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Comment by mbg721 | Hacker News Reader

If you're in the West, it doesn't hurt to buy a couple big bags of rice from the local Indian market, and have some dried or canned beans handy, and cycle through them as you cook. A pallet of bottled water and a bag of charcoal don't hurt either. A dumb power outage or a downed wire or a tornado or something is much more likely than Red Dawn, but you'll still be happy to have all that.

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I recently looked into how much rice I'd need to survive for a year. The results were fairly surprising. A kilogram of uncooked rice only provide you with about 3500 kcal, less than you'd use in 2 days of time (for the average human). So you'd need quite a lot of rice. Beans are similar, they just have more protein (not a complete protein though).

I concluded that while it is definitely advisable to have some number of days/weeks in storage, it doesn't seem feasible to store enough food to last a prolonged period of time (unless you go all-in on prepping, which has its limits). We humans are as successful as we are because we cooperate with other humans, and on our own we're pretty powerless. So fostering community might be the best way to advert crisis.

You don't need 2k calories a day in an emergency.

You can survive on 1200-1500 calories a day.

I still don't advise going in 100% on rice as beri-beri is an issue (or heavy metal issues if you go all brown rice).

A good mix of canned goods, dried goods and reliable water will help. Even in a shortage you will probably have some access, but limited access.

I strongly advise against bottled water for emergencies. It is the worst possible solution for cost/size/availability. You can buy 6 gallon aquatainers and fill them with tap water for an easy (and useful for camping) solution. Rotate every six months and you don't need secondary treatment.

Otherwise a food grade 55 gallon drum is $100 and you can fill it from your tap. You will want secondary treatment options if you plan to rotate just every 2 years, and you still need a smaller intermediary vessel.

Speak for yourself! I’m biking distance from a lake, so I’m going to focus on having enough bleach around. Bottled water is great… for bottles to do solar disinfection with. Though I guess I should really be worried about an algal bloom… ugh.

220gal IBCs should be $100 too, but maybe they’re more now.

you can buy handheld, portable, battery-powered, solar-recharging devices that electrolytically produce bleach from salt and water

Bleach degrades fast though. Look into pool shock and know how to make bleach from it.

My friends were talking about his. If a food shortage hits the plan is to consume the perishable stuff while massively cutting calories.

The goal is to reduce excess muscle and reduce the metabolism.

Rip off the bandaid and then the food rationing won't be as uncomfortable.

After a few days of fasting you lose a lot of your hunger.

Muscle is protective against injury & against angry humans.

Right, its always a good idea to have short term reserves but it's way more important to build out local and regional resilience and a less vulnerable, more robust, diverse food supply

My assumption is that if I'm trying to survive more than about two weeks, "possessions" are a cute theoretical idea.

You're forgetting about your fats. A 5 gal container of oil contains about 153,000 calories.

Every time you cook rice, beans, spit peas, lentils, etc. you put in a few tablespoons of oil or fat to keep it from boiling over, and to add flavor and calories. Each tablespoon is about 120 calories. When you make hummus, refried beans, tamales or spanish rice you generally add in a considerable amount more fats.

Rice will be full of pest insect eggs. They'll hatch after a while (smallish count of months, likely).

You've got to freeze it (to kill the eggs) and then seal it (to keep more pests from getting in) and/or add stuff that'll kill anything that hatches very fast (IIRC diatomaceous earth is popular for this)

Other grains have similar pest problems, plus if it's wheat or similar and ground into flour (not e.g. whole wheat berries), it'll get worse over time from air exposure. Anything with the germ still on/in it will go rancid after a while, and the germ's full of nutrients so you really want that part if you can keep it.

Small (1kg) vacuum-sealed bags should be fine though.

Correct—it's doable, it just takes more material and planning than "buy bag of rice, stick bag in dry place in basement". Do that, you'll be sad when you try to use it in a year or three.

