NPM 03: Real Survival Nutrition with Essential Provisions

Morning everybody we are back day three day three national preparedness month man you got a list written yet what are you doing this month what is the big thing this month because uh when you get 30 days to grind at a thing man you can really have an effect and maybe on top of all the cool people and products that we show you through the month of september like keep that in the back pocket right the fact that On the third, you started something, and by the 30th, something big changed in your life because that's what preparedness will do for you. So today, to continue on with this, I mean, it's a relentless group we have lined up for you, and this is one of the best. We're going to have a conversation today about food storage in a big way. We're going to talk about some things that might surprise you in terms of food storage, and you're going to be introduced to an unbelievable product. I don't even know if you know. This is an option for you, and it is the incredible high-quality nutrition of essential provisions. We have with us today Dan Gentry, the man who really takes the ball that is essential provisions and runs with it from coast to coast. Dan, thanks so much for being on with us today, man. Yeah, James, appreciate you having me on. Good to see you again. You too, bud. I'd say probably about a year ago or something like that. I'm bad at measuring time. anymore. But I'd say about a year ago, I got my first taste of essential provisions. And, you know, I'm a pretty good resource because I was a chef before all of this. And what really blew me away was when I had the realization that putting essential provisions on the shelf was putting the highest quality ingredients on the shelf for a disaster emergency. And all we have to do is heat them up. Maybe. I mean, You don't even really necessarily have to heat them up. Right. Now, when you first tried essential provisions, what was your take on it? When I first tried it, I didn't know what it was. I mean, so so, you know, full disclosure, the owner of the company, Robin, she's a professional chef. She has been her entire life and she's also my aunt. Right. So I grew up with her very, very close with her. We live almost right across the street from each other. But yeah, she'd created a bison stew, invited us over for dinner one night, and I'm sitting there, I'm eating this bison stew, and it's absolutely delicious. It's my favorite. So what do you think? How do you like it? Lugnosa's fantastic because, of course, she's been a chef forever. Everything she makes is fantastic, right? But she's like, hey, would you believe that this is an MRE? Wait, hold on. Explain that to me because I know what an MRE is and that's not what this is. Definitely not. She had been going through the pre-production stage and all that and had a couple sample packs that went through R & D, pulled out one from the pantry there and was like, yeah, this came out of this package right here. I'm like, there's no way this is possible. I was blown away. Then came the bison chili, which is my personal favorite. Absolutely fantastic. Then every product after that was just amazing. Then you The flavor itself is great, right? But then you look at the ingredient profile. The ingredient profile is ridiculous. I always tell people that it's all ingredients you can read, understand, and pronounce. I'm glad you brought that up. I have pre-fired real quick. I mean, feel free to carry on, but I've pre-fired the ingredient list because to me it's one of the biggest selling points of what you guys do is the ingredient list. I have the bison stew here because it's just my favorite, but While we talk about– I'm not going to leave it up the whole show or anything, but while we talk about this, you definitely need to get a look at what's in these and then compare it to whatever it is. There's no comparison. There is not even a close comparison. No, it's a grocery list and not a science experiment. Yeah, there you go. You pick up anything that's shelf-stable, and you're going to find million-dollar words sitting on there. Let me Google this real quick because I don't know what I'm putting into my body. But this, you know, you look at it, it's all 100 percent organic, regenerative ingredients, grass fed, grass finished bison. It was just everything that you could want that you're going to make at home. Everything you can feel comfortable about feeding yourself. I mean, I feed my kid. Her favorite's the bison stew. Right. And I feel really good about feeding that to her. And it's not just the, you know, let me stick it in my prepper room and let it sit on a shelf for however long. It's great for Thursdays. You know, you get home late. My wife travels as much as I do, which is a decent amount. And, you know, I get the kid home from ballet on a Wednesday night. She's five. So her bedtime is pretty early. We get her home from ballet. I've got like maybe 45 minutes to get dinner on the table before she starts losing her mind. Right. So grab one of these from the pantry, heat it up for real quick. All right. Daddy made bison stew, baby. It's great. I'm telling you, man, you know, things like organic extra virgin olive oil, pink Himalayan sea salt really stood out to me when I looked over this list of ingredients. because those things told me this is a, no, another big one was the organic smoked paprika. That was a big one too. That, that told me like the commitment is 100%. Oh yeah. You know what? Like it's one thing to take 100% grass fed finished bison and put it at the top of the list still would look really good, but you