Posts Tagged ‘emergency food’

Mainstream online media post about stocking up on food

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

Some of you may have seen this article on Yahoo:

The top foods you should keep in case of an emergency

Some preppers may argue that when the mainstream media start to suggest stuff like this, things may be worse than we think. I hope that instead more and more people are just coming to the realization that they can’t rely on grocery stores to carry everything everyone needs at any given moment. The phrase “nine meals from anarchy” is a spot-on description of how far away from social unrest if the trucks stop rolling and the three-day supply of food on grocery store shelves is gone. Stock up now while you can. There’s no good excuse not to.

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Don’t skimp on your food storage equipment — your life depends on it

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

I came across a thread in one survival-prep forum recently where someone posted the suggestion that instead of buying allegedly more-expensive oxygen absorbers, why not buy iron oxide hand warmers, they said, since the hand warmers were cheaper and readily available in sporting goods stores and, they said, had the same active ingredients as food-grade oxygen absorbers? Well, that’s all fine and good if the hand warmers are cheaper and if they’re food-grade, but is cheaper necessarily what you want when it comes to food storage?

I’ve tried probably eight or nine different brands of food dehydrators over the years, and the only one I’ve tried that I would recommend to other people (disclaimer: I haven’t tried an Excalibur) is the one manufactured by Nesco, which has an internal fan for air circulation and helps food dry in half the time compared to dehydrators without fans. I like the Nescos so much that I’ve bought a dozen of them over the past several years just so I’ll have plenty of extra food preparation tools if I need them. (Shameless plug: You can usually get a Nesco on eBay for around $30 (plus shipping) if you pick your auctions smartly.)

Now, I could buy a Ronco or other model without an internal fan that would in fact use less electricity during the drying process…but if it takes the dehydrator twice as long to adequately dry food, am I really saving any money? I think it’s more than worth a few extra pennies of electricity to have dehydrators with fans so that I know my food will dry quickly and uniformly…and in the end, I have the security of knowing that I have plenty of food if I need it. (If you’re so worried about a dehydrator with a fan using more electricity than a dehydrator without a fan, maybe you should unplug the appliance in your house that uses the most electricity — your refrigerator!)

Which brings me back to the point about getting what you pay for.

In 1996, I bought my very first car, a 1984 Toyota Corolla. (Yes, a Toyota. The brakes worked on this particular vehicle…but nothing else did.) The car had about 162,000 miles on it, and the dealer was asking only $850 for it. The only warranty it came with was for me not to let the door hit me on the way out of the so-called dealership. More than $1,000 and 1,300 miles later, the car wouldn’t budge out of my mom’s driveway. Well, that’s not quite true…I could drive it three or four miles before the engine would overheat and I’d have to put more (and more…and more…and more) water in the radiator after it cooled down…and watch the water go right through the radiator to the pavement because the bottom of the radiator was rusted out.

I’d spent close to $2,000 and now had nothing to show for it. I was not a happy camper. But at least I could catch a ride on good days and hope I didn’t have to walk very far the rest of the time.

Which brings me back to my first point.

It’s one thing to shell out a couple thousand bucks on a piece-o’-junk car and have the thing eventually stop running altogether and then chalk up the experience to a lesson learned the hard way. But it’s a whole different story when your life depends on something.

And you can’t live without food.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that hand warmers technically do have the same oxygen-absorbing properties as, well, oxygen absorbers. I haven’t been able to try to vacuum-seal a jar yet with hand warmers because (at least according to the sporting goods clerk at Wally World) they are a seasonal camping-accessory item and won’t be available until later in the year. But do I really want something to heat up my food items as they are undergoing vacuum-sealing, and risk denaturing the vitamin content of the food that my life could depend on if TSHTF? Or would you rather use tried-and-true methods and materials that have been proven time and time again to work, so you don’t have to worry?

