I know, I know…when you think shelf-stable milk pouches you think of something like this. (Yeah, it’s cheap humour…I’m not above being low.) I was up at CostCo the other day and beheld this:

Basically, ‘juice boxes’ of whole milk. No refrigeration required. I’ve talked about this before…the folks at Parmalat built an entire empire on UHT pasteurized products. Although not available everywhere, Parmalot milk can be found on Amazon. Problem is, it is quite difficult to find anything smaller than 32 oz. Oh they  make it, yes…but just hard to find. Why would you want the smaller? Because in a grid-down situation you may not need all 32 oz of milk and without refrigeration it sure ain’t gonna keep safely terribly long.

The stuff I found at CostCo is available (also on Amazon) in 8 oz. servings. That’s more suitable for a bowl of breakfast cereal or mixing with your ‘instant breakfast’ powder.

Personally, I don’t really like milk…but several recipes I do like call for it, and corn flakes taste pretty weird without it. So, for me, someone who uses miniscule amounts of moo juice, these are handy sizes.

The more savvy amongst you may ask, “Zero, why not powdered milk?”. A valid question. The answer is….fat. Most powdered milke products are reduced fat. Skim, low-fat, 2%, whatever….it is not whole milk. And although I suppose someone can get used to it, powdered milk tastes lousy and low-fat powdered milk is even worse. See, fat is something that does not lend itself to long-term storage. As a result, whole milk powder, when you can find it, isn’t as long-term as a milk powder that has less fat. But…who wants to drink low fat milk? Ugh.

Now, it took me a while but I did eventually discover powdered whole milk and it is surprisingly not difficult to find. However, it is most definitely not low fat milk..in fact it has about 7(!!!) times the fat of whole milk. My experience is that it is very rich. Very. Like drinking melted ice cream. Using more water than perhaps is recommended might bring it down a notch closer to real whole milk, but it is far more palatable (to me) than that powdered low-fat crap.

So if your the type who like to drink milk, or you’ve got a houseful of kids who you think need to, and you want to have something for when refrigeration is no longer an option, you can head up to CostCo and satisfy your lactose cravings with some reasonably-portioned packages of shelf stable whole milk.

Worthy Repost Of The Day:

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken — more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

If you read the article further, they talk about some unfortunate 21-yr old single mom who steals food from the supermarket. Further in the article we get this gem: “…gave up on local food banks because of the lines.” Here’s the part that gets me…she has no job, so it’s not like standing on line cuts into her busy schedule. What it does mean is that this person would rather steal than stand in line for free guilt-free food. Has no way to feed herself but can’t be bothered to stand in line when the food is offered free. :::SMH:::

Out of curiosity, I checked what a single person would get on food stamps (although they don’t call them that anymore). Assuming minimum wage, and if I did the math right, I’d get about $134 a month. Wanna hear the interesting thing? My current budget for groceries is less than that. I can, authoritatively, tell you that one person can exist quite satisfactorily on $134 in groceries per month. And not be a scarecrow. Heck, man…this is a country where you can go into most supermarkets and buy a completely cooked ready-to-eat chicken for $5-8 that will last you two days. And that doesn’t include whatever you scrounge with a little $20 lawnmowing gig, a $15 snow shoveling job, or just helping someone carry a sofa up three flights of stairs.

Heck, minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Discounting taxes (because, really, if all you earn is minimum wage you aren’t paying any federal taxes), all you have to do is work one hour a day to eat better than pretty much anywhere outside the developed world. Get together with another down-on-their-luck buddy, pool your $14.50, and you can both eat fairly well that day. But even on $7.25 a day, you’re not going to starve. At all. (Although it does require a bit of discipline and intelligence in that you need to know how to do basic cooking.)

I used to have a buddy who lived on a VA disability. He was always running out of money at the end of the month. His choice of food? He’d head to the supermarket and buy a meatloaf-and-mashed-potatoes dinner that was basically heat-and-eat. And for the price he paid for it he could have bought a sack of potatoes and enough ground beef to last him 3x longer than that one meal would. But, he didn’t think that way, and he claimed he didnt know how to cook. And as a result he was always behind the curve, borrowing money at the end of the month.  When resources are scarce, and your back is at the wall, you have to think and make careful decisions…not do whats easy.

This isn’t to say that hand-to-mouth living on food stamps is going to be a walk in the park. Nope, nope, nope…my point here is that the goal is to not be dependent on .gov to feed you in the first place. This is why, when you have an extra $20 in your pocket, you pick up a 25# bag of rice, a flat of canned vegetables, a box of oatmeal, an assortment of spices, or whatever else will store nicely in your kitchen cabinets for a couple years.

And this isn’t some class-warfare you-hate-the-poor attitude I’m evidencing. I don’t hate the poor, and I don’t resent the rich. I could very easily be either one, all depending on my actions. I have food socked away so that if, tomorrow, I had absolutely zero income I could still eat. I could probably go for a month or two with literally no change in my current diet. After that, it’s into the stored food and that would carry me for about a year or more.

I can totally see people hitting a hard stretch and, through no fault of their own, having to lean on some form of public welfare….but stealing food from a supermarket because you’d rather not be inconvenienced by standing in line at a food bank is not the same as ‘stealing to keep from going hungry’.

Ignoring the disturbing mental imagery that honey is basically bee vomit, this is a fascinating article about one of the few foods that can, virtually, last forever:

Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey.

There are a few other examples of foods that keep–indefinitely–in their raw state: salt, sugar, dried rice are a few. But there’s something about honey; it can remain preserved in a completely edible form, and while you wouldn’t want to chow down on raw rice or straight salt, one could ostensibly dip into a thousand year old jar of honey and enjoy it, without preparation, as if it were a day old.

And, yes, the article touches on the medicinal use of honey on wounds as well…and explains why it works on wounds, which was quite interesting.

For me, honey slathered over hot cornbread or other warm baked good is all the reason I need to keep it on hand. Had I the space and time, an apiary would not be an unwelcome part of Casa Zero.

Beef is, supposedly, in a bit of a shortage right now but that’s fine with me. When it comes to animal protein my flesh of choice comes from chickens. So…when I was patrolling the meat counter at ALbertson’s I saw this:

Hmm. $1.69 a pound is pretty good for boneless skinless. So I ask the guy behind the counter how the stuff is packaged in bulk. The answer is this:

Forty pound box. Okay, hook a brother up.

Of course, once you get a box of forty pounds of chicken breast you have a job in front of you. See, in the box is a big plastic bag full of loose chicken and about two gallons of the most disgusting, slimy, chicken funk you can imagine. Can’t just leave it like that for the cryo nap…nope…gotta repackage.

So, out comes the trusty vacuum sealer. Took a while, but the freezer is now full of lotsa animal protein. Did I buy it because I think there’s going to be some sort of chicken shortage? Heck no..how does the world run out of chickens??? No, this is simply because while I believe there’s always going to be chicken to buy I don’t believe I’ll always have money to buy it. Never know what the future holds, and only an idiot would assume that they’ll always have a job and always have money.

So, a happy little day of food security. Go me!

Whats missing from this picture of the CostCo meat counter?

Answer: Prices.

Usually there’s a couple big signs on the wall listing the regular and case prices. Those signs, clearly, are now absent. Reason? I’m guessing it’s because prices (and availability) are uncertain. Now, remember, this is just my opinion…I didn’t actually ask anyone there. For all I know they pulled the signs down so they could paint the walls or something. But…given the Current Situation, I suspect its a matter of pricing and availability.

Just one of those little things I’m sure not many other people at CostCo noticed, but little things like that kinda jump out at me.