make your way all the way down to the bottom of the list and you see all the way down to the cayenne pepper. Right. Um, And yeah, no, she, so Robin and Brian, her husband, um, they spent literally no exaggeration, two years sourcing ingredients. Um, I mean, she, yeah, she, she's had a restaurant in the past and she kind of knows how the sourcing goes and all of that, but she is so meticulous about everything that she puts into her body or anything that even touches her skin and she's not going to compromise there. So why is she going to compromise on product? Cause she has said a thousand times, I think there's a Instagram clip out there somewhere towards like, you know, if she wanted to make money, and just wanted to put out a product, there are a thousand easier ways to do it. But the goal is to provide something that's great. Something that's going to actually help people instead of, you know, let's enrich the coffers a little bit more. Yeah. She, she could have retired years ago and has just chosen not to. Right. But they spent about two and a half years, two years, two and a half years sourcing ingredients. So the way that always works is, okay, let's find a supplier that we think is good. They're going to send us a sample of We're going to send that out for testing just to make sure it is what you say that it is. I want your documentation. I want everything that says that it's free of chemicals. It's free of heavy metals, all of that. I mean, all of our products are, we independently third-party test everything to make sure that, you know, that there's no PFAS, no PFAS. I mean, we're certified glyphosate residue free, which according to the FDA, finding chemical residue and organic products is not uncommon, which is ridiculous to us. I mean, if I'm buying something that is supposedly organic and something that is Supposedly good for me. I don't want to eat chemicals. It's crazy, right? I mean, I wish I could say I was surprised. I just switched the ingredient list up to the bison chili just so everybody knows it's not a one-off. Like the stew is not the favorite and we just put all the good stuff in the stew. But another big standout, man, particularly with the rising cost of food and living in general is, you know, that price point per meal is McDonald's now. Oh, yeah. Easy. You know what I mean? Like that's for one meal, 1195, that's McDonald's. So just wrap your head around that and start thinking like, wow. And then think about the, well, what's three years shelf life, right? Three to five years, depending on the storage temperature. Yeah. You store it in your basement or your, yeah, you store it in your pantry, your basement at 70 degrees, you'll get five years out of it. But you know, again, I always tell people it lasts maybe two weeks in my house. Cause it's good. I like to eat it. That's huge. Yeah. You know, the way I'd manage it in in food storage is it's a rotating stockpile. Right. Right. You keep a par level of essential provisions, chilies, stews, and they have vegetarian options that are great, too. And you guys also have the pouches now, right? Yeah. Yeah. Some of those I haven't tried yet that are sitting in my pantry. But the so you keep you know, you keep that par level in your food storage and just backfill. And then you always have access to these kind of meals for. oh crap, it's dinner time and I didn't plan anything. Or, oh crap, the hurricane just hit. It's the old adage, eat what you store and store what you eat. Got to do it. It's the only way to do it. Going back to the products themselves and the price point you talked about a second ago, yeah, it's McDonald's easily. But then you look at the caloric value, you look at the protein value. The bison chili you just had up, 560 calories, 60 grams of protein and 12 ounces. which is wild. That amount of protein is wild. And you get into those stressful situations, whether that is a hurricane, a flood, late night on Thursday, my kid's about to lose her mind. You're going to want the extra calories. All disasters, by the way. Qualified disaster, 100%, right? But you need those calories and you need that protein, even for cognitive function. Every ingredient in there has a purpose. It's not just, okay, let's put some filler in there and move on with life. it's purposeful ingredients and purposeful, you know, what are, we have a medical director that says that it's a Robin's alchemy that she puts in there. But yeah, you look at the caloric value and you look at the protein and then you look at how clean those ingredients are. We'll compare the price to McDonald's, but that's, that's kind of where it'll stop, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. But, but I, what the reason I bring it up is not to compare, you know, comparing apples to apples. It's just to remind people like, because we have this where we see meat in society today. A lot of us is on a supermarket shelf and you see a steak that costs twenty five dollars and you're like, well, maybe meat isn't the thing right now for my budget. You just don't know where you're to get it from at a price point like this. And to be honest with you guys, like, I don't know. I don't even know. where to go and get a meal at that price with that kind of nutrition. I don't think it exists at the moment outside of essential provisions, to be honest with you. Yeah, no, we've, we've looked around a lot. I mean, especially if you talk about something that shelf. Stable, that too, it's, it's, it's wild to. Find something like that, to find something with that ingredient profile, with that amount of calories, that amount of protein that's going to