Many people who have started to prepare for uncertain times have looked into canned soup as a reliable food prep to sustain them. It certainly can be, when you are choosing wisely and procuring the right products. While other canned foods might be a better choice overall for some, you can surely sustain yourself with hearty and filling canned soups.
You could also make your own fresh soups and can them, but most people aren’t going to go to that level of effort. I thought about doing it at first when I started getting into canning and making fermented foods, but I later decided to just buy a few high quality soups to add to my prepper pantry. I will mostly be relying on other forms of survival food, but having some soups is definitely worthwhile as far as we’re concerned.
Some Of Our Top Choices When It Comes To Soup
Many regular readers of UrbanSuburbanPrepper probably think we are going to go right into nutrient content. That would be a good guess, because the nutrient content is in fact an important consideration in survival, but the most pressing issue is how filling the soup is and how long it will satiate your hunger. The most filling soups are the ones that have a generous amount of protein and fiber. These are the things that fill you up, and without them, is it really worth stocking up on?
Another thing to consider is that many soups have very high levels of sodium, which can dehydrate you and make your need for water more pressing. Trying to find a product with below average levels of sodium will be beneficial. There’s a list just below of some filling soups to consider. Many people swear by lentils, but I can’t stand lentils, so I couldn’t put them in the list in good faith!
Here are some soups to consider that are quite filling:
* Beef and potato soup
* Chicken noodle with vegetables
* Split pea with ham
* Beef and vegetable soup or minestrone
* Beef barley
* Canned chili
If you’re able to find a way to heat these soups up, they will make for a nice change of pace and a good meal to tide you over. If you like soup more than I do, this could potentially be the cornerstone of your food preps, but living on canned soup is probably not the ideal way to survive. Having it as a dependable backup seems more prudent.
Sometimes Canned Soups Are Not Ideal For Preppers
One thing that has to be taken into consideration, is if you’ll have a way to heat your soups. One of the main situations we are preparing for is a grid down scenario, where conventional electricity is not going to be available to you. Most canned soups taste pretty awful cold, and unless if you’re truly starving you might find them completely inedible. As a prepper, you could use something like a solar oven or a wood burning camp stove, or maybe even a solar portable power station to heat up a burner. Most people who are into prepping like us who are storing canned soups for food are not taking into account that it will be pretty miserable to eat if it isn’t heated up. At least they won’t starve.,
Unfortunately, lots of canned soups are pretty bad even when they’re heated up. Quality really matters here, more than it does with canned tomatoes or carrots or green beans. I pride myself on how cheap I can procure canned foods at my grocery store to add to my prepper pantry, but when it comes to soups, I find that taking the cheap option is often a bad move.
There is a high likelihood that we will be able to weather this storm hunkered down in our homes. What if you have to leave for your safety and retreat to a bug out location though? Canned soups are not going to be easy to transport en masse in your bug out bag, whereas other items like MREs and pemmican will.
For that reason, canned soups are kind of low in importance for my food preps, but I have them nonetheless. It’s the same reason I have a bag of soup crackers to go with them that will probably be stale and inedible when they’re needed. They’re both really cheap, so why not? If they aren’t needed when the SHTF I can always donate them to a food bank afterwards!
