Preparedness, no matter how far ‘into’ it you are, has one thing in common at all levels. Whether youre the ‘security mom’ who thinks preparedness starts and ends at a ‘one month supply’ kit purchased at Costco, or if youre a hardcore Burt Gummer kinda guy with a tunnel network under your hosue, a HMMV in the garage and a satellite uplink at your command…all require, to one degree or another, logistical planning.
Succinctly, logistics is managing resources. Two words…’managing resources’. It means calculating how much of an item you need, where to get it, how to transport it, how to store it, how to protect it, how to distribute it, how to replace it, how to use it efficiently, etc, etc. The best bunker in the world is just a concrete cell to starve in if you dont have food. Or to freeze in if you dont have heat. Or to die in if you dont have water. Logistics is pretty much what preparedness is about.
My experience thus far (and I say ‘thus far’ because, well, life is just one big learning experience) has been that the biggest logistical headaches dont come from guns, ammo, gold, communications, or any of those other things. It’s easily food. This seems counter-intuitive because food should be a snap according to the do-it-as-cheap-as-you-can ‘Matt Foley’ survivalists…all we need are a buncha five-gallon barrels of rice or corn or wheat. Anything else is just wasteful luxury that could be better spent on more Mosin-Nagants.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to the apocalypse that gives me the menu options from ‘Forrest Gump’. (“..fried wheat, wheat creole, wheat soup, wheat chowder, baked wheat, wheat gruel, boiled wheat, wheat souffle….”) I suppose it beats starving to death but I suspect that’s pretty much what’s going to happen once appetite fatigue sets in. I suppose someone might say “Hey, dummy…take the wheat and make bread. Make pasta. Make dough.” Well, yeah, I suppose you could but last I checked all of those require more than just wheat and nowhere in that “just buy lots of drums of rice and wheat” did I see anything about yeast, baking powder, salt, eggs, baking soda, etc, etc.
But, anyway, my point was that out of all the possible logistics to be considered I think menu planning is the most annoying. Think about it. It’s the day after the apocalypse…power is out, travel is unsafe, water is limited, the gas pressure is gone, and you’re hungry. So whats for breakfast, lunch and dinner in that situation? After all, you’ve got a busy schedule ahead of…shooting looters, manning barricades, moving debris, diverting refugees, etc, etc. And once you plan the menu for that day, you’ve got hundreds of days more just like it to plan for. And, sadly, ‘one size does not fit all’…the same menu day after day leads to problems. So, you need to have variety. And you need decent nutrition. And it all has to have weathered the apocalypse, stored well over time, require nothing more complicated than a camp stove and some clean water to prepare. Compared to stockpiling guns and ammo, this sort of thing is a major challenge.
So, I’m wondering, has anyone here actually thought up what the menu is going to look like during a week-long blackout or a post-earthquake month of deprivation? Using just what you have stored, nothing from the outside except maybe water and some shattered 2×4′s to cook over, what’s gonna be on your table for breakfast? For lunch? For dinner?
great post CZ…and for the stockpiling “flour” crowd…a post about a topic that needs to really be thought about. in my opinion, when i first became seriously interested in survivalism (thanks Kurt Saxon! love ya buddy!) and prepping – i thought it was just plain common sense to get yourself out of the city/suburb, onto some land and learn how to grow whatever you could grow, learn how to save seeds, learn how to fish, learn how to hunt. in addition to – learn how to eat locally and seasonally and the biggee – learn how to forage!!! most people don’t know that you can make delicious flour from grinding up the roots of cattails. most people don’t care that the Donner Party survived from drinking pine needle tea and pine needle soup. most people think that only maple trees produce sap/syrup????
you can only stockpile so much food in my opinion. you have to know what food grows naturally and locally to your area, you have to learn how to collect, store and prepare that natural food and then you have to learn how to make interesting and delicious meals from that naturally-occurring food. that is step number one. step number two is to learn how to grow additional food, store and prepare it.
your friend,
kymber
Excellent point, for every book from someone like Rawles or Joe Nobody I buy, I try to buy a cookbook geared towards using really basic ingredients. My mother was tickled when I started going through her 50+ year old cookbooks. Since I have found some LMI I have started looking for military cooking manuals since they are geared towards feeding large numbers.