I’m not telling you not to buy that 1984 Toyota. I’m just asking you if it will get you where you need to go when you need it to get you there. If you’re buying cheaper food storage tools that you can’t be sure will do what you need them to do — keep your food fresh and safe until you eat it — are you willing to risk your health and maybe your life just to save a few bucks?

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Oh, carrots are divine, you get a dozen for a dime, it’s maaaaaagic!

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

ORIGINALLY POSTED 4-28-2010:
Some of you may have caught the Bugs Bunny reference in the title above, which seems appropriate given that I’m about to try my hand at dehydrating carrots. And I’m not imagining it will be too hard, as the only extra step between dehydrating carrots and spinach will be the dicing of the crinkle-cut frozen carrots I just bought at Wal-Mart. For just under $6, I picked up a Mainstays brand food chopper (pretty low capacity — maybe 2 cups?) that I will use to dice the carrots so the bits to be dehydrated will be as small as possible — exactly what you want, as small pieces dehydrate much faster.

Someone pointed out to me that frozen vegetables are already blanched before they are frozen, so that step is already take care of compared to fresh-packaged vegetables, and the frozen veggies are ready to be cooked and eaten…or dehydrated, as the case may be.

The price on the 1-pound package of crinkle-cut sliced carrots at Wal-Mart was 98 cents. Checking a couple different websites to see the going price for bulk dehydrated carrots, at a reconstitution ratio of about 1 pound of dehydrated carrots equal to 2 pounds of cooked carrots, pricewise I’ll be doubling my money by doing this myself instead of ordering an already-dehydrated bulk lot of carrots — one particular site I’ve ordered other items from is selling 20-pound lots of dehydrated carrots for about $3.95 per pound (which would be about $1.97 per pound for the equivalent volume of non-dehydrated carrots, twice the price of my package of carrots from Wally World). As I mentioned earlier, in most cases it will be cheaper to dehydrate fruits and vegetables yourself instead of buying pre-dehydrated products, with the caveats that high-sugar foods (especially tomatoes, apples and bananas) might be a bit trickier and stickier since their sugars will caramelize and get gooey and make it hard for you to remove them from your dehydrator trays. But obviously this isn’t a problem with carrots, so never mind. :)

I’d also like to reiterate the point I’ve made before that the food items I’m dehydrating for my long-term storage are either huge in nutrition, huge in flavor or both. Carrots (and spinach as well) are loaded with beta carotene, which our bodies turn into Vitamin A. Carrots don’t necessarily pack the flavor punch that other vegetables do, but they will add a huge nutritional punch to your food — 1/2 cup of dehydrated carrots (equal to 1 cup of cooked carrots) will give you about 130 percent of your daily recommended Vitamin A. Like Bugs said, it’s maaaaaagic!

I’ll post an update as soon as I get my first couple batches of carrots done.

UPDATE 5-17-10–I’ve gotten off to a later start than expected with the carrots, but the first thing I’ll say is that I’m amazed at the amount of shrinkage in volume once the carrots are dehydrated — but this is a very good thing, as it will give you more carats of carrots per quart! It looks like I’m averaging 8 pounds of pre-dehydrated carrots per one-quart mason jar AFTER dehydration–I’d estimate it’s about an 8-to-1 shrinkage in volume, similar to what I’ve encountered with tomatoes. I didn’t realize how much water was in carrots! But having said that, assuming reconstitution will work on the same water-to-carrot ratio of about 8-to-1, I’ll be able to fit the dry equivalent of 96 pounds of carrots per 12-jar case! I’ll post a photo of the carrots after dehydration…as soon as I can find the USB port for my camera. :P

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Nine meals from anarchy, part 5: Cheap eats, coming right up!

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

As I said yesterday, in general it’s a lot cheaper to dehydrate and store your own food than to buy prepackaged dehydrated or freeze-dried foods. It takes a little more effort than just entering your credit card number on a website and waiting for the package to arrive, but it’s typically a lot cheaper. And putting together your own food storage from home-grown or store-bought items also allows you to know exactly what you’re buying and storing.