The alternative is maintaining a stock but constantly drawing it down & replenishing it, but it gets difficult to maintain a substantial reserve that way, unless you already eat your "apocalypse" diet most of the time, so go through a lot of the same things you've got in storage even during normal times—say, if you already eat rice & beans 5+ dinners a week. You're capped by the rate at which you go through those things in non-emergency times. Plus it takes some planning and ongoing monitoring/inventorying, which is a non-zero amount of work.

Maybe I'm ignorant of this, but it was my impression that vacuum-sealed white rice should pretty much last indefinitely?

I'd expect a couple years at least. A quick Google gives common wisdom that you still want anti-weevil measures (bay leaves in the bag, the aforementioned diatomaceous earth) with that method.

My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material than simply buying sealed (but not vacuum sealed) bags at the store and putting them on a shelf. Getting grains ready for long-term storage means more than just keeping mice and bugs and water out—you've gotta worry about oxygen, and about insect eggs already present in the grain, too. Just stuff one might not think of if one were to make the wrong assumptions.

[EDIT] Incidentally, trying to store all one's calories, at least more than enough for a week or two, might not be the right idea anyway, short of a truly horrible catastrophe like nuclear war—my great-grandparents and grandparents, who lived through the depression and World War II, respectively, didn't seem to be all that in to storing lots of grain. What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables. I'd guess that's the result of some hard lessons about how to make it through hard times—plus, just, times before modern shipping and refrigeration when food availability dropped a whole bunch in Winter.

"What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables."

Ditto

I became aware of the world just as seasonal food availability was becoming a thing of the past—I remember significantly more seasonal variation, but only when I was pretty young—so this really stuck with me growing up. All those colorful jars lined up on shelves, all the gardening, all the boiling-of-jars, et c. All that work, and a can of the same thing was $0.29 at the store.

So I assume they all developed these super-similar habits for really great reasons. And since the ~1960s and earlier were just normally pretty similar to what a significant food shortage would probably look like now (at least in countries that will almost certainly be able to maintain adequate supplies of staples, like the US) it seems to me that might be a good first place to look. Stock up on canned veggies, worry less about the rest of it. Maybe get some chickens and plant some berry bushes (they also all loved keeping a line or two of berry bushes, and it seems like in their generations you just alway kept chickens, if you weren't smack in the middle of town)

I'm going to ramble a bit... I grew up on a farm in the actual middle of nowhere. It was a then-defunct, mid-size dairy. In it's heyday it had 300 head of Holstein being milked.

My mother, whose parents ran the dairy, and to a large extent my father, instilled this way of life on me at a young age. Growing up, we had a huge vegetable garden (they still maintain a 1/8 acre vegetable lot in their 70s, it's quite impressive, really -- and that's in addition to a 400 sq. ft. greenhouse I helped my father build and the rest of their lot that has fruit trees, berry bushes, etc.) but I was always in awe of the canning and the preserving. You grow all of this food but you only eat 20% of it fresh, canning and preserving the other 80%. But then, being so young I didn't realize that our meals consisted of vegetables/fruits that were canned or preserved years previously, of course. There was a strong communal aspect to it, too. We'd get oversupply from neighbors and/or give oversupply to neighbors.

Chickens, too. The farm had a coup. My parents had a coup (they gave it up in their late 60s -- my father grew tired of dealing with the foxes and skunks they attracted). It's something I want to do but where I live it's impossible. We're planning on a move where we can have a chicken coup and more space for growing food in general. I'd really like to preserve the heritage, as it were, and it's become more important as we start a family.

Also, I've dealt with corn and wheat weevils before. I actually did not realize that they also laid eggs on rice. I guess I assumed that it was "different" or whatever but thank you for highlighting that in other comments. I've got 50 lbs. of rice that I'm going to break down to smaller vacuum sealed bags this weekend. I've dealt with weevils at least a half of a dozen times in my past and it is not pleasant. I do not want a repeat of that mess, but especially where I live today.

