You might also want to check over at Frugals. It seems they were not intentionally banning people by the droves but their board admin software was making it difficult to use short or multi-word screen names.
A good third to half of their forums are dedicated to survivalist food preps.
As for those life boat bars. I remember them being a big deal pre-Y2K. John Trochtman used to sell the pellet version at gun shows in the Northwest. They came in a wide mouth plastic bottle roughly the size of a 2 qt canteen that had a plastic bag in it. A pretty smart arrangement. You carry the thing in a canteen pouch inside your pack, maybe two of them. When you use the pack for actual bugout, you empty the food pellets into the bags that are in the wide mouth bottles, then fill the bottles with water and they become your canteens, which you wear on a belt or switch over to the outside of the pack.
I was digging around in a storage area and found one of those at least six years old, and snacked on a couple of the pellets. They don't seem any different from when I bought them, and to be honest I had mixed the Y2K ones with the ones I bought in the 2003 to 2004 period so don't know which is which (I think I had eaten the Y2K ones on NG drills between 2000 and 2002). They last a long time and take a long time to chew.
Thing is, all of the work it would take in duplicating the commercial ration bars and pellets might not be worth the hassle or be as cost effective as buying cases of them on discount from someone who regularly deals the stuff.
