I sometimes get some flack for discussing any food-related items. I’ve gotten heat in some venues for saying that I don’t think food is appropriate for short-term survival kits. I stand by that, for many reasons. I’ve fasted many times, three times for a week or more and several for a few days. For a normally-healthy person (not addicted to simple carbs) I think there is little downside to doing this, and several benefits. For one thing, hunger is a way that your body knows its in a survival situation, and it responds accordingly. For another, hunger is a normal thing that happens all the time in nature. The lack of periods of hunger in our lives is itself the aberration; we can take it for granted that the vast majority of you ancestors went for periods without eating by necessity. How far back? Probably far enough back to make the period when our ancestors were human seem like current events When something regularly happens to several generations evolution learns to take advantage of it- there are bodily processes that seem to ONLY happen in periods of not eating. On an evolutionary scale periods of hunger were frequent, it’s going for years, decades, lifetimes without skipping many meals, with the digestive system actively working 24/7 with no breaks, THAT is the circumstance so prehistorically and historically unlikely its debatable whether evolution would have created a mechanism to cope. It may well be that we need hunger for health.
Personally, this time around I’ve been doing what is popularly called “intermittent fasting” for close to two months now. I’m allowing myself one 3.5 hour window out of each 24 hours, in which to eat, six days a week. It’s flexible, I can eat at any time during the day, but when I first eat anything that 3.5 hour clock starts, so once I do eat anything I want it to either be a meal or to be assured of a meal within those 3.5 hours. What this typically translates to is eating one meal a day, anything want to for an hour or so, and after that I generally just don’t want anymore in that time window. There is some incentive to be regular about it, if you eat early at some point you’re going to be for a going without for a lot more than 24 hours in order to eat later in the day again, but in practice I generally eat lunches some days, dinner others, and don’t worry about it. On Sundays I relax the rules, but I find I have no desire to “pig out”. This is what I’ve come up with for myself, based on knowing myself pretty well, and it seems to be working for me, but I’m not advocating it for others.
A reasonably healthy person should be able to go a couple of weeks without eating. In our culture this is something people absolutely panic about, but really, it’s not a huge deal. Most of the world knows that, most humans in the past knew it very well. So, yes… I consider a 24-hour, 48-hour or 72 hour survival kit loaded up with food items totally ridiculous. In the short term, food is NOT a survival priority, so in a real emergency-level kit like this sacrificing lots of space and weight for the sake of candy bars, tea bags, cookies, dried soups and other foods of dubious nutritional value is silly. In a LOT of scenarios, loading up with food, the moisture (water) contained in food, the packaging, the cookware, the cooking fuel, the utensils, the extra firestarting gear, and on and on just for the sake of food is a very poor job of prioritizing.
So why utensils? Even if you are going to eat, utensils aren’t necessary for survival. You can always eat with sticks, or fingers, or whatever. I get that.
While I don’t advocate carrying food or cookware or related items that involve a sacrifice of space and weight, that doesn’t mean that I necessarily advocate ignoring what fortune drops in your lap. Sometimes in a survival situation you may have “downtime”, sometimes you may have access to food you didn’t have to carry in yourself. Few people are going to pass on the opportunity, and a few small, lightweight items can make a huge difference in the amount of time and attention you need to devote to just consuming the food. This kit is one of those items.
What it is, is a plastic (FRN) spoon, fork and knife in two pieces that fit together in two ways, either “spooned” or end-to-end.
It’s also one of those items that is fairly frequently very useful in daily life. I’ve got more than ten of these kits, I’m not really sure how many. I’m often tempted to pick up another one whenever I’m buying some items in Walmart (which is rarely, but at writing and for some years now they’ve routinely had the best price on the.m). I’ve got one in each pack and haversack in current use, some not-routinely-used kits, my travel shaving kit and two in each vehicle glove compartment, plus some spares stored away, and I’ve given away a couple of sets new.
Why? Because they solve a problem.