For the sake of full disclosure, however, I will admit that there are certain kinds of foods I prefer to order from certain companies because those particular foods can be a bit challenging to dehydrate. In particular, foods that are high in naturally-occurring sugar will, of course, get gooey and sticky when they are heated. I dehydrated a batch of apples a couple years ago that were darn near impossible to pry off of the dehydrator tray, a problem that didn’t get solved until I bought food-grade plastic mesh sheets to put on the trays first to keep high-sugar foods and other items from sticking to them. (More on those sheets in a moment.) And in calculating how much or how little end product I was ending up with for the time I invested, apples (which had to first be cored, diced and dipped in lemon juice to prevent browning) ended up being more labor-intensive than I wanted to deal with (your mileage may vary), so I decided to order a can of dehydrated apples from WaltonFeed.com and have been very happy with the quality and the price. I’m planning to order a case of banana chips and a case of tomato powder from them very soon as well. (Editor’s note 8-26-10: Since I first posted this thread back in March, I’ve found much better shipping prices — $5 for orders over $75 — at BulkFoods.com.)

Having said that, though, I’ve found that most other foods are much less problematic to dehydrate, so your options are pretty wide-open as to what you can make with relatively little effort. And one thing you want to aim for as you’re putting together your food storage is to make sure you’re getting the biggest nutritional bang for your buck. I promise I won’t “preach” too much on the merits of making and storing food that is “good for you,” but it just makes sense: Healthy eating is especially important in high-stress situations, and if you’re in a situation where you’re having to rely primarily on your food storage for a while, I’m guessing that the situation itself will be stressful. So let’s use my favorite vegetable to illustrate how easy it can be to dehydrate and store food for your long-term survival and health:

SPINACH!

Mmmmmmmm, spinach!

Now, I’m not suggesting that YOU should like spinach, I’m just saying that as far as vegetables go, besides being my favorite, spinach is also packed with vitamins and flavor. And it’s pretty darn easy to dehydrate. So let’s start with the dehydrator.

A few caveats before we begin: I’ve had several of my ideas criticized online by people who tell me I’m not using the “best” dehydrator or that I should buy only fresh vegetables instead of frozen or that I shouldn’t buy my food at Wal-Mart or other big-box stores or that THEY do other things differently and so I should try to do things their way. You might hear the same things from people as you proceed with your own food storage. I’ll offer these few thoughts to the few points above and let you decide for yourself what is best for you.

1. I typically buy frozen vegetables unless fresh vegetables are in season because I can keep the vegetables in the freezer until I’m ready to dehydrate or cook them, and if the vegetables aren’t in season, I’m not keen on paying high prices now when I can wait for much lower prices when whichever fruit or vegetable is in season. It doesn’t make much sense to pay high prices for one thing now if you can buy other fruits or vegetables that are in season at a given time and which are cheaper as a result.

2. I own several Nesco American Harvester food dehydrators that I’ve picked up for about $25 each on eBay over the period of a couple years. They’re not high-end machines like the Excalibur, but they get the job done. And personally, I’d rather have multiple dehydrators since 1. I dehydrate a lot of food; and 2. if something happens to one machine, I still have a backup. Just my two cents, but these machines can save your life. I don’t think I’m exaggerating in saying that — at the moment, I’ve got about 20 quarts of spinach alone (that’s about 80 lbs. before dehydration) that I can keep in storage for a long time until I decide to eat it. The security of knowing I can prepare food by dehydrating it and storing it for several years until I need it (and to have a lot of food on hand that can feed me and my family for a long time) helps me worry less about food so I can turn my attention to other long-term needs. Having said all of this, Nesco puts out a very good product, and I’m willing to stake my entire food-dehydration process on their product.