Maybe the misunderstanding stems from a geographic difference. The rice I buy seems to come in an under a co2-atmosphere vacuum sealed bag that costs around $2 (or less on sale) per kg.

> What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables,

My grandmother did this too, after living her childhood through WW2 (in Germany), she used to have a repository of canned vegetables in the cellar. I sometimes talked to her about her rural live in the war-torn country, and she told me about soldiers, and all kinds of people, who would come by in war-time, where food was very sparse. And I think she maintained that sort of hoarding behavior throughout her life, based on the experiences she made as a child.

Interesting. Our (my part of the US) rice is mostly sold in small plastic bags (perhaps 1-2kg), or for some brands hard plastic containers; larger amounts come in either a much heavier opaque plastic bag (like pet/livestock feed, when it's not in a lined paper bag of some kind), or a thin clear plastic bag inside a rough cloth bag. If there are already-vacuum-sealed options here, I've not noticed them.

Reading some other comments, it is also possible that these bags aren't actually vacuum sealed. It is hard for me to tell how much of a barrier you need to get a good sealing, in particular to protect from rice weevils (bugs), which appear to be the biggest issue.

you would know if your rice was vacuum sealed because the grain jamming would make the bag inflexible

If you vacuum seal it with mylar lined bags and some oxygen absorbers, it can last up to 5 years, which is a long time.

Oxygen will get through normal plastic vacuum sealing bags and ruin the taste and eventually nutritional content otherwise after a year or two. Mylar lining stops most of that and the oxygen absorber gets the rest.

The thick bags will also stop rice moths from getting through (they are able to get through most cardboard and thin plastic bags), and the lack of oxygen will stop their eggs from hatching.

"diatomaceous earth"

This is also a suspected carcinogen. I'd be careful about putting it on food, even if you do wash it.

Yes, though if you're eating your emergency store of food rations because the world has ended, you probably won't live long enough to die of cancer.

There are alternatives.

What are you talking about? I've kept bags of rice for years without any issues.

What he said is generally true [1], so you must have either stored your rice in an environment that prevented them from hatching, or got lucky.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_weevil

I've never seen anything like that and I've kept rice around for years as well. Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies? If things like that hatched in food people bought from stores that would make the news, I've seen it in the news before so it can't happen that often.

Can confirm both: I've gotten lucky with some batches and unlucky with others.

Unlucky is quite nasty, but maybe extra protein? /s

This reminds me of something I read in Discover magazine around 20 years ago.

The gist of it was that immigrants in western Europe from various countries in Africa had developed nutritional deficiencies after immigrating. It appeared their diets were the same, perhaps better on paper, so it wasn't clear why their health was deteriorating.

It turned out that these people had diets rich in unwashed greens and vegetables, and they were likely consuming far more beneficial bacteria, insects, and minerals in their diets. They continued their mostly-vegetarian diets in Europe, but were no longer benefitting from what tended to accompany their foods before.

Not sure why I remember that. Regardless, we should all be eating dirt and weevils.

> Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies?

USA.

So, I mean, kinda.

But, unless they're irradiating or freezing your rice before it gets to the store, there are rice weevil eggs in it. They're inside the rice grains. If you've eaten much rice, you've eaten rice weevil eggs.

Probably comes from grain storage locations in warmer climates then. I can't find anyone talking about these online in my local language which is to the north, we have no native pests like these so they all only live inside houses. There are other weevils, but they are very rare and mostly comes from other sources and starts eating your bread etc, they don't come from packages you get in the store. Nobody said there is a problem storing these things long term, instead you get rid of them by getting rid of all their eggs in your kitchen.

The eggs don't hatch right away, can take months or years, but most people buy rice to eat right now, not to stockpile, so it's mostly consumed before the weevils hatch. And when they do, it's just a known nuisance, not worth reporting.

