Font Size:     

Category: long-term food storage

Monday, 17 October 2016

06:54 – We repackaged 100 pounds of sugar and 50 pounds of rice yesterday, using a mix of one-gallon Costco water bottles, 3-liter bottles, and 1.75-liter orange juice bottles. Sugar and rice go much, much faster than flour. Barbara had no objection to repackaging sugar and rice, but said she’d really, really rather not do the remaining 50-pound bag of flour.

And speaking of repackaged LTS bulk staples, email over the weekend from another correspondent who wants to remain anonymous. I’ll call him Jeff. He and Laura are in their mid- to late-40’s and have two sons of high school age. They live in the exurbs of a mid-size city. Jeff runs the family engineering business, which he took over when his father retired a few years ago. Laura is a stay-at-home mom. She homeschools their sons and runs a profitable eBay business on the side.

They’ve been preppers since 1999, when they became very concerned about Y2K. They’d bought a house shortly after they married, and in early 1999 they started stocking up food and other supplies. Jeff built a false wall in one of their below-grade basement rooms. He framed it out with 2X4’s, they filled it up with food and other supplies, and then he screwed plywood sheets to the studs. They ended up with a concealed storage room that’s 12 feet wide by about 2 feet deep. To camouflage it further, they installed steel shelving units in front of the plywood wall. Then they pretty much forgot about it for the next 15 years or so.

A few weeks ago, they noticed the basement floor on that wall was damp. The following day, there was actually standing water in puddles along that wall. So that weekend they pulled everything off the steel shelves, disassembled the shelving, and took down the plywood panels. Behind the panels were piles of supplies that hadn’t seen the light of day in 17 years. There didn’t appear to be much damage to the supplies other than soaked cardboard boxes. They moved all the stuff that had been behind that wall to another room and then called a contractor to fix the leak.

The food they had stored behind that wall was a mix of cases of LDS #10 cans, cases of supermarket canned goods, and long-term staples they’d repackaged themselves in soft drink bottles. All of it at least 17 years old, and everything other than the LDS #10 cans at least 15 years past its best-by date.

Their first thought was just to throw it all out and start again from scratch, but Jeff decided to check things out before doing that. The LDS cans were in pretty good shape, with some light rust on some of them and a few labels peeling off. The commercial canned goods were in about the same shape. The soft drink bottles looked pretty much the same as they had the day they’d filled them. The only thing that looked like it had aged was the oil in plastic jugs, which had darkened and become a bit cloudy.

As is usual for women, Laura was much more concerned about the age of the stuff than Jeff was, but she finally agreed to test some of it. First up was a 3-liter bottle of white flour. Jeff says it may have darkened a bit, and it was caked in the bottle, but it passed the sniff test. As Jeff said, it smelled like flour. So they sifted it to break up the caking and used it to bake a loaf of bread. It rose normally and the finished loaf tasted just as home-made bread always tastes. No one clutched their throats or keeled over.

They next sampled some of the commercial canned goods. The soup smelled normal when they opened it, as did a can of baked beans. Laura cooked both of them very thoroughly, and they tasted normal. Again, no one keeled over. They opened a can of shortening, which looked and smelled normal. They used it along with some of the antique flour to bake biscuits, which turned out normal. The only fail was their stored oil. When they opened a bottle, it smelled a bit off. Jeff says that he’d have been willing to use it in an emergency if they had no other source of oil, but Laura was greatly relieved when Jeff decided to pitch it without testing it first. As Jeff says, oil is cheap.

They decided to hold onto everything but the oil, as a last-ditch source of food in an emergency. They’re not going to rebuild the hidden room, so they’ll just stack it against the repaired wall. The steel shelving had been mostly filled with more recently purchased food, and that along with stuff they’re still adding will serve as their deep pantry, with the really old stuff as their deepest pantry.