3. I realize that buying food from various big-box stores, most notably Wal-Mart, is a contentious issue for a lot of people, so I’ll lay out my case and let you decide what is best for yourself. I buy fresh fruits and vegetables in season from local sources whenever and wherever possible. But as I type this, it’s early March, snow is still on the ground in some areas and not many crops are ready for harvest at this time. There’s no local farmers market selling tomatoes along the highway right now, so I’ve been buying packages of frozen spinach recently for about $1.30 per pound at Wal-Mart. The tradeoff of spending my money at big-box stores for frozen vegetables I can’t get fresh, inexpensive and in-season from other places at the moment is the price I’m willing to pay just for now until the local growing season begins and I can buy from local growers. I’d rather make a regular series of purchases from big-box stores during the offseason and keep building up my food storage year-round than only stock up on food when I can get it fresh and local. Most of us go grocery-shopping year-round, so I think it just makes sense to keep stocking up on food-storage items year-round as well.

Now, having gotten those caveats out of the way, on to the good stuff… ;)

food-grade plastic mesh that keeps your food from sticking

These food-grade plastic mesh sheets available from Nesco have saved me a lot of headaches since my first forays into food dehydration. As I noted above, high-sugar foods get really gummy when heated and can stick like super-glue to the dehydrator trays unless you use these mesh sheets. But since spinach isn’t a high-sugar food, we don’t have to worry about this at the moment. However, I will point out that because of how fine the mesh is, it will also help keep food particles from dropping through the trays themselves.

Let’s start with four quarts of frozen spinach:

I put quarts of frozen spinach into, well, quart-sized containers and let the spinach thaw for 6 to 8 hours. I could theoretically microwave it to accelerate the thawing process, but since I want to keep the vitamin content as intact as possible, I just allow several hours for the spinach to thaw and then put it into the dehydrator.

So I start off by spooning the spinach onto a dehydrator tray…

…and then spread it out evenly and as thinly as possible. You want to have whatever product you’re dehydrating spread out as thinly as possible so that you can have as much air flow through the product as possible:

Then I put the lid on, turn on the dehydrator, and in about six hours (your dehydration times may vary) I take the lid off the dehydrator to check on things.

You can see that after several hours of drying, the spinach has shriveled up a bit as the water has been removed. But you’ll notice that some of the pieces are kind of clumped up, and I can feel that they are still a little soggy, so I break those pieces into smaller pieces…

…and after another 4 to 6 hours, it’s done:

And now things get a little tricky.

These dehydrator trays are about 12 inches across and obviously not flexible. The plastic mesh sheet are flexible, but they have little holes all over and a big hole in the middle. The challenge is how to get the spinach from the tray and into a mason jar without spilling it all over the place. The first time I tried to figure out how to do this, I remembered a large, flat box in my office…

Don’t laugh…because it works. :P

I opened the box flaps, turned the box on its side, stuck the dehydrator tray into the box, inverted the box and then poured the spinach slowly from the box into a quart-sized mason jar, compacting it as much as possible until I couldn’t fit any more spinach into the jar. About 4 lbs. (pre-dehydrated weight) of spinach will fit into a one-quart mason jar if you pack it in tightly.

A couple notes about serving sizes of dehydrated fruits, vegetables and anything else: Obviously because whatever you dehydrate will take up less space after the water is removed, your serving sizes will be proportionately smaller. Leafy vegetables such as spinach are about one-fourth of their original volume after dehydration, so if you’re wanting to cook one cup of spinach, about 1/4 cup of dehydrated spinach or whatever other leafy vegetable will be what you need. Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and other fleshier vegetables and fruits will take up about 1/8 of their original volume after dehydration, so measure accordingly. Breaking up the dehydrated pieces into smaller pieces will help you get a more accurate measurement.

Portion size is vital!

Measure your dehydrated foods carefully so you don’t overestimate how long they will last. If a recipe calls for 1 cup of tomatoes, using 1 cup of dehydrated tomatoes will be the rough equivalent of 4 cups of tomatoes, and you’ll burn through your food storage in no time at all. Portion control will help you ensure that your food storage will last as long as you intend it to last, all other circumstances being equal. Measure your dehydrated items carefully. And enjoy them. :)

To help you get started:

Here’s a file on dehydrating vegetables that I found at this link. The one thing that I’d recommend you NOT DO is peel the skin off of your fruits or vegetables before you dehydrate them if in fact the skins are edible. The skins are a great source of fiber and vitamins, and you’d be doing yourself a disservice to peel the skins off even if the instructions on that PDF file calls for peeling.

