Business Is Booming for America’s Survival Food King
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For those of the prepper mindset, it would make more sense to start homesteading instead. That is, learning to grow and preserve one's own food, instead of stockpiling a little food but in the end still relying on our national food supply network. Homesteaders, I think, will be the ones who survive the true nuclear/climate change apocalypse, not preppers.
Think about hurricane Katrina, or even the more recent season.
Just because there is some aid doesn't mean your access is reliable enough for an entire family.
There's never enough to go around to everyone who needs it, so the best you can do is be prepared.
"There is a 17 to 20 percent chance that northern Oregon will be hit by a magnitude-8 quake in the next 50 years."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/a-major-...
The big one that people never seem to realize is that gasoline goes bad much quicker than you expect.
However, Katrina cracked the shell of the idea that the government will help out competently in a timely fashion. You may be on your own longer than you think. And planning for that is simply sane in areas like California (fires and quakes), the Gulf Coast (hurricanes), or the Northeast in winter (ice storms).
Diesel fuel also has a shelf life as well.
I couldn't respond because I started getting the "You are posting too fast" message that somehow magically isn't actually related to time or rate.
"...today, the major concern is environmental instability. “It’s not just the freak events. We get calls from people saying, ‘I live in Miami, and flooding is now routine. I’m worried Florida is going to be under water in two years,’ ” he says. “Or from people in upstate New York who experienced a 1-in-a-1,000-year blizzard and couldn’t get out of their driveway for two weeks. People who lived through the California drought, the forest fires of Texas and the Northwest, and who think maybe the government won’t come to their rescue when a disaster hits...."
The best disaster preparedness measure you can take is to insist that people in PR are helped -- so if it happens to you, the expectation is assistance.
I reminded of the hunter-gatherer concept: the best place to store food is in another belly.
I’m in a good position to help, but let’s say that I was also* desperate and starving and so were my children? If I have to choose between other kids, and my kids, I choose mine. Worse, what if it were a situation in which helping revealed the degree of my preparation, and led to looting?
I would expect that the world would go through several stages after such a disaster:
1. Disaster happens that destroys normal food production and distribution over much of the world.
2. Widespread violence breaks out as people realize help will not be coming and starting fighting over resources.
3. After a couple of months, the fighting and starvation have greatly reduced the population. Most who have survived are weak and out of ammo for firearms.
4. Those who had 6 month stockpiles and were able to keep them (either by being somewhere away from the violence, or by having sufficient arms to defend them) come out and start working with similarly prepared people to get farming going again in their area. They are in good health and have ammo for firearms and so can deal with any survivors of stage 3 who want to try to steal from them.
I don't think the goal when preparing for this kind of disaster is to live off your stockpile until civilization is back to normal--that would take way more than 6 months. I think it is to live off the stockpile until things stabilize and we have enough regional civilization to enable seriously working on rebuilding.
there probably isn't anyone alive today in the US who is ready to be entirely self-sustaining for six months...if civil society disintegrates for six months, it likely isn't returning
Three days is the minimum for any part of the country that gets blizzards. At this point, I've gone to a week since last winter I was stuck at home for 3 days.
> there probably isn't anyone alive today in the US who is ready to be entirely self-sustaining for six months.
No, there are folks who would be fine for six months. Heck, there are still folks in rural areas that you don't see coming back to town to buy supplies in six months. The country is pretty vast and still has a lot of rough edges.
(I've lived in lake effect snow belts most of my life and never had a 4 wheel drive vehicle and have basically never worried about roads)
With all due respect that's a load of hooey. Northern towns generally have capacity to clear a normal winter's snow. On the other hand, we have gotten well above a normal winter.
First, the snow event can last a couple of days. Even after the large amount of snow gets done, winds can exceed 30 mph with gusts above 50mph. This makes any sort of travel a non-starter. Worse are the storms that start with a sleet / light rain (early and late winter) and then freeze before the actual snows show up.
After the event, you are faced with moving the snow. Late winter storms are fairly brutal if the ditches are already filled with snow. This assumes you can get people to all the emergency equipment in a timely manner. This also assumes the budget is holding for all the overtime.