11:06 – Barbara points out that she didn’t say she didn’t want to repackage the remaining 50-pound bag of flour. What she said was she’d really, really rather not transfer it to PET bottles because they’re such a PITA to fill. She wants to transfer it to one-gallon LDS 7-mil foil/Mylar laminate bags. That’s fine with me. For flour, they’re immensely easier and faster to fill, and they’re what we’ll use for flour we purchase in the future.

Barbara is spending the afternoon volunteering at the Friends of the Library bookstore. Tomorrow, we’ll finish labeling bottles, adding an oxygen absorber to each, and transferring them down to our deep pantry shelves in the basement.

Read the comments: 87 Comments

Wednesday, 5 October 2016

09:40 – Barbara is down in Winston today, running errands and having lunch with a friend. As usual when she’s gone, it’s wild women and parties for Colin and me.

Most people really are stupid. I was just reading an article about Hurricane Matthew, the strongest storm to affect Florida in more than a decade. As usual, everyone panics and heads for the supermarkets and hardware stores to lay in supplies. One stupid woman who was interviewed had gone to her local Publix supermarket, in search of bottled water. She was upset to find that they were sold out of the store brand stuff and had only the more expensive name-brand bottled water left in stock. The article wasn’t clear about her actions, other than that for some reason she lay down on the empty shelf where the cheaper bottled water had been. Presumably, she left without any bottled water because it cost a few cents a bottle more than the house-brand stuff. Jesus wept.

As is usual this time of year, my component inventory system has completely broken down. The problem, as always, is that we’re doing so many things at once, and updating component inventory is often overlooked. For example, we’ll be running short of biology kits and are out of chemical bags for them. So I check inventory and find out that we have only eighteen bottles in stock of the limiting chemical. So we build 18 of the chemical bags and start assembling more biology kits. Meanwhile, we get a bulk order for chemistry kits. We ship those and realize that we’re now short on chemical bags for those kits. So we check our inventory and see that it shows that we should have 27 of the limiting chemical for those kits. But it turns out that another chemical is really the limiting chemical because I hadn’t updated the inventory records after we used 18 bottles of it to make up biology chemical bags. It turns out that instead of having enough to make up 27 chemistry kit chemical bags, we actually have only 11 of that second chemical. So we make up 11 chemistry chemical bags and start building kits. As Barbara is assembling those, I make up the solution for the chemical bottles we’d run out of. So it’s really a matter of us having so many things going on at the same time that stuff slips through the cracks. Multiply that confusion by the scores of different chemicals included in the various kits, with significant overlap between types of kits, and things quickly turn chaotic. Fortunately, things have now settled down to a dull roar, so we’ll have time to rectify the inventory count again by physically counting all of our component inventory SKUs.

With Barbara away for the day, I’m going to spend some time washing and sanitizing bottles that will contain bulk staples. I wish Coke were still sold in 3-liter bottles, because their wider mouths mean they’re immensely better than 2-liter bottles for repackaging LTS bulk foods. Someone mentioned that dollar stores still carry off-brand soft drinks in 3-liter bottles. I may pick up a couple of those to try, because I’d really like to have more 3-liter bottles. I much prefer them to foil-laminate Mylar bags for LTS food storage.

In fact, nearly all of our repackaged LTS food is in PET bottles. We use them for just about everything other than bulk storage of oxygen absorbers, for which we use glass canning jars.

11:32 – Ooh. Almost a prepper fail.

I just started a load of laundry, darks and towels. We use Chlorox II rather than chlorine bleach. When we moved up here, we knew nothing at all about septic tank care, and I decided not to risk killing the beneficial bacteria in the septic tank by using chlorine bleach. Granted, I’d only be using a cup (250 mL) or so a week, but chlorine bleach is an extremely effective bacteria killer. In retrospect, I suppose I should have run the numbers. Assuming a 1,500 gallon septic tank, I’d be adding 1/16 of a gallon of bleach, or one part 5% hypochlorite bleach to 24,000 parts water, assuming the tank is full. Call it maybe 2 ppm. Not enough to kill many bacteria, but probably enough to make them feel unwell.