In a pretty long life I’ve lost count, and I imagine others who have led fairly active lives have lost count as well, of the number of times I’ve had food or access to food, but I’ve had to eat it under unusual circumstances. Food from convenience stores, grocery stores, even drug stores, carry-out restaurants, whatever. In nice conditions you might be rigging up an impromptu picnic, or you might be eating in yours or someone else’s vehicle, or in a hotel room or motel room or B&B. Most of those will not make an issue of it, but short of suites with a kitchen none of them exactly encourage eating in the room other than their room $ervice. Having a set of utensils (or two) just simplifies the whole operation immensely. Eating sloppy food with fingers does not tend to impress witnesses or be a great idea before meetings, and it adds new emphasis to and complicates cleanup. Also, smelling like appetizing food even for a little while is not a great idea in some places… like bear country.
This set is very lightweight, durable, and reliable, and they work very well. They’re also inexpensive and readily available enough to do just what I’ve done-hoard sets anywhere you think you might need them
That combination of lightweight and durable didn’t exist not long ago. Camping folks were generally using pretty normally-heavy stainless utensils to eat with then, which was no help. The last generations of C-rations (and the first generations of LRRP’s and MREs) included a lightweight plastic spoon that was a wonder for its time, it was durable and nothing stuck to it, and I learned to hoard them. That was not the case with plastic utensils marketed for backpackers for some time- when I started in the late ’60s there was almost nothing available. When “outdoor stores” started carrying them most were miserable failures, some were essentially repackaged fragile disposable utensils, some softened at temperatures less than boiling water, and one memorable set stuck so firmly to so many foods that it was next to impossible to clean in the field and annoying to try and eat with. Don’t laugh, it was an age when one of the holy grails of backpacking was a lightweight, durable plastic water bottle that did NOT leak (because you might have to sleep with it to keep it from freezing and a soaked down bag in sub-freezing weather was life-threatening. It was very difficult to find any. Now the entire globe is being covered with them as unwanted trash.
These UCO kits are a marvel for me. They’re designed very well, they work well. They are three utensils in two pieces, on the fork and the other the spoon on one end and the knife on the other. I don’t like most sporks much. In the design with a combination spoon bowl and fork tines on one end one function limits the other, the longer the fork tines the less liquid the spoon will hold and the shorter the fork tines the less they function. For those that try to add a sharp edge it just gets way too complex, you’re trying deal with that compromise while also trying to eat comfortably with a sharp, or at least jagged edge in your mouth.
Forget ’em. This gives you a spoon bowl that’s smooth and has a solid for liquids, a fork with tines long enough to actually work as a fork, and a knife that’s sharp enough and rigid enough and strong enough to cut most things that are ready to eat- pretty normal utensils that work normally for eating.
Reviewers seem to miss that. They also miss the fact that you generally, especially in the field, use only one utensil at a time, the other hand being used to hold the cup, pot or plate you’re eating from. Some complain that they’d rather have no knife at all, but in practice in the field you eat with the two utensils connected so that the spoon is on one end and the fork on the other. This way you can flip between knife and spoon on the fly, one-handed, quickly and easily- and the knife is edge is protected and only deployed when needed- which with backpacking food is seldom. Connecting them this way also makes for a LONG utensil, which is a great help when eating from the boil-in bags that freeze dried foods comes in, or deep “billy” pots, or MRE pouches, or, sometimes, for cooking.
I’ve never before had utensils this good that were lightweight enough to be negligible, much less cheap. Problem solved. With a very good solution readily available, it will be even more frustrating to find myself needing them again in someplace where I didn’t anticipate. Short of actually carrying a set on my person, I think I’m covered.
At this writing these are still under $5 at Walmart, in person. For some reason they’re always much more expensive at Walmart.com, currently the cheapest listing there is $10.67. On Amazon it’s $7.99. This has been the situation for quite some time, but we live in interesting times, and who knows for how much longer it will be. That’s why I tend to pick them up when I’m in Walmart. Also, it’s easier to judge the colors in person.
- – Robert the Wombat