Month: July 2023

Practical Preparedness – Part 4

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Food

This is a big one with dedicated ‘preppers’. But in keeping with our theme so far, let’s keep this simple too. How much non-perishable food do you have on hand? If you have a nursing infant, how much formula? How much food is enough? The good news is you probably have at least enough fresh food on hand for three days. So even if supplies were completely cut off tomorrow you won’t starve before the Red Cross or FEMA show up with MREs for all. So for the absolute minimum survival ration, most households are already good-to-go. If you’re short of a three-day supply of food then I suspect nutrition is already a daily survival issue for you and this article may not help.

If it feels too easy to simply open the cupboard and go ‘Yep, I’m good!’ then let’s think about goals to be prepared for longer term situations like supply chain failures. Should we prepare for a week? A month? Three months?

Most people with families have a week’s worth of food on hand, but maybe not a week’s non-perishable food. If the power goes out and your fresh food spoils quickly you might need a backup supply of spaghetti-o’s or canned soup or other food to carry you through. But really you don’t need a lot more than that. Canned food will survive most disasters and although it’s not nearly as appetizing you can eat most of it without having to cook it. Take the number of people you’re feeding and presume at least one can of non-perishable food per-person, per day. That’s skinny eating to be sure. If you can stock more that’s great.

What about fancy non-perishable ‘survival’ food? This is a great way to stock up for preparedness, but it’s probably the most costly. I’ve eaten MREs (thanks Uncle Sam!), freeze-dried backpacker’s meals and products such as ‘Mountain House Adventure Meals’ and in the case of the backpacker food and adventure meals, they taste was better than I expected. MREs should be considered survival food, and only in the most dire of circumstances. The taste is ‘lowest-cost government contract’ quality. The Mountain House products and (I assume many others) have very long shelf-lives. Mountain House claims a thirty (30!) year shelf life. But don’t expect this to be the case with all products. The few products I’ve gotten from the ‘Backpackers Pantry’ line do not have extended shelf lives. The challenge with this option for preparedness is that all of this food is ‘dry’ and needs boiling hot water to reconstitute. The good news is that it’s durable and very lightweight. If ‘bugging-out’ is part of your plan, this is potentially a good option. Get yourself a Jet Boil type backpackers stove to cook them and you have a very compact solution that works even if the power is out or you can’t otherwise use your stove to cook.

https://mountainhouse.com/collections/emergency-food-and-survival

https://www.mypatriotsupply.com/

I don’t get anything for your use of these links, they’re just here to be helpful.

The good news is you have choices, and at least for short-term concerns, it’s really pretty easy to make sure you’re prepared. Remember, if you have limited funds/resources, don’t make this any more complicated/expensive than it needs to be. If you are concerned with more TEOTWAWKI situations then you should looking into learning more about hunting, homesteading, home gardening etc… These are all worthwhile endeavors of their own and I might have a bit to say about them later, but for now we’ll focus on what the average person can accomplish.

The Danger of our Collective Illusion

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Why does it seem like people disagree so strongly about so many things? Vaccines? Masks? LGBTQ? The Left, the Right. Polarization is nothing new. Political parties, media concerns, the press, industry, and people who seek wealth have always used division and fear to drive people to do what they want.

So why is this a bigger issue now? In his book, Collective Illusions, author Todd Rose explains that the rise of the Internet has given everyone a powerful voice. And some factions and people are getting voices far more powerful than they would otherwise have. As we have seen the Internet is a breeding ground for everything that mankind has to offer. There’s lots of love, encouragement, friendship, social connection and sharing of helpful, useful and even vital information. However our highly connected world is awash in speculation, derision, conjecture and outright lies. Rumor spreads among people like wildfire and the Internet is an amplifier for this. Posts go ‘viral’ and the social media sites, seeing they are becoming popular, amplify them as trending.

Does this mean the content is worth your attention? Is it helpful? Or is it speculation on some important local, national, or world event that has no basis in fact. This isn’t confined to random people on the Internet. It’s often once-trusted news sources who pick up the first whiff of a story and rush to publish it before anyone else, so they don’t get scooped. Then it gathers momentum, as other outlets who don’t want to be scooped, do the same thing.

Have you ever noticed the content of a lot of stories and ancedotes is suspiciously identical? It’s literally just copied and pasted or poorly transcribed repetition. Sometimes it’s the same five seconds of carefully edited video, designed to convey a crafted narrative. The messages, attitudes and mindset that get propagated are often of the most dubious kind. And it’s more likely to affect you if you live in an ‘echo chamber’ of people who all spout the same ideas or ideology. Your natural filter begins to let ideas and information in simply because it resonates with whatever you already think or believe. But this can be dangerous. What if it’s wrong? And worse, what if it’s spread deliberately to manipulate you into doing something for the benefit of someone you might not even agree with?

I found the book Collective Illusions to be very enlightening. A lot of what the author shares seems like common sense, and much of it is. But Mr. Rose does a good job of putting it all in our contemporary technological context.