I have another load of laundry queued up. All of our whites, none of which have been washed with chlorine bleach since last November. Chlorine-free bleach just doesn’t cut it for whites. All of our white underwear, socks, t-shirts, etc. are starting to have a faint yellow cast, which is what happens when you don’t use real bleach on them. So, since I was going to use a mixture of dishwashing liquid and chlorine bleach in the kitchen sinks to wash and sanitize 3-liter bottles, I went off in search of the chlorine bleach. I couldn’t find it anywhere. It wasn’t on the laundry room shelves. It wasn’t under the kitchen sink, where Barbara used to keep a supply of it for sanitizing work surfaces. It wasn’t under the sinks in any of the bathrooms. It wasn’t downstairs anywhere, including in the unfinished area.

I have enough calcium hypochlorite (pool shock) stored with the prepping supplies to make up about 30 gallons of bleach, but I didn’t want to open it. I was actually considering walking down to the convenience store across the road to buy some, but I thought to look in the cabinet under the laundry room sink. Sure enough, there was an unopened gallon of chlorine bleach nestled behind a bunch of 2-liter bottles filled with water.

The takeaway here is that if you don’t know where something is stored, you don’t have actually have it even if it’s listed in your inventory records.

Read the comments: 64 Comments

Sunday, 18 September 2016

09:20 – I called Barbara first thing this morning to make sure she knew about the Colonial Pipeline break, that the governors of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee had declared states of emergency, and that South and North Carolina may not be far from doing so. According to Google, it’s 532.1 miles from Cape May, New Jersey to Sparta, North Carolina using the most direct I-81 route. That’s more than she can get on a tank of gasoline, even driving at the most efficient speed. I suggested she fill up her tank today. I didn’t suggest that she buy a 5-gallon gas can or two and fill them as well, although I probably should have. There’s no good estimate on how long it’ll take Colonial to get the pipeline running again, but they’re building a bypass so it’ll probably be at least 10 days or two weeks if they work around the clock on it. As it stands, the East Coast has lost something like 50 or 60 million gallons a day of gasoline, which is a significant portion of the supply to the East Coast from Georgia up to New York City. I checked my Trooper, which has 4.7 miles on the trip odometer since the last fill-up.

I decided to re-watch Jericho while Barbara’s away. I notice new stuff all the time. For example, I hadn’t realized until last night that there are mountains or at least foothills right outside Jericho, Kansas. Until now, I thought of Kansas as flat. If I didn’t know the series was set in Kansas, I’d almost think they’d shot that footage outside Los Angeles.

Colin and I ate dinner from long-term storage last night: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As still more evidence on the mythical nature of best-by dates, the jar of peanut butter I used had a best-by date in March of 2013, 3.5 years ago. It was opened 18 months ago, and has been sitting on the pantry shelf since then. The odor and taste are indistinguishable from a fresh jar just opened. I’ll keep what remains in this old jar for further testing months or years from now, but I think it’s safe to say that the real shelf life of a jar of Jif Creamy peanut butter is at least five years, and probably a lot longer. At about $1.50 per pound, it’s a good shelf-stable way to store both oils and proteins that supplement grain proteins. Oh, the Welch’s Grape Jelly I used had a best-by date about a year and a half ago, and has been sitting open in the refrigerator at least that long. It was fine as well.

Bombings in New Jersey and New York City, a musloid slasher at a Minnesota mall, a cop ambush and mass shooting in Philadelphia. No word on just what caused the pipeline break. Things may be ramping up for the election. Historically, Committees of Vigilance arise when the government can’t (or won’t) protect citizens. I hope that never happens in the US, but I’m afraid it might.




