had an answer. That silence amounts to a booming You’re on your own, Bub.
So that’s the world we live in.
The goal with this project was to pack a one week supply of shelf stable safe foods along with cooking and cleaning equipment and basic dishes and utensils. This kit consists solely of necessary items to accommodate a medically restricted diet. This post does not attempt to replicate other aspects of disaster preparedness that receive adequate coverage in other published guides. So although complete disaster plan would of course include such items as water, money, and flashlights — along with safe storage for medication — those considerations are out of scope here.
Preparation Level: Microwave, Micro-Kitchen, or Camp Kitchen?
An evacuation could mean anything from a drive across town to survival camping. What scenarios are you likely to encounter? Plan accordingly.
Most likely I would stay at a place where a microwave oven is available. This kit includes a microwave safe bowl with a lid. Some people choose to pack their go bags strictly for microwave use. I decided to take the next step and also pack a micro-kitchen. This takes up extra size and weight but it would be enough to prepare meals anywhere that has a table surface and an electrical outlet.
Some allergy sufferers travel with an Instant Pot; my portable cooking equipment centers on a single burner countertop stove and a one quart saucepan. The remainder of the micro-kitchen consists of a miniature bamboo cutting board, a utility knife, a wooden cooking spoon, and two tea towels.
Eating gear consists of an oversized mug that can double as a bowl plus a set of flatware and a handful of paper napkins. The go bag already has a heat safe microwave dish, so this oversized mug would normally be used for brewing tea. It’s large enough to double as a soup bowl if the need arises.
For cleaning, the kit has a scrubber sponge with two bars of homemade unscented soap and a cylinder of wet wipes. The wet wipes came as part of a pack and had no internal seal. The wet wipes top popped open twice during a trial setup so I packed it inside a plastic bag with a twist tie to prevent the contents from drying out. Wet wipes deserve a few comments because earlier this year a research study got misreported in the news as a caution against using baby wipes. Actually wet wipes/baby wipes are a practical tool for removing cross-contact allergens from fingers and preparation surfaces when access to running water is limited. This makes wet wipes an important component for a disaster plan. Be aware that hand sanitizer does not remove allergens. That difference may be surprising but those are the conclusions of clinical research.
Real roughing it would consist of a backpacker’s Sterno stove and a mess kit. I do own camping gear but that is unlikely to be useful in an evacuation because the local disasters are usually wildfires, and fire marshals could order no campfires.
Which Allergens?
The gear in the previous section could work for most people with food allergies. Individual plans become much more specific when it comes to which foods to pack. Different people have different allergies: there is no one-size-fits-all set of foods for a go bag. Packing for myself becomes second nature but people have been known to have lapses packing for friends or family.
Well-intentioned forgetfulness made an impression during my first year after diagnosis while visiting relatives: an aunt offered to pack a lunch for the return trip and after arriving at the Greyhound station I opened the bag to find a juice box of apple juice, an applesauce cup, and a fresh apple. I have a life threatening allergy to apples. She had been informed about the allergy but was probably used to packing apples with meals out of habit.
Fortunately I was already a college student by the time my first anaphylactic allergies developed, so I shrugged and disposed of the meal. The sandwich was probably unsafe from cross-contact and it was better to go hungry than to take the chance. A young child might have trusted an authority figure and eaten what they were given.
I would eyeroll less if that page of recommendations had included a disclaimer about customizing the items according to specific needs.
Rather than recommend a list of foods that avoids all the top eight allergens, my advice is check which allergens the specific person must avoid. Recheck periodically because an individual’s allergies can change over time: new allergies develop; sometimes old allergies get outgrown. Be aware of the details of allergen safety statements. For instance, “may contain” allergen warnings are voluntary. So products that contain no warning are not necessarily safe — the manufacturer simply provided no information. Verified safe products are sold with a “free from” statement on the product label.
Ten percent of people who have life threatening food allergies are allergic to one or more foods that do not receive mandated food labeling protection. If you are packing for someone with rare food allergies then familiarize yourself with the ways in which potentially deadly allergens can be concealed in ingredient lists. Manufacturer statements about allergen risks sometimes mistakenly claim to be free from all allergens when they are free only from the top 8 allergens. This product is one such example: although the official website says it has no allergens, the second ingredient is high fructose corn syrup which is a risk for people with maize allergy. It also contains unnamed “natural flavors” which could include cherries and various other fruits. Anyone with an anaphylactic allergy to fruits could reasonably be wary of that product.
Since I happen to have anaphylactic Oral Allergy Syndrome with birch-Rosaceae cross-sensitivity, my safe foods are often different from safe foods for other food allergy sufferers. The foods shown below are not universal safety examples. Please consult a board-certified allergist for guidance in preparing a go bag menu for someone else.
Test Packing the Go Bag
My go bag consisted of an insulated shoulder bag with a zipper top. Even though none of my go bag items are temperature controlled, the insulation is a potentially useful feature during a disaster.
Preparation started with setting it on the dining room table and laying out the mini-kitchen and the cleaning gear nearby. Those were necessities. The next step was to see how much food would fit.
This started with breakfast, which is a tricky meal for me because few shelf-stable choices are safe. Made a custom oatmeal mix and stored it in a plastic container. Next up was a safe version of trail mix. I use a home dehydrator to dry safe fruits and vegetables. Commercially prepared foods are certainly time savers when feasible so those went into the bag when possible. The alfredo sauce mix pictured below will go with a bag of pasta. Some of the emergency meals are homemade mixes from scratch such as the split peas with rice in the photo, which comes with parsley and a few other safe-for-me spices. A label maker was useful putting this together.
Dry foods packed in plastic are a good way to save weight. I broke a “rule” here by keeping oil and vinegar in half pint sized mason jars. Salad dressings are rarely safe for my allergies so those two items take on an importance that many other people could overlook.
The microwave safe bowl doubled as a repository for small Ziploc bags of other foods. There’s a bag of dried vegetables here to go with the alfredo sauce and the ravioli (I’ll be eating Italian for a few meals if I evacuate). Also a bag of salt. Two of my quirkiest choices were to include alfalfa seads and mung beans. I have experience making sprouts so this might turn out to be my only source of fresh produce in an emergency. That choice would definitely not be for everyone, yet the supplies took up so little weight and space I decided to chance it.
To put several small items into one coherent place I used a plastic container that filled the bottom of the go bag. Some of these were commercially produced products, a component which I de-emphasize in photos. The plastic bin could double as a dishwashing tub if the need arises. One happy accident as I filled it was that it contained a little extra unused space in a corner, which meant in the last round of packing that there was room for small a bag of sweets.
It took a few tries to fit everything into the go bag. An early hope to include a frying pan soon proved impossible. The cutting board had to be downscaled. Regardless of what other guides had written about packing canned goods, none of the few canned items I had originally set aside made the cut. Those were too big, too heavy, and too hard to pack around. Several of these choices were compromises: I prefer coffee over tea but tea brewing needs less equipment.
After swapping out a few other nonessential items such as wasabi peas for meal mixes I was able to put together a six day supply of safe foods. Separate from this bag there’s a flat of bottled water near the door. One of the lessons learned is how much more time this takes than I had thought it would. Oh, I could pack in ten minutes I had expected. Nope. It actually requires a fair amount of thought because this amounts to a six day meal plan with constraints that go beyond the usual dietary restrictions.
Here’s hoping none of these supplies are ever needed. Yet a walk-through on this topic seems like it would be useful for other people.
