15 Items the Red Cross Actually Says You MUST Stockpile (A Lunch Lady Kept Every One)

📕 Get the full cookbook - The Lunch Lady's $3,600-a-Year Grocery Cut (175 recipes & tricks, scaled for 1, 2 or a family): www.dorislunchlady.com/ The river came up one March, and for three nights the gym at my school was a shelter. On the first night a Red Cross volunteer walked into my kitchen with their home kit list on a clipboard and read it out loud, and I checked my shelves against it like a delivery sheet. Fifteen things. No generator. No bucket of food that keeps twenty-five years. Not one brand name, and not one dollar figure. Most of it is already in your house, just in the wrong drawer. Counting down all fifteen, exactly as the American Red Cross lists them, with the school kitchen version of each one and the one thing people get wrong about it. Plus the two shorter lists further down the same page that almost nobody scrolls to: a whistle, spare keys, spare glasses, hearing aid batteries, a hand can opener. Number nine is the line most people misread. Number two matters more past sixty than anything else on the page. Number one is in every house already, just nowhere near enough of it. I am Mrs. Doris. A school kitchen in Scioto County, Ohio, on a dollar and five cents a tray. Checked in September 2026 against redcross.org (Survival Kit Supplies and Power Outage Safety), ready.gov and the EPA's guidance on disinfecting drinking water. For anything about your own medications, ask your pharmacist or doctor. My book, The Lunch Lady's $3,600-a-Year Grocery Cut, is at dorislunchlady.com If you have ever slept on a cot in a school gym, or handed out the blankets in one, tell me where. #emergencypreparedness #redcross #over60 #frugalliving