Read the comments: 81 Comments

Saturday, 27 August 2016

09:14 – We had Jen’s Bean Gloppita recipe for dinner last night. I’m not much of a vegetarian, but it was pretty good. Barbara wasn’t able to find coriander at the supermarket yesterday, so we made it up without it. I tried to convince Barbara that bacon was a reasonable substitute for coriander, but she wanted to try the Gloppita as the original vegetarian recipe. We made up a half of the original recipe, which makes a very large pile of Gloppita. There was enough left that I’m having the left-overs for dinner tonight.

I was thinking about ordering some dry black beans and repackaging them for long-term storage, but I think instead I’ll just buy the canned version. The nice thing about the canned beans is that they’re ready to use right out of the can. Just open the can, drain them, rinse them, and they’re ready to go. Dry beans need pre-processing, which is time- and fuel-intensive. Even if you soak the beans overnight, you’re still supposed to boil them for an hour. In an emergency, that’s a significant amount of fuel. The downside of canned is that a one-pound can of the beans costs $0.60 to $1.50+, depending on brand and vendor, versus maybe $1.50/pound for dry black beans. And most of that can is water weight. I’m guessing that on a dry-weight basis, that can of beans probably costs $4 to $5/pound. On balance, I think I’ll store a few cases of the canned for regular use and maybe 30 pounds of the dry beans in foil-laminate bags that we’ll reserve for SPMF emergencies.

Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then heading over to volunteer at the historical museum this afternoon. We’ll wait and do more kit stuff tomorrow.

Read the comments: 75 Comments

Thursday, 18 August 2016

09:38 – We had another monsoon yesterday afternoon. It dropped more than an inch (2.5 cm) of rain on us in about 20 minutes, accompanied by very high winds and lots of lightning where there was only a fraction of a second gap between the flash and the boom. Colin was beyond terrified. He’s a high-attention dog all the time, but heavy rain, high winds, and lightning/thunder scare the hell out of him. I finally went back and stretched out on the bed, where he went into four-paw drive and climbed up on top of me. I went out to my desk. He hid under the desk for about 30 seconds and then forced his way up between my legs and climbed up into my lap. I wouldn’t mind so much, except that he also claws me the whole time, demanding that I do something about the problem. After the rain, wind, and thunder slacked off, the sirens started. I suspect there was some significant property damage, and maybe some injuries. Every time he hears a siren, Colin heads for the front door or windows to bark at it. If it’s particularly close, he does synchronized howling.

Some people are unaware that one can actually starve to death even with an unlimited supply of wheat, rice, and corn or foods made from those grains. The problem is that the amino acid profile of grains is low in some essential amino acids (those that the human body cannot synthesize from other amino acids). The same is true of beans, but the essential amino acids that beans are short of are present in abundance in grains, and vice versa. That’s why all cultures, going back to prehistory, have eaten grains and beans in combination. Together, they provide complete protein.

Meats, eggs, milk, and other animal-based foods include complete protein, and may be used to “fill out” the protein profile of beans or, more commonly, grains. We store a lot of canned meats, but in a long-term emergency additional meat will be harder to come by than beans. Also, obviously, animal-based proteins are much more costly and difficult to store than are vegetable-based proteins.

The problem is that most citizens of the first world are used to getting their complete protein by combining grains and meat. Beans generally play a relatively minor role in our diets. People generally prefer to eat what they’re used to eating, so few people would regard a combination of grains and beans to be appetizing.

I mentioned this issue in passing to Jen, and told her that we aren’t storing any dry beans, although we have about 100 cans of Bush’s Best Baked Beans. We don’t store dry beans, because neither Barbara nor I knows how to make a bean-based dish appetizing. I got email from Jen yesterday with a recipe she suggested we try. She and her family felt much the same about eating beans as we do, but she said this recipe turned out extremely well. She says the herbs and spices are what makes this dish worth eating. This recipe makes enough to feed four to six people. We’ll probably halve it for our first test run.