I cannot find anyone talking about rice weevils in my language online, so I really doubt finding them is a common thing everywhere. If it is that impossible to get rid of them then it is probably a climate thing, they are common in your climate but not in my climate.

So the advice would be to look at local pests and how to avoid having those in your storage. We still have other kinds of weevils but they are not everywhere like you say rice weevils are, you are unlikely to have them in packages meant for humans so storing things long term is fine.

What’s your climate? If it’s a colder one then that would make sense.

He's quoting the best way to store it. You want it in mouse and moisture proof containers too.

I have seen rice stay without any problems for more than a year. It was dried under hot sun for hours before storing. Most likely, the extreme heat took care of the weevils and the lack of moisture had a protective effect on the rice.

They take the rice out and soak it (as in soaking, not washing) like beans before cooking. Probably for re-hydrating it.

I keep rice and grains permanently in a chest freezer. It is fairly low power and you can cook directly from frozen, 1 cup at a time.

Does it not affect texture? E.g. I'd imagine they might be more inclined to crumble/turn to mush on boiling?

Nope, you can use the rice as normal in a recipe, no change. And the grains go straight into the grain mill and turn into flour the same as normal.

Eek. Ideally, you don't have a bag of rice for months and months at a time, though, you have a bag of rice and once you've used up most of it, you buy a new bag of rice, etc. There is kind of an inherent assumption that the person doing this is fond of eating rice.

Buy some MREs. They are made to last and to have everything essential for survival.

Shelf life is about 5 years, depending on how it's stored: https://www.mreinfo.com/mres/mre-shelf-life/

Make sure to pack some fiber though too! They'll plug you up something fierce if you eat them a lot.

Bran is cheap and should last a long time.

For sure. When making my emergency kit (my oldest has severe food allergies and I live in a major earthquake zone), I ran across some issues with things with high fat content though (which I believe bran might be). Unless you’re very careful with removing oxygen, the fat can go rancid after awhile (from months to years depending on the specific oils).

So best to do some research beforehand.

If you're going for shelf life I've eaten canned chili that was more than 15 years old and it was fine. Most things seem to change texture in unpleasant ways sitting in a can that long but chili doesn't. Not that it's viable to live off of in terms of calories and storage space, just an interesting observation about shelf life.

I wanna add a solar panel. Having 50 or 100w is going to make my life a lot better than 0w.

If you have the setup where you've got that connected and make it work, that's a great idea. The neighbors next to my building have some on their roof--it's not too different from having batteries for your radio.

You can get 100-ish watt solar panels on Amazon surprisingly cheaply, and they're small enough to take car-camping.

https://www.amazon.com/PROGENY-Portable-Kickstand-Flashfish-...

https://www.amazon.com/Jackery-SolarSaga-Portable-Explorer-F...

I've just specced up a system to deliver 1-2 KWh per day off-grid, and there are a lot more parts in the system than just the panels.

Apart from anything else, if you save on costs by sticking at 12v, you run quite high current. That 100w panel can fuck you up.

Sure, but the parent poster just wanted 50-100 watts to charge a phone. This just has a USB hub on the back you plug into.

A lot of the grid tied systems don’t even support off-line use, but you could always bodge something together during prolonged outages.

I was just researching this and the new Enphase IQ8 microinverters will run without grid power. You are correct though it is common for microinverters to require grid power to operate, which seems pretty surprising!

It's usually a safety feature. If there is a downed power line and you lose grid connection, energizing your (otherwise dead) side of the downed lines could easily kill the lineman who comes to fix it.

Oh certainly it is important to have some kind of cut-off to prevent back-feeding the power lines, but I thought that would just be part of the system design.

It is! The easiest design is to require existing grid stable power and supplement it. :)

Anything else is difficult to do reliably, and would generally require some kind of smart monitoring system, electrically actuated mains rated switch (not easy, cheap or durable it turns out), additional sensors, etc.