Got ideas or suggestions? Post ‘em below!

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Nine meals from anarchy, Part 4: Start slow if you must, but get started!

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

I’d say there are two basic rules when it comes to stocking up on food for the long-term: First, stock up what you normally eat anyway. And second, get started!

But how many of us do neither?

I’ll admit, it took me about two years to really wrap my mind around the idea of “food storage” — after all, with so-called “just in time” inventory in grocery stores arriving, well, just in time on a regular basis, what’s the big deal? Food will always be on the grocery shelves when we need it, right?

Let’s recap a video from a few days ago:

http://www.youtube.com/v/gWnV1kQM0z4

On the spectrum of disasters, 30 inches of snow really is a cakewalk compared to a Category-4 hurricane like Katrina — at least with the so-called “Snowpocalypse,” people more or less knew it was coming, and they had a bit of time to prepare for it (although whether they actually did so is a different matter altogether). Yet in both cases, before and during the storms, preparation either becomes just an afterthought, or it leaves you like a deer in the headlights, overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear.

Time to take baby steps. Then more baby steps. And more baby steps. And then pretty soon you’ll be miles closer to where you want to be.

But get started now.

The first thing to do, obviously, is to look at what you normally eat and just buy more of it and use less of it each time you go to the grocery store. It’s the same way with budgeting money — the way you build up a surplus is to spend less than you earn. But to do that, first you need to know where your money is going. And in the case of food, it’s good to sit down, make a written list of what you normally buy — written lists will help keep you on budget and on track — and then build up your pantry from there.

Cheaper is better

It’s a lot cheaper to eat at home than to eat every meal at a restaurant. So why do so many of us think that the “best” way to build up our food storage surplus is to buy prepackaged dehydrated or freeze-dried foods from various companies we’ve read about online rather than preparing our own food storage as much as possible? I’ve perused dozens of sites selling dehydrated or freeze-dried foods for long-term storage — but on a per-serving basis, many of these items being sold through such companies costs just as much, if not more, than what you’d pay for a meal at a decent sit-down restaurant. And just like a lot of “normal” prepackaged foods, a lot of the dehydrated and freeze-dried items I’ve seen listed for sale have all the same drawbacks as the normal American diet — too much salt, too little fiber, not enough vitamin content. Why would I pay a lot of money for those things if I can make them myself for a lot less money? The flip side of the coin, however, is that by not “eating out” via prepackaged food storage items, we can get a lot more for our money and we can tailor our food storage to our own tastes, and we can take steps to avoid the extra salt and (some) fat. Fat and protein will be very important if we find ourselves in a more physically demanding environment for an extended period of time, so we want to make sure we have an ample (but balanced) supply of both in what we’re stocking up on. But by taking control of our food, we can control what goes into our food storage.

Four pounds of spinach, after dehydration, courtesy of my Nesco dehydrator–fits nicely in a 1-quart mason jar:

4 lbs. of spinach, after dehydration, fits nicely in a 1-quart mason jar, courtesy of my Nesco dehydrator

Getting started

Driving a sports car that gets 15 miles to the gallon is great if you can afford to fill up twice as often than if you get 30 mpg. But more often than not, you’re going to want good gas mileage. And how many of us have money to burn anyway? So also with your food storage: You want to get the greatest “mileage” for your food storage dollars. Fat, protein and carbohydrates are the building blocks of our diets. And even though beans and rice has gotten a bad rap at times because, well, it’s “just beans and rice,” the combination of the two is one of the most complete meals in the world. You get all three major nutritional building blocks in this simplest of meals.

