- Jan 12, 2012
- 27,286
- 113
I have been giving a lot of thought lately to the way that whenever we plan things, we generally do so through the lens of the familiar. We build our assumptions around maintaining the same basic lifestyle to which we have become accustomed, or as close as we can manage, and rarely consider anything more different than the least variation we believe realistically possible even in a full-blown SHTF situation. There are a number of paradigms that I believe need taken into consideration, and I will grant you that each one will likely create a situation in which for every ten people, there are eleven different answers, but nevertheless, I consider the paradigms in question very important to hold up to scrutiny both for our well-being in the event of a catastrophic event of one type or other, and also for improving our lives on the way to that event, if it even happens.
I am going to start with food. The process of becoming aware and deciding what to attempt to do about it, followed by actually acting on it has been quite a process for me, as I am sure it has been for anyone who has stepped so far out on the limb as to accept that something terribly bad could possibly happen. As with most, my first thoughts started with identifying food that will last until the Second Coming of Christ and figuring out a way to construct a secure domicile with a reliable supply of water, and then 'hunker down in the bunker' until it blows over. The more I think about it, unless a person is willing to sink huge amounts of money into such an endeavor at the expense of other competing spending programs, it is not going to be a workable plan. The bottom line is that it is not easy to do even if one is single, believes it to be a probability, and does not have any expensive hobbies competing with it. From this point, I continued into considering other avenues of sustaining one's self.
Starting from the end and working your way backward is not necessarily the best way to address this situation. In doing so, we generally start from our present standard of living and either deliberately or unwittingly start building our plans on the least disruption possible to that standard of living. In the case of food, that works out to an expectation of dietary variety even if it is from dehydrated food packages. Then we consider how to preserve condiments, and then some variety in drinking material, and then start doing some significant math, assuming that the brochure is reasonable correct about how many meals can be derived from the contents, figure out how to husband supplies for as long as we think the incident may last, and puzzle over all of this while planning on running our kitchen basically the same way we always had only with a much sharper eye on wasting food. After this, we may start thinking of all this plus a garden or some orchard trees. While indulging in such a line of thought, I was also busy considering--in a flashback to my reaction to Y2K--the ages and necessities of the technologies being threatened. When I sorted it all out, my own conclusion there is that electricity was the oldest technology actually threatened, and it had only been considered necessary to have in one's home for something like half a century. Sure, it was over a century old, but for half that time had been considered a luxury. This led me to the first paradigm shift under consideration.
When I applied this line of thought to food in a SHTF, I came to the realization that while preservation and storage are important, they are not necessarily the end-all and be-all. People did manage to survive without canning as we know it, without refrigeration aside from the fortuitous winter weather for storing such things as meats, and without foods with shelf lives longer than the average life expectancy. They also functioned with an entire different understanding of the concept of what constituted waste and how to properly avoid it. In part, I can trace this back to a conversation with my grandfather some 25 years ago. He mentioned feeding garbage to the hogs, and noticed the predictable look on my face. He then explained the difference between garbage and trash, two terms I was in the habit of using interchangeably. Having been introduced to the concept that garbage is food waste and trash is paper, plastic, broken dishes, or anything else which had never been considered edible, feeding the hogs garbage made perfect sense. It also was the gateway into my understanding of the idea that non-waste did not mean that you ate every edible molecule on your plate and/or stored leftovers such as never to throw food away, but rather that you put what you did not eat to a productive use. Operating under a non-storage (particularly of leftovers) paradigm, you can get a great deal of mileage out of feeding hogs food that we would ordinarily throw away unless we were religious savers and consumers of leftovers.
Rather than eating every crumb, we now are moving into a paradigm in which we keep a fairly steady stream of food moving, and we dip from that stream what we need at the time, preserve and store as much as possible as long as possible (keeping in mind we are talking months and not years in most cases), and use what we would generally consider waste to either feed hogs and chickens (yes, they will eat things that in some cases a hog won't eat) or to use as compost. Generally, we buy milk and keep it carefully refrigerated and are careful to use it before it spoils. What happens when you milk the cow every day and can't use all the milk you collect? You have several options. First, you will be separating the cream to make into such products as butter, and the buttermilk in turn will be used for your biscuits and other bread products. You can use surplus milk to make cheeses. You can feed what is left over that doesn't get used otherwise to the hogs, not only sustaining them, but making the meat more tender than it otherwise would be. This general pattern of feeding surplus and/or waste food to animals works with most consumables you may find yourself growing.
There is no reason why you can't grow your own grain crops and grind your own products like wheat and oats for breads and cereals. Corn may be a bit tricky given the near omnipresence of GMO corn contaminating your seed, but it too can be grown and ground into meal or soaked into hominy. There is a book out there published during World War II on using corn as a primary food source which I intend to pick up at some point, but I just haven't got around to it yet. This will take some investment in tools and equipment, but contrasted with buying freeze-dried 'lasts forever' food, it works much like the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish.
There are a number of unusual and diverse things a person can do toward feeding himself and family, and I am not going to try to prepare an exhaustive list, just encourage you to take the above-mentioned examples as a demonstration of the need to review the paradigms that we tend to accept as truth without questioning them since they have always worked--in the circumstances in which we have lived up to this point. To put these thoughts in a phrase, I would sum it up as saying that in a self-regenerating system, the issue isn't the avoidance of using resources, but rather seeing that when they are used, they are used productively until they are all used up.