Bean Gloppita (Feeds four to six)

2 cans (15-ounce each) black beans, rinsed and drained
2 cups long-grain white rice, uncooked
6 cups of water
2 Tbsp of olive oil
1 cup of fresh chopped onion (or equivalent rehydrated dry onion)
1 cup of fresh bell peppers (or equivalent rehydrated dry bell peppers)
3 cloves of garlic, chopped (or equivalent rehydrated dry garlic flakes)
2 tsp of chili powder
1 tsp of salt
1 tsp of ground cumin
1 tsp of dried oregano
½ tsp of dried coriander
½ tsp of ground red pepper
¼ cup of shredded cheddar cheese (optional)

1. Bring five cups of water to a boil. Stir in rice, return to a boil, turn down heat, and allow to simmer for 20 minutes or until water is absorbed.

2. Heat olive oil in a skillet on medium heat. Add fresh or rehydrated bell peppers and onion. Cook until tender, about five minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the garlic and continue cooking for another minute or two. Add the remaining one cup of water and all of the remaining ingredients other than the cheese. Bring to a boil, then cover, reduce heat, and simmer 10 to 15 minutes, or until rice is ready.

Serve bean gloppita over hot rice and sprinkle cheddar on top.

FedEx showed up yesterday with three more #10 cans of Augason Farms dehydrated potato shreds from Walmart. Those three cans are equivalent to about 10.4 30-ounce packages of the Ore-Ida frozen shredded hashbrowns, but at a total cost of $24.72 plus tax, versus $31.10 for 10.4 packages of the Ore-Ida frozen shreds. (Walmart has since increased the price from $8.24/can a week ago to $9.77 now; they bounce prices up and down regularly.)






Read the comments: 38 Comments

Monday, 11 July 2016

11:09 – As a follow-up to Nick’s first post, I’ll tell a similar story of my own.

I got started prepping when I was nine years old, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Like most adults, my parents were scared and trying to keep it from the kids. We knew something was going on, but few of us realized that our parents were terrified that the USSR was about to nuke us. My dad got to work immediately building a shelter in a basement room and stocking it with food and water. He let me “help” him.

For the next 45 years or so, I maintained a higher-than-average state of readiness for emergencies. The financial crisis of 2008 kicked me into higher gear. On every Costco run, I started buying extra stuff–a case of vegetables, another of soup, another of canned chicken, and so on. From then until late 2013, we maintained probably a 3- to 4-month supply of food, as well as the stuff needed to purify water and so on. I’ve been a shooter since I was a young teenager, so we already had guns and ammo.

In early 2014, I became concerned enough with world events in general and US events in particular that I decided to expand and extend our food supply to carry us for at least a year, as well as having enough to provide for Barbara’s family. In June 2014, I told Barbara that for my birthday I wanted a trip to the LDS Home Storage Center over near the Greensboro airport, where I planned to fill up the back of the Trooper. We made that trip, and hauled back about 700 pounds of food, mostly in #10 cans. I bought four 6-can cases each of flour, sugar, macaroni, spaghetti, potato flakes, rice, and non-fat dry milk, along with smaller quantities of several other items.

No beans, you’ll note. Beans are important in most long-term food storage programs because the protein in grains is not complete. It lacks essential amino acids that are present in beans, so the two in combination provide a complete protein. (One can literally starve to death by eating only grains or only beans.) Instead of beans, I decided to stock up on animal protein, which is complete by itself and is also an excellent supplement to grain protein. So I bought lots of canned meats–hamburger, chicken, pork, Spam, and so on. A couple of hundred pounds worth. Other than chicken, Barbara doesn’t particularly like the canned meats, but if it came down to it I’m sure she’d much rather be eating canned hamburger and pork than just beans. Not that I completely ignored beans. We keep 100+ one-pound cans of Bush’s Best Baked Beans on hand, along with a smaller supply of dried beans.

