Let Them Eat???????
Welcome, once again, my dear readers to another edition of Survival Saturday. This week we will revisit food storage and some options for certain situations. If you remember, in our very first Survival Saturday we touched on food storage (here) in that we mostly covered the various types of foods that can be stored long term and the only actual method we got into in any detail was CO2 packing. This method is very effective for dry goods like beans, rice, bulk freeze-dried food, and pasta. This week we will discuss some methods of home food storage in more detail, but we will also talk about where to store food and the possible risks to those stores in an emergency, where perhaps you don’t have the protection of law enforcement. Please note, while the things discussed here are great for major civilization-ending events like polar magnetic shift, extinction-level asteroid, nuclear winter, or Civil War 2.0, these are also practical for more mundane and possibly realistic (Nuclear winter and Civil War 2.0 have moved up in probability lately) events like major power outage, natural disaster, or real pandemic.
The first consideration is location. Where are you going to keep your food stores? To get the maximum nutrition and life out of your stores they need to be in a cool place and protected from direct sunlight by their packaging or location. Consider the fact that even a thirty- or sixty-day supply of food for a family of four will take up a significant amount of space and will be hard to move. You want to be sure your food supplies are stored in the location you intend to use them at. This could mean that you have several stashes. You may have a 3–7-day stash at your primary residence for short-term emergencies like the loss of power or being temporarily cut off due to an earthquake, tornado, or other natural disaster. Then, another long-term, months or years, stash at a bugout location where you hope to ride out a prolonged incident, where everything falls apart and will not easily be returned to order. The third type of location may be used if you have several possible locations to hold up, but you expect there will come a point where you may have to abandon one or more of them (bugout). So, you set up caches in strategic locations along your possible routes of egress, with 3-7 days of food or more in each that you can pick up on the move. You may also cache gear, weapons, ammo, and other things in these places to make sure you are well-equipped as you try to move from one location to the next.
I know many of the survival food companies make it look like you can store up to a 30-60 day supply for each person in a convenient tote you can stack in the closet, easily toss in the trunk, or be otherwise conveniently easy to move, use, or store. I suppose as a minimum you can use those, but before that is your plan, go look at what is included. You will notice that none of the food in the kits actually has any meat in it most of the time. You will see things like BBQ Beans, Creamy Chicken Flavored Rice, and Creamy Bacon Flavored Potato Soup. Note, it is always chicken flavored, bacon flavored, or beef flavored because there is typically no meat in any of it. These kits rely heavily on carbs for most of the calories in these kits and rely almost exclusively on powdered milk for protein. They also tend to lack vegetables and fruit while relying on their powdered drink mixes for vitamins, including vitamin C. All these companies do offer freeze-dried meat as extra ala cart items, but they are expensive add-ons. There are exceptions to this such as Mountain House brand and a few others but their survival food is priced significantly higher, accordingly.
Don’t get me wrong, these kits can and probably should be part of your storage, as they are relatively inexpensive, and they are better than not having food at all. My point is it is just better and healthier to have more variety. You will probably want to add some preserved meat and vegetables to the storage, at the minimum, to balance out the nutrition. That supplementation will take up additional space. You must also consider that not only will these foods require water to be consumed, but boiling or close to boiling water. So, if you are going this route exclusively, you will have to make sure that you have considered that. Once you add canned or dried meat, preserved fruit/vegetables, and means to guarantee heated water for preparation, you will find the storage situation gets a little more daunting than it seems in the advertisements. You should figure 2 cubic feet of food storage, per person, per month of preparation. Some things will not take nearly that much, and others will take more. However, looking at my prep, that is the average space per person over time. I am confident that if you plan the same and mix up your food types stored, you won’t run out of room.
Location is also important. All of your long-term storage foods, from canned goods to MREs and dehydrated foods, will last the longest in cool, dry (under 80 degrees and under 50% humidity) places without direct light. And, since any long-term emergency food supply will not be easily moved once it is needed, the location of storage is very important. The best course of action is to store the food in the place you intend to be when whatever happens goes down. That might mean you have a short-term emergency food supply at home (especially if you are in a city or large town) of 7-30 days per person for long-term power outages, bad storms, or other emergencies that should sort out without the fall of civilization and another longer-term supply in your bug out location for longer-term emergencies. Seriously, if something serious happens (seems more and more likely every day) being in town is almost assuredly a death sentence, especially in large cities. If you need to go in with a group of your closest friends and family to get a place in the sticks and start getting it ready just in case, do that. Bottom line, wherever you are going to try to ride out, whatever emergency happens, that is where you need to have your supplies in advance because odds are you will not be moving them after the fact.
