The best preparedness plans will avail you nothing, if you never implement them. It's far better to have an inferior but simple, inexpensive plan that you actually carry out.
Almost any type of emergency can empty the grocery store shelves for a time. With “just in time” inventories, stores have no more than two days' worth of supplies. Shelves will be empty in the first hour of a crisis.
Many elaborate and expensive food storage plans are available. But remember, the cheaper it is, the more you can afford to buy. If you have to rotate it, chances are you just won't do it, or will not do it very often. However wonderful MREs may taste when there's nothing else, you are not going to serve them routinely for dinner. For the most part, buy things that have a shelf life of many years, or that you can afford to give periodically to the community food bank or throw away if outdated.
You should have several types of food: staples for long-term storage; easily prepared foods for a short or medium-term crisis; and portable, immediately edible foods that require no preparation–some MREs, dry cereal, and canned goods for your shelter or backpack.
The best single source of advice is Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny. Keep a copy with your food stores. Someday you might need to know how to sprout grain to obtain vitamins. Also browse through it to make your shopping list. Buying some gold bullion coins might be a good idea–but not before you have invested in the things that Kearny suggests, which could prove even more valuable. Things like salt and ascorbic acid (vitamin C). The cost of Kearny's famine insurance: about $30 per year in 1987.
I will not duplicate much of what is in NWSS, but simply supplement it with some personal observations and other sources.
As Kearny states, unprocessed wheat, corn, and beans packed in nitrogen should keep for decades. I have made perfectly good whole wheat flour from 30-year-old wheat. If the soybean oil goes rancid, it might someday be usable as a substitute for diesel fuel (see www.knowledgepublications.com).
An electric K-TEC Kitchen Mill impact grinder is great for making flour out of various grains or legumes, but you'll want a mill with a hand crank for your shelter. Except for rice, grains that are not ground cause diarrhea and sore mouth if eaten in large quantity.
You can buy Mylar storage bags that can be sealed with your iron, plus oxygen absorbers, from New Millennium Concepts. You can use this method to preserve dry food that you buy when it is on sale, such as rice, beans, and popcorn.
If you see a disaster coming, you can very quickly prepare food that will last days, weeks, or months. Steve Harris suggests buying one or more Wal-Mart Belgian waffle irons, the round kind with deep pockets, for about $14. (The pockets formed by the cheaper rectangular kind tend to have holes in them.) Each waffle iron can make a 1/4 lb waffle in four minutes. Besides being faster, they're easier than bread to carry in your pocket.
To make “biscuit waffles,” get biscuit mix (about $1 at Wal-Mart) that calls for adding milk and eggs, but just add water. Make the batter a little thinner than pancake batter. Spoon it into the waffle iron and let it stay 30 to 60 seconds after the light goes out to indicate that it is done; it should come out easily with a fork. Drying the waffles makes hardtack; Harris made some that's still good after 5 years. One method is to heat the oven to 200 , then turn it off; repeat as necessary until the waffles are very hard.
You can also make hardtack from biscuits; slice them in half while still warm.
Store your hardtack in a well-sealed bucket to keep out air and insects. Also put away some sealed squeeze bottles of jam, honey, margarine, and peanut butter.
For the very long term, you should store whole grain, baking powder, and salt. A generic biscuit recipe calls for 1.75 cup whole wheat flour, 1 tsp salt, and 2.5 tsp baking powder. Skip the shortening or other ingredients, and just add water until the batter is the right consistency to put in the waffle iron.
For the short term, you might want to keep some just-add-water pancake/waffle mix; Sam's or CostCo offers it in a Mylar bag. It won't keep as long because of the milk and eggs in it, but it makes tastier, more nutritious waffles.
After reading an article on “`Poor Boy' Survival Food Storage” by Richard E. Oster, Sr., in the Journal of Civil Defense, October 1986 (available to TACDA members at www.tacda.org), I started a long-term experiment and can now report a 20-year follow-up. Almost from the beginning, I simplified Oster's method. I just clean out the metal coffee cans, fill them to the brim with dry food, and put them in a 175 oven for an hour or two, in order to kill any insect eggs, reduce bacterial contamination, and drive out some air. Then I cover them with a circle cut from aluminum foil, put the plastic lid on, tape it securely with masking tape or duct tape, and label it with the date.
I recently retrieved rice (purchased in 1983), macaroni, split peas, lima beans, white beans, and pinto beans that had been in an Arizona basement, with no heating or cooling, for 20 years. There were no insects, the taste was acceptable, and no ill effects were caused by eating the food. I did not use Oster's method with dried potato flakes because they already came in a sealed can. After 20 years, they were brown and had a very strong taste. I think you could eat them if you had to, but I will discard these and re-use the can. Metal is now so expensive that potato flakes are packaged in paper, and coffee in plastic.
The technology that our grandparents used in food preparation and storage is the subject of many interesting articles compiled by Clarence Baal, now available in pdf files on request from DDP. A donation is requested to recover costs.
If your normal access to the grocery store were cut off, how long would the food in your larder last? You could be on your own for much longer than FEMA's 72 hours.
No matter how much you have spent on it, most insurance becomes worthless as soon as you stop paying premiums. But with famine insurance, you can use the food, or keep it–for decades, if you've done it right. Store some food today!
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Some epidemiologic observations that demand an explanation: (1) Influenza is distinctly (though not invariably) seasonal, occurring during times of least solar radiation (wintertime above 30 latitude, rainy season in the tropics). (2) Outbreaks have begun simultaneously in widely separated areas before the age of mass transit. (3) Many families have only one affected member. Could there be widespread transmission by asymptomatic carriers, followed by an outbreak when resistance falls? Could vitamin D deficiency contribute to decreased resistance (and to the overactive inflammatory cytokines that are at least partly responsible for the death of robust young persons)? Consider storing pharmacologic doses (50,000 units) of vitamin D. See www.vitamincouncil.com. A copy of references kindly sent by Fred and Alice Ottoboni is available on request.
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