You’ve got to be kidding…

Even casual car buffs know that there’s a HUGE difference between an Edsel and a Lamborghini. But they’re both cars, so what does it matter?

That’s like saying that Steak’n Shake must be just like Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse because they both have “Steak” in their name.

And so it is with beans and rice–your food storage can be really cheap but really good. Googling beans and rice recipes brings up more than 1.3 million results, enough recipes to last you at least a few weeks.

We frequently eat the same type of bread when we make all kinds of different sandwiches–pastrami, peanut butter, ham salad, grilled cheese–so what’s unusual about the thought of making hundreds of different beans-and-rice dishes out of, well, beans and rice? What kind of beans do you want? Pintos? Light red? Great Northern? Lentils? Split peas? Garbanzos? Black beans? Do you want white rice, basmati, brown rice, parboiled rice, medium grain, long grain?

I remember being amazed as a kid when I heard a commercial that said I could have a Wendy’s hamburger 255 different ways. Did I want ketchup? Mustard? Pickle? Mayo? Mustard and pickle? Cheese only? Tomato, ketchup and mayo? Onion? Everything except ketchup? Plain? Only tomato? It’s the same hamburger. But I could eat a hamburger a day for 255 days and not have it made the same way twice. So why can’t we do the same thing with rice and beans?

What it all boils down to is how long you want to be able to eat with the limited money you have, and starting now to stock up you beans, rice, veggies, spices and everything else that will make your food storage anything but boring. I’ll post photos and more tomorrow to show you how you can get started making your own food really cheap and making it just the way you want it.

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Nine meals from anarchy, Part 3: You really DO have enough space for food

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Before I started stocking up on months worth of food and other necessities, just like a lot of you I greatly overestimated how much space all of my food, water and other things would take up. And overestimating how much space you need for important stuff like food and water (is there anything more important to your physical survival?) will probably make some people not start stocking up in the first place because they think it can’t be done, so why try? So to help shoot down misconceptions that stocking up on food takes up too much space, let’s take a look at some photos.

Probably the most ubiquitous item among prepared people is the five-gallon bucket. They don’t take up much space, and they’re very useful and versatile. And so are the buckets:

Your typical five-gallon bucket

The box in the picture is from an office-supply store–just your average case of 8-1/2-by-11-inch printer paper. The box itself is just over 11 inches wide and 17 inches high as it appears in this picture. And you can see from the photo that the bucket is smaller than this particular box. I don’t know about you, but I have at least a couple dozen boxes this size in various places around my house. One of these five-gallon buckets can hold about 25 pounds of rice, beans or similar bulk foodstuffs (sealed up in food-grade mylar storage bags with oxygen absorbers inside–more on that soon). So if I have a couple dozen boxes this size in various places around my small-ish house containing stuff that might not be as useful for my survival as, say, food, couldn’t I very easily find someplace to put important stuff like lots of food and move the boxes of paper, books, Christmas ornaments, etc., somewhere else if I really wanted to be able to eat for a while? I kind of like to eat every day, so I couldn’t see myself not making room for extra food, especially with the economic uncertainty in our country and around the world right now. I could lose my job tomorrow…you could lose yours, too…but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about food for a little while if I started buying and storing it right now.

“But I’ve heard that eating food-storage stuff gets boring…”

Yeah, I’m not much for boring food, either. Which is why I stock up on what I like to eat anyway, with a lot of spices and other accoutrements to keep my food from getting boring, bland or blah. Take a look at my latest, um, “cabinet meeting”:

I've got spices and other goodies coming out my ears...

These quart-sized mason jars are one of the handiest kitchen accessories around, and pretty darn inexpensive–about $9 for a case of a dozen jars. And buying spices in bulk quantities and storing them in mason jars will help carry your food a long way away from boring and will last you for a long time–just how long do you think it will take to go through a quart of cumin or garlic? Speaking of which, on the top shelf in this photo are (left to right) red pepper flakes, dehydrated tomatoes (which I dehydrated myself in one of my handy Nesco dehydrators), garlic powder and chicken (also courtesy of my Nesco). Visible on the bottom shelf are jars of cinnamon, cayenne, dehydrated spinach (back right) and cumin.