With all that on hand, the next thing I needed to cover was salt and oils/fats. Salt was easy enough. I picked up a dozen or so 4-pound boxes of iodized salt at Sam’s Club, which I later transferred to wide-mouth PET bottles that used to hold Mott’s applesauce. (They’re a lot easier to clean out than ones that had spaghetti sauce in them.) For oils, the first thing I did was order a dozen 3-pound cans of Crisco shortening. It’s saturated fat, which scares some people, but in reality it’s just as healthy to eat saturated fats as unsaturated or polyunsaturated. Probably healthier, actually. To that, I added several 3-liter bottles of Costco olive oil, which live in our vertical freezer where they’ll remain good for decades.

With all that on hand, my next priority was to start picking up #10 cans of supplemental stuff. None of it is freeze-dried, because the price of freeze-dried stuff is simply outrageous. All of the stuff I stock in #10 cans that isn’t from LDS is from Augason Farms. Augason stuff is very high quality, but the real reason it’s my go-to brand is that Walmart sells it on-line at a fraction of the list price. I picked up six or eight cans each of the Augason powdered eggs, cheese, butter and Morning Moos milk substitute, along with one to three cans each of other supplemental stuff like TVP meat substitute (bouillon) in beef, chicken, and bacon flavors, lentils for sprouting, and so on. There’s also a 26-pound pail of Augason brown rice, which is rated at seven years, but in reality will last much longer.

All of the stuff in #10 cans from LDS or Augason is in long-term storage, where it will not be touched. The same is true of some of the regular canned stuff like pork, hamburger, Spam, and so on. It’ll be edible and nutritious for longer than Barbara and I are likely to be around. Just that stuff totals enough nutrition to feed Barbara, Colin, and me for a year or more. Then there’s a 2X5-foot five-shelf shelving unit that contains lots of canned and bottled goods–applesauce, spaghetti sauce, alfredo sauce, etc.–as well as some bulk staples that we’ve repackaged ourselves and use routinely. During each Costco/Sam’s run, we pick up one or two 50-pound bags of flour or sugar or rice, and one or two 10-pound boxes of Quaker oats. We also replace the canned vegetables, sauces, and other stuff that we use routinely.

My next goal is to expand our bulk staples storage significantly. We’ll have packaging parties to transfer those to the one-gallon foil-laminate bags that LDS sells on-line.

Another comment from Dave and my response to it:

“Thanks for the suggestions. I’m going to add flour to my storage foods. My plan is to make it to the local LDS Home Storage Center and pick up some cans. Given Bob’s comments about it being more difficult to store flour in two liter bottles, I’m going to skip that idea. Lisa Bedford’s comments about mites in the flour also concerned me with regard to packaging my own.”

Great. I have four 24-pound cases of LDS HSC flour in the closet. At $3 per #10 can, that’s only $72 worth, about $48 of which is the cost of the cans. (Flour runs about $12.50 per 50-pound bag at Costco.)

I’m debating about adding another six or eight cases of flour from the LDS HSC. I gave up trying to use soda bottles–it takes forever to get the flour into the bottles and packed tightly–so the alternative will be using the one-gallon foil/Mylar bags that LDS on-line sells. That’ll cost about $0.40 per one-gallon bag plus another $0.10 or so for an oxygen absorber. A one-gallon bag holds about 6+ pounds, versus the 4 pounds in the LDS #10 cans, so the packaging cost is about $0.50 per six pounds of flour self-packaged versus about $2.50 per six pounds for the #10 cans. LDS rates shelf-life of their flour at 10 years, which is extremely conservative. I doubt you’d be able to tell any difference after 20 years. The same is true for the foil/Mylar bags, so that’s a wash.

I’m not trying to discourage you from getting the LDS HSC canned flour. If I were you, I’d pick up several cases each of the flour, macaroni, spaghetti, sugar, beans, oats, etc. With some salt and vegetable oil, that’d be a very good start at a pretty reasonable price.

