Month: January 2015

11:09 – Barbara and I just got back from a Sam’s Club run. She did just fine walking the aisles of the warehouse. We got out of there for about $180 even though our cart was heaped precariously. That’s what happens when you don’t buy any meat.

I told Barbara I needed some #10 cans (institutional size) to shoot images for the book. In the past, she’s always put her foot down and forbidden #10 cans. This time, she let me get away with half a dozen #10 cans of peas, corn, Bush’s Best Baked Beans, and so on. I’d have gotten more, but our cart was already starting to bulge. Each time I picked up a different kind of #10 can, she said, “Okay, I’ll eat that.” So I’ll probably pick up more from time to time.

The advantage to #10 cans is that the food is noticeably cheaper per ounce. The drawback, of course, is that when you open a 6- or 7-pound #10 can, you’re opening the equivalent of 6 or 7 regular-size cans. That’s not really a problem, because all of that stuff keeps for months in a sealed container in the refrigerator or for years if frozen.

13:36 – As further evidence of the ridiculousness of best-by dates, I just bought 6 quarts of 91% isopropanol (rubbing alcohol) at Sam’s. I just noticed that they’re stamped best-by 02/17. As stupid as it is, a lot of people–probably the majority of the population–would actually discard this alcohol after February of 2017.

I’d forgotten, but we actually did buy some meat at Sam’s. Two 3-pound tubes of Hillshire Farms sausage. It’s shelf stable, with a best-by date of July 2015. I’m half inclined to vacuum seal one of those tubes in a foil-laminate Mylar bag and stick it on the shelf for several years. I suspect it’d be as good five years from now as it is now. Assuming no damage to the container, a packaged product either contains microorganisms or it doesn’t. If it does, they’ll reproduce so quickly at room temperature that the product will spoil in a day or less. If it contains no microorganisms, there aren’t any to reproduce, so that package will remain free of microorganisms indefinitely.

This is something that seems to escape most people who write about long-term food storage. They claim that canned food “goes bad” after x number of years, which is crap. Apparently, these people still believe in spontaneous generation, which was disproven in the 19th century.

Others claim that canned food loses nutritional value. There’s actually a kernel of truth to that. The carbohydrates, proteins, and fats don’t degrade over time, or at worst only very, very slowly. Some vitamins do very gradually degrade, but this really isn’t important. Even the least stable vitamins are reasonably stable in canned foods. After 10 years, a can of food may lose 10% of its original vitamin content, but typical canned goods and other shelf-stable foods contain such high levels of vitamins that it’s a non-issue.

11:40 – Barbara’s recovery continues apace. She got the staples out yesterday, which helps a lot. She’s still frustrated that she’s not recovering faster, although in terms of recovery speed she’s certainly in the top decile and probably in the top percentile.

I’ve been a prepper since the mid-1960’s. I grew up under the threat of Soviet nuclear attack. I well remember the drills in elementary school, just as Barbara remembers spending the night in a fallout shelter in 1962 with other 2nd-grade students, eating crackers and drinking canned water.

Our basement had two small rooms running across the front of the house. One of those turned into my darkroom. The other was a storage room. My parents never said a word about it, probably because they didn’t want to scare us kids, but that room had a good supply of canned food and water and a stack of heavy planks, concrete blocks, and bags of sand. None of us ever said a word about it, but I figured it out when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. That stuff was there to allow my dad to construct a shelter easily and quickly if the need arose.

Back around 1965, as a 12-year-old kid I didn’t have the money to stock up on more food and supplies, so I decided the best thing I could do was develop special skills. That’s why I got my amateur radio license, for example. (Sadly, I noticed the other night while watching Jericho that I can no longer copy CW. Each episode begins with a short piece of Morse code. Fifty years ago, I could copy CW at the 13 WPM required for a general class ham license; now I can’t even copy the slow CW on the Jericho opening. Use it or lose it, I guess.) By the time I was 12 years old, I probably knew more about radiation and defensive measures than anyone in town, including the CD people. I’d certainly read and memorized Glasstone’s The Effects of Atomic Weapons.

It was around then that I decided to start accumulating “good to know” information and skills, on the basis that if things ever went to hell I wanted to be able to more than pull my weight. So for the last fifty years or so I’ve been accumulating knowledge and skills toward that end. I wanted to be able to step in as the resident “wizard”.

Some of the things I want to do turn out not to be easy. For example, many post-apocalyptic novels feature a character with diabetes, from Dan Forrester in Lucifer’s Hammer to the protagonist’s young daughter in One Second After. Those characters invariably die when the insulin runs out. I decided back in the 70’s that I couldn’t let that happen if I had anything to say about it, so I learned how to isolate insulin from animal pancreata. So far, so good, but what if I don’t happen to have a sheep or a pig when I need one?

Since the late 70’s, insulin has been produced bio-synthetically. Over the last couple of decades, nearly all insulin has been produced by bio-engineered bacteria or yeast. I’ve been trying to get my hands on specimens of those bacteria or yeast (ideally, yeast, because there are advantages to using a eukaryotic rather than prokaryotic organism.) I’ve exhausted my contacts, and simply can’t find anyone who can get specimens for me. The problem, I’m sure is that no one has preserved specimens of the older, obsolete organisms and the newer ones are probably all under trade-secret or patent protection. I don’t want to go into competition with them. All I want to do is breed a large quantity of them, lyophilize (freeze-dry) the sample, and make up a hundred or a thousand RIA vials of the lyophilized specimen. It still takes a lab and a wizard to isolate actual insulin from the waste products of the microorganisms, but they’ve done 99.9% of the work for you.

10:55 – Barbara’s doing extremely well; Colin, not so well. He has the squirties. He had a large accident last night, fortunately on the hardwood floor. He did pester but we ignored him, thinking he was just acting strangely as he so often does.

After she saw my post yesterday, Barbara pointed out that she did not mention groceries. She was talking about milk. Since we have four cases of non-fat dry milk stored, along with two or three cases of evaporated milk, we didn’t really need milk, either.