And to give you a top view of how little space you need in your cabinet for lots of flavor, here are a dozen mason jars in the box you saw in the photo at the top of this page:

Lots of flavor, not a lot of space

I’ll continue tomorrow with this notion that you can cram a lot more food into a much smaller space than you think.

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Nine meals from anarchy, Part 2: Don’t worry, the government can help!

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Maybe you saw this story on Sunday about the rescue and relief efforts in Chile following Saturday’s magnitude-8.8 earthquake. At first glance, it’s just your average recap of a major disaster: what happened, how many are dead, how bad the damage is and various accounts of those who made it and those who didn’t. But as I read the article further, several passages jumped out at me:

Paragraph 7: “Virtually every market and supermarket had been looted — and no food or drinking water could be found. Many people in Concepcion expressed anger at the authorities for not stopping the looting or bringing in supplies. Electricity and water services were out of service.”

Paragraph 13: “To strip away any need for looting, [President] Bachelet announced that essentials on the shelves of major supermarkets would be given away for free, under the supervision of authorities. Soldiers and police will also distribute food and water, she said.”

And beginning with paragraph 25: “One woman ran off with a shopping cart piled high with slabs of unwrapped meat and cheese. A shirtless man carried a mattress on his head. Some of the looters pitched rocks at police armored vehicles outside the Lider market, which is majority-owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

“Across the Bio Bio River in the city of San Pedro, looters cleared out a shopping mall. A video store was set ablaze, two automatic teller machines were broken open, a bank was robbed and a supermarket emptied, its floor littered with mashed plums, scattered dog food and smashed liquor bottles.

“‘It was a mob. They looted everything,’ said police Sgt. Rene Gutierrez, 46, who had his men guarding the now-empty mall. ‘Now we’re only here to protect the building — what’s left of the building.’

“He said police had been slow to reach the looted mall because one bridge over the river was collapsed and the other so damaged they had to move cautiously.

“Ingenious looters even used long tubes of bamboo and plastic to siphon gasoline from underground tanks at a closed gasoline station. Others rummaged through the station’s restaurant.

“Thieves attacked a flour mill in Concepcion — some toting away bags on their shoulders, others using bicycles or cars. One man packed a school bus with sacks of flour.

“Many defended the scavenging — of food if not television sets — as a necessity because officials had not brought food or water. Even Concepcion’s mayor, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, complained that no food aid was reaching the city. She said the federal government should send troops to help halt the looting.”

Now let’s break this down:

Markets have been looted after the earthquake. No food and water can be found. People are mad at the government for not stopping stuff from being taken or bringing in more stuff (which could also theoretically be stolen by looters). So to make sure would-be looters don’t “need” to loot, the government does the looting for them–confiscating goods from merchants to give away free to hungry, thirst, angry people.

I’m sure the shop owners whose goods have been appropriated away aren’t happy about their losses, even though the confiscation of their goods was legal as long as the government did it. And even though there were a lot of people made happy by the freebies the government gave them, I’m guessing there were a lot more people who went away unhappy when the government ran out of free stuff to give them, after which the unsanctioned looting continued.

And police and other authorities continued to be overwhelmed and unable to do much that mattered. And hungry, angry people continued their looting.

There were probably freeloaders whose survival didn’t depend on what they were stealing. A lot of people were probably stealing just so they could make a few bucks. But what if there were people who didn’t need to wait for a government handout, while supplies last, because they had stocked up on food and water and had personal protection and other vital items, just in case?