sit on the shelf for five years, possibly. you know, that's, that's pretty rare. I, I've, I've not really found one competitor out there that I can call a true, you know, air quote competitor. Yeah. Something that you just open and eat. Yeah. You don't, you don't have to heat it up if you don't want to. I'm not using my water to, to dehydrate or to rehydrate it. Cause that's not dehydrated. It's truly, you know, we say, just bring a spoon, grab the pouch, open the top and just start eating it. Yeah. I've done it. I mean, I've had, I've had the room temp, the bison chili on the fly. It's not a bad deal. You know what I mean? I've had much worse deals out of food storage for sure. Yeah. And that was one of the things that, uh, that was important to me because I don't heat anything up. You know, I, I'm, I'm impatient. My wife says it's lazy. I say it's impatient, whatever. But you're on the road, man. You know, I'm on the road a lot. I'm on the road a lot. And you know, it's for me when we first got the packages in after the stew, you've got the chili and everything else. We first got this in one of the things that was like, okay, well now I need to try to room temperature. Cause if it's not a good at room temperature, you know, if I, If I'm out backpacking and it's 80 degrees outside, I'm not busting out the jet boil. I'm just going to eat something. So it's nice. It's quick. It's easy. So I opened it, I started eating it and it's just as good at room temperature as it is warm. It just depends on how you like your food. That's a good reality to understand too, right? There are a lot, I've been in situations like that a lot and camping and hiking and fishing, even hunting where it's like, you know, the sort of break out the cutting board into And the cool knife Instagram moment ain't happening. You're going to be eating out of a pouch because that's what you're going to do. And I've done it before you guys. I did a lot of that in the mountain house world. And again, no comparison, right? I mean, it's a whole nother level. It's a whole nother world. Yeah. I mean, everything has its place. If I'm through hiking the AT, then yeah, maybe some mountain house because it's nice and it's light and I don't have to deal with it. I know that I've got secure water sources and I know that I've got water filtration. I know that I've got all of these things. yeah, sure. Everything's going to have its place. But you know, when I look at, again, the ingredient profile, the calories, all that other good stuff, and just how good it is when you rehydrate something, whoever, whatever the product happens to be, whatever the company happens to be, you've got to boil the water and you got to put it in the bag and you got to wait 15 minutes and you got to kind of shake it up and stir it a little bit. And again, I'm impatient that I'm not doing it, you know, but even with that, You take that first bite, and it's probably going to be pretty good. But by the time you get to the bottom, it's still pretty chalky. There's still some powder. Oh, yeah. I never can stir those things up enough. Never works. And it's one of those things. If I'm dead tired and I've hiked 13 miles that day or whatever. Oh, of course. Yeah, it's going to be okay. It'll deal. It'll be fine. But you get something that's actually good. It's not dehydrated. You open it up, and you start eating it. You may be sticking the Jetboil and warm it up a little bit. It's a morale booster. by itself for sure yeah we had that long day whether that's a hike a disaster whatever and you get good food and that's that fuels the soul and that fuels your morale pretty. Easily yeah we had a in january my oldest and i went up to big sky uh beautiful not big sky in virginia no i'm sorry sky meadows in virginia for a camp out in the dead of winter specifically because it was going to get down like under 20 degrees so we were playing around with the camp stove and a hot tent and all that kind of stuff. And after we watched the sunset off the mountain and the moon rise, we came back and heated up the, uh, the chili and the chili. Yeah. A double dose of the chili right before bed was a big deal. Yeah. You know what I mean? It was a big deal. We still froze our asses off, but it was good. We were full at least. Um, you know, getting those calories before you go to bed, that's going to help keep you warm meal. Yeah, definitely. Um, We had the canning diva on yesterday. And, you know, you guys, I feel like, are a part of this. It's sort of an unwritten food revolution that's happening at the moment. This idea that, you know, eating out, traditional ways of eating, traditional means of dinner, largely. There are all these resources and skills out there that are, I mean, it really is changing. there are people out there who are changing what dinner means and how it gets done and removing that sort of dependence on companies that everybody seems to be well aware of. You know what I mean? Well aware of the negative effects and sort of the negative intentionality of companies like, I don't know, name a big food corporation that owns everything you eat. And I think you guys fit right into that, like a puzzle piece, like this sort of reinventing of the daily meal set and what, You know, what kind of nutrition can be had? And most importantly, the cost and the ease of access. You know, those are the two things that have always been a hindrance. And I think for what you offer, you guys just hit it better than anything, you know? Yeah. In terms of a daily use food. Yeah. And especially with the big question marks that there are these days with food. I mean, you look at all