The design we're talking about just doesn't output power unless there is an existing sine wave to follow. Pretty foolproof, since anything that provided it would also be the one responsible for electrocuting the worker.

That makes sense! I guess being new to this it is just counter intuitive to think that you could install a big solar panel system and still suffer power outages. But I see what you mean.

I’m typing this from a computer I’m holding in my hand that’s more powerful than the ones used to put men on the moon. A box with three connections - grid, solar, and house (four if you have a battery) with sensors and disconnects and the smarts to not backfeed and electrocute linemen just doesn’t seem impossibly complex. Especially when we’re talking about home solar installs, which cost several thousand dollars to begin with. There’s got to be some other force at play here preventing this device, which is the most obvious way of implementing a supplementary power system connection, from being widespread.

They do exist. Does your handheld box switch up to 48 kw under load?

Because that’s the typical rating for a new residence in most areas in the US (200 amp x 240 volt).

Is your handheld device rated to last 20+ years in an outdoor environment?

Because that’s what you’d need.

But don’t worry, just the switch itself is only about $700-800 without labor, installation, or maintenance - [https://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/Generac-RXSW200A3/p...]

Add in all the other stuff and an extra couple thousand to the cost of the solar installation is why it isn’t as common. Because most people don’t care enough to pay the extra amount. Some do.

If you wanted it enough to pay the extra, most electricians wouldn’t mind adding it in I’m sure.

To the breaker on your solar (or genset) the resistance of the neighborhood is gonna look indistinguishable from a short circuit so you'll need to at least disconnect from the grid if you want to power your house. From there your next problem is that solar panels don't handle being overloaded very well so you either need a ton of them ore batteries.

Often, but not always. There are a number of ways lines can and do fail that produce high impedance, including a tree downing a service connection, breaker tripping, etc.

It's for two reasons.

1. Not killing linemen by backfeeding power

2. Your appliances don't like brownouts and voltage dips whenever a cloud passes overhead. Try to run a house without a power buffer and you'll burn up power controllers all over your house.

Unfortunately the battery market is extremely tight due to so many car manufacturers trying to switch to BEVs ASAP and stressing the raw materials markets. That and COVID shortages. Prices are very high and availability is usually "8-12 month waitlist".

I wonder if it’s possible to retrofit a Tesla to work as a bootleg Powerwall in tandem with residential solar - should brownouts become a common thing.

My Google-fu isn’t strong enough to find anything on the topic that isn’t on the level of “tremendously sketchy YouTube video” and I’m not about to risk my car and house experimenting off the back of that sort of thing.

I don’t know about Tesla specifically but this is a thing that some EVs can do. The new Ford F-150 lightning can do it. This is generally called vehicle to grid, vehicle to load, or bidirectional charging. A quick search shows maybe Tesla hasn’t added it yet. But here’s some details on the Ford lightning setup:

https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/electric-vehicles/home-...

The whole reason I wanted to take up camping was to understand what I can eat in an emergency situation. Now I own a camping stove, a few fuel canisters, some boil in bag rice, and a few large cans of plain freeze dried chicken and beef. Add in the charcoal BBQ and I'll have a feast the day the power goes out.

The benefit of backpacking as a hobby is not only testing gear and learning how to use it, but also having a means/excuse to rotate through an emergency freeze-dried food supply or MREs and/or learn how to forage and hunt/prepare small game. MREs are reasonably cheap, high calorie, long lasting, and if you strip them down to essentials can be reasonable weight. They don’t last forever on the shelf, but again, camping/backpacking/kayaking can give you an excuse to cycle out the oldest stuff.

Bottles water takes up too much space and is a logistic nightmare. Just get brita filters instead.

Rice will keep you full but our body requires protein and fat to live. Carbs are optional.

I Olympic lift so I always have whey.

Carbs are not optional for survival. MREs are overwhelmingly carbs for a reason. Pure protein sources lack carbs. Beans and rice don't have this problem.

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