Mobs of hungry, angry people don’t do much to ensure one’s personal safety or peace of mind. It’s always a good thing to stay away from those mobs unless absolutely necessary. And quite frankly I can’t think of a compelling reason at the moment to join a mob of hungry, angry people. In fact, I’d like to do everything I can to make sure I (legally) obtain things I will need to take care of myself and my family and the means to protect what I have. Or I could take the easy way out and just wait for FEMA to show up and repeat the stellar performance they had after Hurricane Katrina. It’s free. Courtesy of the U.S. Government. How long it will take help to arrive, and how much or how little they can do for you…yeah, good luck with that.

You can wait with all of the other hungry, angry people who get hungrier and angrier as they wait for the government to take care of them. Or you can start now to prepare your family for any emergencies that you might encounter. When the next disaster hits, wouldn’t the biggest disaster be if you weren’t ready?

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Nine meals from anarchy

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

The headline above isn’t my own creation–I read the phrase online some time ago referring to the fact that most grocery stores turn over their inventory about every three days. If no deliveries occur during any three-day period, the odds are pretty good that at the end of three days, under normal circumstances, the grocery shelves will be pretty close to bare. But how many of us keep telling ourselves that deliveries will keep arriving like they always have, so if we need bread, milk or anything else, we’ll just head to the store, get in, get out and get home? That’s usually no problem, unless thousands of your closest friends also decide to go to the store at the same time for the same items, just like hundreds of thousands caught in blizzard conditions on the East Coast.

Much of the East Coast was slammed by record snow late last year and early this year, so it’s no surprise that grocery stores may have been much busier than usual in the days before and even during the storms. But what good is a store full of customers if there’s no food left on the shelves?

If people get hungry enough, they’ll do just about anything to get food. Stories of food riots around the world seem to be increasing. Yet people in developed countries such as the U.S. deceive themselves into thinking that a food shortage can’t happen here. Do the math: If grocery stores have a three-day supply of groceries under normal circumstances, what happens if people even THINK there’s going to be a shortage of something? Forecasters call for a possible chance of snow, and hundreds of people all head to the store at the same time to pick up whatever limited supply of grocery items are left. But if they get there too late and the shelves are bare…

We’re nine meals away from anarchy.

One relative of mine keeps talking about how they can’t afford to stock up on extra food, all the while buying small packages of gourmet organic delicacies that cost twice as much and last only half as long. Meanwhile I’m going through the checkout lane at Sam’s Club with a 50-lb. bag of rice and 5 10-lb. bags of great northern beans for less than $60. Stir in batches of vegetables I’ve dehydrated myself and sealed up in mason jars, add a pinch of spices from among the two dozen quart-sized mason jars of dried onion, tomato powder, cumin, celery, cayenne or other spices I’ve bought dirt-cheap in bulk quantities and I have enough soup mix in my grocery cart to last at least two months.

A man who’s $100 in debt is $200 poorer than a man who has $100, but all other things being equal, the man who’s $100 in debt can eventually dig himself out of his financial hole by spending less than he earns. It’s the same way with stocking up on food and other essentials. Do you eat five cans of vegetables a week? Buy 10 cans of vegetables every week and build up a stockpile of food. If it sounds ridiculous to think that after six months–26 weeks–you’ll have 130 extra cans of vegetables or anything else you’ve bought and haven’t used up, then ask yourself how dumb you’ll feel if weather, riots, strikes or anything else interrupt the supply chain to the grocery store and your family is left with empty cabinets and empty stomachs that didn’t have to end up that way.

“But I don’t have enough room to stock up on food!”

Do you like to eat more than you like to have stuff you never use taking up space you could use for things you really need? Do you really need six boxes of Christmas decorations you only use once a year hogging space along the garage wall when you could use that same space to store several cases of canned food? Do you really need all that empty space under your workbench that you could use to store a couple 55-gallon drums of potable water in case your water service undergoes an unexpected, long-term interruption? Could you take those boxes that you’ve stacked three-high along one wall and stack them six-high and use the new-found space for cases of canned goods so your family can have food no matter what interruptions have left grocery shelves bare? Why not show your family that you’ve got their best interests in mind by preparing now to ensure their long-term well-being?

How many meals are you away from anarchy?

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