Let’s say you are caught out of position and will have to move from where you are to your bugout spot. If the roads are clear, you can be there in a couple of hours, but if not, you have to go on foot and that might take a couple of days. What do you have for food in your bag? There are lots of options you could have. MREs, at 1200 calories each, can be stretched out to one a day, but it can be extremely bulky to carry 3-5 planning on one a day. Freeze-dried prepared food is an option but that will require extra water that is heavy or extra time to purify water and the ability to heat it, so some kind of portable stove or fire. Unfortunately, camp stoves or campfires emit light and can give away your presence at a time that may be suboptimal. For my money, there are really two good options for ultra short-term (a week or less) rations to have in your pack and your specific situation can play a role in what you choose. The first is survival ration bars such as Datrex or SOS Foods. There are others as well but look for ‘Coast Guard approved’, as they tend to have more vitamins and better packaging standards. These are calorie-dense carbohydrate bars fortified with vitamins. They are light and can get you through short-term. Most brands can be eaten like a cookie or broken into water to make a porridge-type substance. They taste like bland, sandy shortbread cookies. The downside is they really are just carbs and vitamins, with little to no protein or fat. So, you need to consider them an extremely short-term option. In this same category, you could also make and use the forever bar I posted (here). The other emergency travel ration is a jar of peanut butter, jar of jelly, and tortillas. This option is bulkier than the ration bars, but less than the MREs and doesn’t require any heat like the freeze-dried rations. Two tablespoons of peanut butter provide around 380 calories, An 8-inch flour tortilla has about 140 calories, and a tablespoon of grape jelly carries about 50 calories. This also includes protein, carbs, and fat with vitamins and minerals. One 40oz jar of peanut butter, a 20 oz jar of jelly, and 2 8 packs of tortillas weigh under 4 pounds and can provide you 570 calories, 4 times a day, for 2280 more balanced calories for 4 days, or 3 times a day for 1710 calories over 5 days (here, here, and here) . Plus, vacuum-sealed tortillas and unbroken seals on the plastic peanut butter and jelly jars mean that you can just toss them in your pack and forget them for several years and they will be fine when you need them. It isn’t perfect nutrition, but it is better than survival bars and you can tolerate it longer without ill effects.
At this point, we have considered space and location for our food storage and both here and in the previous post we have conversed on options for food storage. Now, we are going to talk about meat, as it is typically the most expensive type of food to obtain for storage and it also is one of the most prone to spoilage. As such, it is a good idea to capitalize on really good deals when you see them for meat at the market (Realize that is less common now under Bidenomics' new normal. 250% overall food cost increases but still occurs both in and out of the current economic context). If you come across pork shoulder, chicken quarters, or something else at an amazing price, how do you buy as much as you can afford and preserve it so it doesn’t go bad since there is no way you can eat it all now? If everything is normal, the answer is to freeze it, but what if you want to add it to your shelf-stable stores, how do you do that? There are four main options, pressure canning (will write an entire post on canning in the future), freeze drying (I have no firsthand experience with freeze drying. So, I can’t write about it, but I lust after a Harvest Right machine and I have a birthday coming up…LOL), regular drying, perhaps the oldest method, and salting, probably the second oldest method. We are going to discuss salting here, as I have recently finished my experiment with the process and ate the last of my preserved pork that was 18 months old and stored at room temperature the entire time. You will need salt, and a lot of it, 10-30 pounds depending on your container, a food-grade container, a weight, and a lid for the container. I used a 5-gallon food-safe bucket, and the method was as follows:
Cut your meat (venison, beef, pork lamb, or whatever) into boneless pieces as regular as possible between .75 and 2 inches thick. Then put a layer of salt, about .5 inches thick, on the bottom of your container. After that, put one layer of meat. The pieces can be touching but should not overlap, and cover with a .5 inch layer of salt. Then continue this process until all of your meat has been added and you end with a final half-inch layer of salt. Then, put a weight of 25-35 pounds on top, that is as evenly distributed as possible, and put the lid on. For the weight, it is best to cut a piece of plywood or wood to fit snuggly but with the ability to slide up and down. Then, wrap it in foil and place your weight on top in the center. This will preserve your meat in the corner of the laundry room, the closet, or in the storm shelter, wherever it won’t be subjected to extreme temperatures. I followed this exact procedure with meat from a pig we butchered here. I then sampled the meat at 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months, where I ran out.
During this process the meat never developed any off smells and after a while it looked sort of like pinkish plastic pieces with a consistency of leather as they were removed from the bucket. You must desalinize the meat even after just a month. I did this by soaking overnight in a bowl of clean water, changing out the water every few hours, or by boiling for 10 minutes, changing out the water and repeating the process three times. The overnight soak worked best but both methods made the meat palatable. I found that it could be removed from salt, rinsed off, cut into bite sized pieces, and added directly to pots of beans or potato soups that would cook for long periods and they greatly improved the flavor and all but removed the need for salt. After desalination, when fried up with eggs, the meat had the consistency and taste of cheap ham, perfectly edible, but the primary taste was a non-overwhelming salt even after desalinization. I adopted this method from 16th-century instructions for salt pork preparation as naval provisions. So, it has been used for a very long time, probably because it really does work. As best I can tell, there is no reason you couldn’t reuse the leftover salt to preserve more meat.