You can easily be stuck in your residence for 3 days and sometimes a week. Hope the power company is on the ball because that's a load of fun in itself. The 96 storm in ND had people stuck for a week if you were anywhere off the main route. Never mind the damage to the power grid and the setup for the 97 flood.
They expect to go and steal from others (and have others try to steal theirs).
That's one of the reasons they have very large arsenals.
Rice works as well as hard red wheat as far as calorie density goes and in the short term that’s all that really matters for adults. Rice also has some advantages as it’s more versatile in terms of cooking and taking flavors. A few cases of Minute Rice, a small camp stove and a variety of seasoning packets would be a win over a large bag of wheat.
Longer term wheat has a higher protein content and has an advantage that it can be sprouted to increase vitamin content but you would need to be in pretty dire straights for that to make a difference. Neither wheat nor rice have enough fat content needed for long term survival.
Neither wheat nor rice will sustain toddlers without a supplemental high quality protein source like milk or eggs.
Cheap though ($1/pound at mass market retail in the US). Dry pasta is about the same on both measures.
Doomsday prepping has really taken off in America. It's upsetting to think how many are squirreling away resources in a fortified bunker.
I lived in hurricane country for a long time, and having a week's worth of bottled water & shelf-stable food in the house just made good sense. (I was without power for 10 days after Hugo in 1989).
I will say the taste has really improved over the years. I was fed some of the original MREs back in the 80's (guard duty at a USAF base) and the ones the military have today are way more palatable. Same with the freeze-dried food.
Our preparedness is this: Water for 3 days, food for less than a week. Those things come in quickly from the government.
After that initial couple of days, what people in stricken areas are desperate for: batteries to charge their phones. Toilet paper. Soap. Diapers. Sanitary pads. Plastic bags for waste.
After that, the most important thing is having enough savings to rebuild your life after your home, belongings, town, job are all gone.
There is a reason we have food regulation. Without regulation, food producers do nasty things. Vomit inducing things.
One of the most important books of the muckraker era
Heh, beat.
TL;DR it was basically a massive expose on the conditions in the food and meat-packing industry in 1904 that lead to the creation of what is now the FDA, and the establishment of regulations concerning food sanitation and requirements about ingredient purity that we still greatly benefit from today.
Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of aircraft carriers.
The first time I walked into the bakery I couldn’t believe what a mess it was. The sides of the ovens were yellowing, machines were rusting, there was grease everywhere.
“Is it always this messy?” I asked.
“What? What are you talking about?” the manager said. “We just finished cleaning. This is the cleanest it’s been in weeks.”
Oh boy.
It took me a couple of months of cleaning the bakery every morning before I realized what they meant. In the bakery, clean meant no dough on the machines. Clean meant no fermenting dough in the trash. Clean meant no dough on the floors.
Clean did not mean the paint on the ovens was nice and white. Painting the ovens was something you did every decade, not every day. Clean did not mean no grease. In fact there were a lot of machines that needed to be greased or oiled regularly and a thin layer of clean oil was usually a sign of a machine that had just been cleaned.
This is what a dough rounder looks like.The whole concept of clean in the bakery was something you had to learn. To an outsider, it was impossible to walk in and judge whether the place was clean or not. An outsider would never think of looking at the inside surfaces of the dough rounder (a machine that rolls square blocks of dough into balls, shown in the picture at right) to see if they had been scraped clean. An outsider would obsess over the fact that the old oven had discolored panels, because those panels were huge. But a baker couldn’t care less whether the paint on the outside of their oven was starting to turn a little yellow. The bread still tasted just as good.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...
The "servings" of the meals listed on their website are about 250 calories. 500 calories is small meal for many adults.
It'll be a little happier.
Really depends on your timelines. Prep for short-term disaster scenarios on a 1-2 week timelines should be manageable for most, and really we should all be doing it. Prep for longer timelines is much harder.
They used to call it "the law of twos" - you can live two minutes without air, two days without water, and two weeks without food.
So yeah, water is the big concern. Two weeks without food is the low end, but electrolyte imbalances can kill you even if you still retain plenty of stored calories.