Not a problem. Have 90 different food items stored in volume in #10 cans or 5 gallon buckets with 5 different ways to cook it using fuel and water stored on site and have 5 ways to make water safe to drink. Think in terms of the rule of 3 — have at least three ways of doing anything critical and in terms of having a great variety of food stored so you don’t have appetite fatigue.
Coffee, fried spam and Grits
Lunch, canned tuna or soup, pilot bread
Dinner, Mountain House, Chicken and rice maybe, or chili.
Desert, my neighbor’s cat…just kidding
My only additional comment would be from my Katrina experience: after a disaster you probably won’t have much of an appetite due to the stress. Sounds kind of strange, but I had a house full of food with nothing I wanted to eat except for some crackers, cheese and pepperoni slices when I did feel hungry (and that was not often). The only thing I wanted to drink was cranberry juice and did not have much of that around.
The point is that you will be surprised at your response “physiologically” to a disaster when it comes to eating…I have discussed this with many people who were here and rode out Katrina and they described similar experiences. It was not until the power came back on 2 weeks later that I started eating “normal” again when all of a sudden I had an appetite for cooked food. Weird I know, but that was how my mind associated things. I have different “disaster” foods on hand during storm season these days and I would expect for any other longer term disaster scenario it would be much the same with normalcy only returning at some distant time when the mind had acclimated to whatever the new “normal” would be. Then it would be time to break out the long term stored food stuff…just some thoughts.
What ever MRE I pull from an open case, and a shot of dark rum, to keep the fire inside going.
A Great cookbook is the Encyclopedia of culinary Arts Institute. Mine is the 1977 version. Over 1000 pages From 700 menus, recipes to how to preserve , One recipe for Corned beef brisket starts with Fresh killed beef or cured bacon starts with 100 pounds of pork sides and how to store cooked meats in fat. It’s the coolest cook book I have ever seen.
LOL- with your homesteading crowd, if you look at the food they prepare (often off grid), the biggest problem is not gaining weight.
I think it all depends on your background. Since a big chunk of my is in cooking this was the easy part for me.
The Joy Of Cooking has all sorts of good info in it including a little info on wild game and recipes for just about everything you’d want to cook. Quite a few fresh ingredients can be swapped out for dried or powdered just fine. You can make fairly good versions of quiet a few recipes using dried stuff.
It might be helpful to think of all the different ways you can use just a handful ingredients, for example: oil, flour, powdered eggs, yeast, powdered milk, salt, baking powder, and sugar can be bread, pizza crust, crackers, pancakes, crepes, waffles, cake, noodles, french toast, and probably a bunch more stuff. Add old fashioned oats, brown sugar, and baking soda to the list and you’ve got oatmeal cookies. And of course the oats, brown sugar, and a little bit of dried fruit are what’s for breakfast. Chicken and Red Lentil Soup is good stuff and can be made from 100% stored stuff. The dried Apricots doing triple duty in your breakfast cereal and cooked up with some water, sugar, and brandy for a sweet desert treat.
Chicken and Red Lentil Soup
3 tablespoons olive oil 1 onion, chopped 4 cloves garlic, minced 1 pound boneless chicken breasts, cut into small chunks 1/3 cup dried apricots, sliced 1 ½ cups red lentils 5 cups chicken broth or stock 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes (or use fresh tomatoes, if you have them) ½ teaspoon ground cumin ½ teaspoon dried thyme salt and pepper to taste
Toss everything but the apricots in a pot and let simmer for 30 minutes. Toss in apricots and simmer 5 more minutes. And it’s super healthy food.
Not to over hype a particular person or magazine but I got one of Jackie Clay’s cook and canning books awhile back and its got recipes for safely canning different chicken beef and pork dishes (spaghetti, hot dishes, chilis, casseroles, etc) with the top emphasis on safety and minimal amount of post jar opening cooking aside from warming up. Like how long to cook or soak noodles to them hot pack with food so they are perfectly cooked when they are opened. Soups and gumbos too. If your cool dark place is dry as well, bags of beans and rice will make anything else go further. Having some water on hand of course is good too, but if you want some variety, buy some drink mixes now, and put them away for later. Whether you go with regular or sugar free, cans of mix or the little packets to go into bottles of water, you’ll stave off the ‘same old, same old blues’ if you can spice up your water from time to time.