So, now you are storing food of all kinds, canned goods, dehydrated foods, bulk beans, and rice among other things. You are capitalizing on sales and storing bulk purchases of meat and produce yourself by salting, dehydration, and CO2 packing. Everything seems to be coming together. Now, it is time to consider the long-term. We have no idea what might happen, when it might go down, or how long any disruption caused by the event will last. What is known is any amount of food stored is a finite supply, be it 30 days or 5 years, it will eventually run out. Since this is a fact, you need to plan for supplementation and replacement as quickly as possible, once you are safe and using up your stores. Even if you are not in the sticks, some cities and suburbs allow you to own chickens (there will be a future article on chicken husbandry). You can garden just about anywhere, from a plot in the backyard or a larger area if you have land. Even if those are not an option, you would be surprised at what you can grow even in an apartment with pots and planter boxes. Always store and grow heirloom vegetables because you can harvest and replant the seeds of those varieties. It is also good to keep in mind that squash, pumpkins, and root vegetables like carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips, and the like are very calorie-dense and can be stored in root cellars or other cool dry places for extended periods with no further preservation. Learn what can be wild foraged in your area, as there are things in every environment. Even in the densest city, I bet you can still find dandelions for greens, at minimum. If you are out and away from town, learning to hunt and fish can be vital to supplementation. Please note, that hunting and fishing are terrible primary plans, especially for groups, unless you are planning to have both a nomadic and feast-or-famine lifestyle. As mentioned before, chickens and other livestock, if possible, should be raised. Excellent choices are chickens, goats, and rabbits because the first two provide eggs and milk, in addition to meat. Rabbits are a good choice because one pair can deliver 30-80 pounds of meat every 120 days or so, depending on the breed. These animals are also excellent choices because they are excellent foragers and can be raised through the warmer months with little to no feed costs.
Another serious consideration is morale because food can play a huge role in how everyone feels about the situation. Think you are prepared and have a ton of both rice and beans put back in properly CO2 packed buckets? How long will it be eating nothing but pottage of beans and rice with whatever meat you can scrounge up by hunting, scavenging, or preserving until you lose your will to live? As I mentioned in my previous post, CO2 packed rice and beans are the least expensive way to put back a lot of calories. Seriously, for $400-$500 you can store up enough of them to feed 6-8 people for a year or more. However, that diet will do nothing for the morale of the people in that group. The other side is that with proper planning your food stash can be used to boost morale in strenuous times. For example, if you put back some of the $1 boxed cake, cookie, muffin mixes, oil and have access to eggs (fresh or reconstituted), then your group can know there are fresh muffins for breakfast on Saturdays or a fresh baked desert on Sunday. Storing spices and seasonings can also help greatly. You should also consider putting back things like flour, sugar, and dry yeast. Even if you save the fresh baked goods (box or scratch) for when things are hard, you will be amazed at how much they can do to change moods and refocus attitudes by providing a bright spot in times of stress, where the food will keep you alive, but otherwise is unexciting. If served on a more regular schedule it can also give people something, however small, to look forward to. It might sound silly, but I discovered the power of something small to look forward to when I was in boot camp. It was the first time I had ever had fresh pineapple (had eaten canned often enough but never fresh). At that time, it was one of the best things I had ever put in my mouth, and it was available every morning at breakfast. Several times were harder than average at boot camp, where thinking of the fresh pineapple at breakfast was the better thing that got me through in the short term. The thing is, you get through enough hard spots in the short term and suddenly you have made it long-term. You cannot underappreciate the role of food in morale and the long-term impact morale will have on you making it through any kind of emergency of any duration.
I hope you have been able to glean some level of useful information and that I have given you something to think about. I once had someone ask me if I carried a firearm every day because I was afraid of or really anticipated I might be attacked. I told them no, I am not afraid and I do not have any expectation of being attacked, but I know it is a possibility, even if an unlikely one. So, I choose to be ready for that possibility. I carry it because it doesn’t harm me and there is a possibility it might one day save me. I hope they understood my point, and I hope you do too. We prep because bad things are possible and being ready doesn’t hurt us while not being ready could be fatal.
On a side note, if I am being completely honest, I would be in my chosen bugout place on election night 2024, if things hold together that long. And, I would plan on being there for at least two weeks if it isn’t my primary residence because I think it will take at least that long to tell what is going to happen with any degree of certainty. I really don’t think either side will accept the results no matter what and things will deteriorate very quickly afterward. You might have some time to get where you need to be or you might not, so it is just better to be there to start with. I hope I am wrong, and everyone remains sane, but after the last several election cycles I am not sure that is possible. So, in my opinion, it is better to be safe than sorry.
Psalm 23:5
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You have anointed my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
God Bless you,
-Sam
Very thorough info, thank you. And you answered several of my questions before I had a chance to ask them, such as whether the salt could be reused for future batches.