the big controversy with beef right now. Do we know where this is coming from? Do we know what's in it? Has it been tested? You know, am I getting actual good quality beef when it comes off that ship from whatever country it's coming from? I don't know, but you know, we're sourcing our bison. Yeah, exactly. You know, we source our bison here in the United States from out West. It comes from small farms that they're all humanely harvested one at a time. It's, it's not this big cattle farm to where they're putting 13 of them into a shoot. And then however they, they euthanize and they do, but these are all ethically harvested in the field. one at a time. They bring the truck out in the field and they do it all right there. And we know where it all comes from. And these days, how do you really know? Because even though it says, you know, made in America or whatever that sticker is on your, your package of beef, technically that could just mean it was packaged. Packaged in America could have been made in America and shipped to another country to be processed and back. Oh yeah. There's a whole, there's a whole insane journey that food goes on if it's not local. Um, before we get going though, I do want to, I do want everyone to give their, uh, emergency food storage a try this month at some point. Okay. I want you guys to really taste what you have on the shelf and pick something that is not the most appealing because that's going to wind up on the menu. Eventually we did a big survival food challenge a couple of years back, Dan, and we, we, We're starving hungry. And there were foods that we prepared, you know, these freeze dried meals from various companies that we didn't finish eating because they were that bad. Yeah. You know, like we would we would prepare them. We would have not eaten for a couple of days. I don't want to get into all the, you know, the logistics of the challenge. But and we would find ourselves like telling each other, hey, I didn't finish today. I'm still kind of hungry, but I wasn't finishing that. And that's a reality that you have to understand when it comes to the food storage that you have on the shelf and you're thinking, this is what we're going to turn to in a disaster. Like, you know, when you have the option of what we're talking about with essential provisions on the market, which, you know, like I said, cost per meal, highly negotiable on the family budget these days. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's you want to think and you want to believe that, oh, man, when I get that hungry, I'll eat anything. That's what people say. Not necessarily. They always say it. They say it and then you've got the whole stigma, of course, that we roll into with it's an MRE because it's a meal ready to eat. It's an MRE. You think of the DOD MREs. You think of those humanitarian rations. Anybody that's been in those positions where they are forced to eat that stuff, you know how it goes. You open the MRE pouch. You dump everything out. You take one or two things and the rest goes in the trash because I might be hungry. I'm never going to be that hungry. I'm not eating the spam slice or the four fingers of death. I'm not that hungry. You get the pound cake. You get the peanut butter. And then you move on with life. Right. You get the necessary calories to carry on and then go on. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then here we are offering something that, uh, I choose to eat, which is a big difference. I'll choose to eat this on a Thursday. I travel a lot. Like we were talking about, man, the amount of times that I've had bison chili in a hotel room is crazy because I, you know, I was in Southwest Georgia last week and there were just no good food options out there. I wasn't, yeah, I'm not going to go hit, you know, McDonald's, Taco Bell, whatever it happens to be if I don't have to. Yeah, I got a sack full of bison stew right next to you, probably in that hotel room. So what's the point, right? Exactly. Exactly. Grab a spoon and off you go. Yeah, man, that's phenomenal. Well, I appreciate you coming on today, Dan. Essential Provisions, guys, is linked in the Instagram. It's linked in the show description. It's also really easy to remember, essentialprovisions.com. Yep. And give them a try. And I'll tell you one last thing before we cut off. If you want to use promo code PBN, as in Prepper Broadcast Network, PBN, that'll give you 10% off through the end of the month. Dude, no better time, no better reason to go to essential provisions.com and use the promo code PBN and get some percent off. No, you're going to drop the price. Now you're really competing with all fast food out there with that price, man. That's phenomenal. Thank you so much for that. No, thank you. Appreciate you. Appreciate you having us on and appreciate all the hard work and the information you put out, not just, you know, this month, but you have been doing and you continue to do. We really appreciate that. Thanks, man. That means a lot. I was telling you before, I'm an emergency manager by trade, you know, so that stuff kind of hits home with me and I love it. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to join us, folks. Promo code PBN at EssentialProvisions.com. Don't miss out on that. You may wind up getting deals every single day, so come back to us tomorrow, 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. We've got Phoenix Survival on tomorrow, the master of fiber work. She's going to blow your mind. All right, Dan, have a great day, my man. I appreciate it. Guys, use the promo code, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.