An afterthought: Every little stash should have something to try to stave off boredom as well. From the north of the mason dixon line winter car survival kit to the underground ex missile silo. Books, magazines, etc… all things that you only need light to operate. But be warned. *IF* you throw old magazines into a pile and you are stuck with them, don’t include the ones with food ads or of a ‘cooking’ nature. You don’t want to be trapped with little to no food left and nothing but ads for superbowl feast items to look at. That’s just being cruel to yourself. And no ‘La Cucina Italiana” mags either.
Oh, I dunno. A simple diet sufficed many a people for many thousands of years. What was that line from Monte Walsh? “If’n yer hungry, you’ll eat”. I do agree that sourcing native plants and foods is a good idea and there will be a fair amount of that return to foraging, as well as gardening. Most people only use a few spices anyway. . . salt, pepper, chile…. cinnamon, clove. Pioneers, the middle ground hunters, did have a varied diet of vegetables in season including apples, cucumbers, potatoes. But I’ll betcha this, if you have a store of extra spices on hand for barter, you’ll be a ‘Spice’ King in the neighborhood….ain’t that what got this country found in the first place…. lookin’ fer a new way to the spices of the East? Maybe yer aughta have a safe full of that stuff. Shoot, maybe I should Wait, wait…mebe I do!
Have you considered Quinoa? I know it’s considered to be a food for health nuts and vegans but consider for a moment its survival applications. It stores as well as rice, it cooks like rice, its more versatile than rice, it’s tastier than rice and *drumroll*…. It’s a complete protein. It’s got a higher protein content than wheat, and if you’re so inclined (and from what I understand) it’s super easy to grow (it’s basically a weed). It was originally cultivated in the Andee’s so growing it in Montana should be no problem and from what I’ve read it grows well everywhere and is highly drought resistant. The important thing to remember is that you need to rinse/soak it really well since it has a soapy and nasty coating on it that need to be washed off. Other than that though it really is something worth considering. NASA is considering it for crops on long space missions that would grow well in that environment. Sorry to sound like a Quinoa commercial but it IS worth trying at least to see if you and the missus like it.
Um, I look at this problem pretty differently. We try to eat things we store and store things we eat, with the obvious exceptions of fresh meat, fruit and veggies. The things Wifey uses to make wheat bread, sauces to go with rice, etc all are things that we try to store in sufficient quantities.
We have worked through several Gulf Coast hurricane events here with multiple weeks without power and heavy tree/debris cleanup. Translate to long days of physical activity at typically higher stress level than normal. We found we needed filling food and accessible easy foods with clean nutrition to get through the heavy physical activity. We wanted filling meals and energy bars without a lot of prep to eat during valuable daylight hours. By a week of this we usually want some comfort food as well.
The first day or two is whatever goes from the freezer straight to the grill to minimize food spoilage. Time to get to know your neighbors again and have a shared cookout. We don’t actually use a generator, we just work through it. We keep 3-4 weeks per person of Freeze Dried camping pouches that give instant nourishment along with a couple of indulgent desserts or psychological meals. A big fan of the mashed potatoes and chicken breast type dinners here. Chocolate and wine are pretty great ends to a long day (usually by candlelight). We keep #10 cans stored of freeze dried and dehydrated foods and longer stuff that we regularly cook from and rotate. So, easy to fix for early routine adjustments. Then we move to longer term storage with more planning needed. We buy storage foods based around meal recipes and plan our garden around same. Of course long term gardens and timeline on those are a different beast. Whew, yep… it is tough to plan, but we keep trying.
Note to Radar: we love Quinoa and store and use it regularly. Shelf reliance now carries #10 cans of the stuff. We replace lots of rice and pasta recipes with quinoa. Throw some FD veggies on top, a few spices, and it is a nutritious bowl of energy and fuel. Haven’t tried to plant and cultivate yet, hmmm…. opening a new browser window.