Then, perhaps the most important part: If you are in a position to do this, you can start improving the quality of nutrition you are receiving as soon as the harvest starts so that you benefit even if the S never HTF.
I am going to start with food. The process of becoming aware and deciding what to attempt to do about it, followed by actually acting on it has been quite a process for me, as I am sure it has been for anyone who has stepped so far out on the limb as to accept that something terribly bad could possibly happen. As with most, my first thoughts started with identifying food that will last until the Second Coming of Christ and figuring out a way to construct a secure domicile with a reliable supply of water, and then 'hunker down in the bunker' until it blows over. The more I think about it, unless a person is willing to sink huge amounts of money into such an endeavor at the expense of other competing spending programs, it is not going to be a workable plan. The bottom line is that it is not easy to do even if one is single, believes it to be a probability, and does not have any expensive hobbies competing with it. From this point, I continued into considering other avenues of sustaining one's self.
Starting from the end and working your way backward is not necessarily the best way to address this situation. In doing so, we generally start from our present standard of living and either deliberately or unwittingly start building our plans on the least disruption possible to that standard of living. In the case of food, that works out to an expectation of dietary variety even if it is from dehydrated food packages. Then we consider how to preserve condiments, and then some variety in drinking material, and then start doing some significant math, assuming that the brochure is reasonable correct about how many meals can be derived from the contents, figure out how to husband supplies for as long as we think the incident may last, and puzzle over all of this while planning on running our kitchen basically the same way we always had only with a much sharper eye on wasting food. After this, we may start thinking of all this plus a garden or some orchard trees. While indulging in such a line of thought, I was also busy considering--in a flashback to my reaction to Y2K--the ages and necessities of the technologies being threatened. When I sorted it all out, my own conclusion there is that electricity was the oldest technology actually threatened, and it had only been considered necessary to have in one's home for something like half a century. Sure, it was over a century old, but for half that time had been considered a luxury. This led me to the first paradigm shift under consideration.
When I applied this line of thought to food in a SHTF, I came to the realization that while preservation and storage are important, they are not necessarily the end-all and be-all. People did manage to survive without canning as we know it, without refrigeration aside from the fortuitous winter weather for storing such things as meats, and without foods with shelf lives longer than the average life expectancy. They also functioned with an entire different understanding of the concept of what constituted waste and how to properly avoid it. In part, I can trace this back to a conversation with my grandfather some 25 years ago. He mentioned feeding garbage to the hogs, and noticed the predictable look on my face. He then explained the difference between garbage and trash, two terms I was in the habit of using interchangeably. Having been introduced to the concept that garbage is food waste and trash is paper, plastic, broken dishes, or anything else which had never been considered edible, feeding the hogs garbage made perfect sense. It also was the gateway into my understanding of the idea that non-waste did not mean that you ate every edible molecule on your plate and/or stored leftovers such as never to throw food away, but rather that you put what you did not eat to a productive use. Operating under a non-storage (particularly of leftovers) paradigm, you can get a great deal of mileage out of feeding hogs food that we would ordinarily throw away unless we were religious savers and consumers of leftovers.
Rather than eating every crumb, we now are moving into a paradigm in which we keep a fairly steady stream of food moving, and we dip from that stream what we need at the time, preserve and store as much as possible as long as possible (keeping in mind we are talking months and not years in most cases), and use what we would generally consider waste to either feed hogs and chickens (yes, they will eat things that in some cases a hog won't eat) or to use as compost. Generally, we buy milk and keep it carefully refrigerated and are careful to use it before it spoils. What happens when you milk the cow every day and can't use all the milk you collect? You have several options. First, you will be separating the cream to make into such products as butter, and the buttermilk in turn will be used for your biscuits and other bread products. You can use surplus milk to make cheeses. You can feed what is left over that doesn't get used otherwise to the hogs, not only sustaining them, but making the meat more tender than it otherwise would be. This general pattern of feeding surplus and/or waste food to animals works with most consumables you may find yourself growing.
There is no reason why you can't grow your own grain crops and grind your own products like wheat and oats for breads and cereals. Corn may be a bit tricky given the near omnipresence of GMO corn contaminating your seed, but it too can be grown and ground into meal or soaked into hominy. There is a book out there published during World War II on using corn as a primary food source which I intend to pick up at some point, but I just haven't got around to it yet. This will take some investment in tools and equipment, but contrasted with buying freeze-dried 'lasts forever' food, it works much like the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish.
There are a number of unusual and diverse things a person can do toward feeding himself and family, and I am not going to try to prepare an exhaustive list, just encourage you to take the above-mentioned examples as a demonstration of the need to review the paradigms that we tend to accept as truth without questioning them since they have always worked--in the circumstances in which we have lived up to this point. To put these thoughts in a phrase, I would sum it up as saying that in a self-regenerating system, the issue isn't the avoidance of using resources, but rather seeing that when they are used, they are used productively until they are all used up.
Then, perhaps the most important part: If you are in a position to do this, you can start improving the quality of nutrition you are receiving as soon as the harvest starts so that you benefit even if the S never HTF.