Don’t worry too much about bugs in your bulk staples. An oxygen absorber (or using dry ice) solves that problem. Bugs and their eggs can no more live without oxygen than we can.

Read the comments: 37 Comments

Friday, 31 July 2015

08:48 – I got email yesterday from another woman who wants to remain anonymous. I’ll call her Jen II, so that I can just use the Jen category. Besides which, she reminds me a lot of original Jen. They’re both determined and decisive.

Jen II isn’t LDS, but she’s prepping for her family of five and has jumped into the Mormon “Big Four” long-term food storage with both feet: 1,500 pounds of flour, oats, pasta, instant potatoes, and rice; 300 pounds of beans; 300 pounds of sugar/honey; 72 pounds of milk powder; 50 liters of vegetable oil; 50 pounds of salt; and various other dry staples. They bought most of that in a couple of runs to their nearest LDS Home Storage Center in #10 cans and foil-laminate bags, hauled it home in their pickup, and stacked it in the basement.

She’s now set for a year of feeding five people on iron rations, and could probably stretch that to 18 months with other regular foods she has stocked. Their basement is now stacked with cases of #10 cans, but she knows this is just the basic staples. She needs to (a) add lots of supplemental dried and canned foods–meats, fruits, vegetables, powdered eggs and cheese, sauces, spices, and so on, (b) get it all organized, and (c) figure out exactly what to do with it if/when worse comes to horrible. Her goal is to have what she needs to feed her own immediate family plus some other family and friends for a year or more. Fortunately, her husband is fully on board with all of this, and is happy to leave the decisions to her. Money isn’t much of issue, nor is storage space.

She and her husband are both retired professionals. They live in a small town that sounds ideal. The rest of her family consists of their adult daughter, their son-in-law, and their early-teens grandson.

My first suggestion to her was to pick up a good cookbook oriented toward cooking from long-term storage, such as MD Creekmore’s , and the freely-downloadable Shelf Storage Recipes, both of which are collections of recipes contributed by people who routinely cook from long-term storage. Then to go through those, pick out some recipes to try and figure out which ones she likes, and order whatever supplemental foods are needed from Augason Farms via Walmart on-line.

My time this week was occupied almost exclusively on science kits, but I did spend some time in the evenings doing prepping research.

  • I spent a lot of time researching relocation issues. We’re still looking at homes, and have decided to look at some that are farther out into the county. One or two of them are located not far from the oddly-named hamlet of Meat Camp, NC.
  • I was able to get an hour or so in on the prepping book, again mostly just jotting down notes about stuff I want to write about in detail.

So, what precisely did you do to prep this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

Read the comments: 69 Comments

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

07:51 – The MDR-1 test kit for Colin showed up yesterday. It contains two tiny little brushes to do cheek swabs. The instructions said that food can interfere with the test, so we decided to do the cheek swabs first thing this morning, before Colin had eaten.

So, Colin was lying on the love seat in the den while Barbara was sitting on the sofa opening the envelopes that contain the brushes. I sat down beside him. His ears went flat as he watched Barbara opening the brush envelopes. I could tell exactly what Colin was thinking: “You’re going to stick those in my mouth and use them to obtain specimens of my squamous epithelial cheek cells, aren’t you?” I told him that was exactly what we were going to do. He cooperated pretty well. I’ll send the swabs off today for testing. My guess is that Colin doesn’t have the MDR-1 mutation, or if he does it’s heterozygous. But it’s worth $70 to find out for sure.

The paper this morning reported a horrible accident in Yadkinville, which is just down the road from us. A three-month-old baby was killed by the family dog, which apparently mistook a multi-colored stocking cap she was wearing for a ball and bit her head repeatedly. What surprised me was that the paper reported that the police had investigated and ruled the incident an unpreventable accident. Nowadays, it seems that nothing is ever an accident. There’s always someone to blame. But apparently the authorities recognized that no one was at fault here and that the family was going through enough already without criminal charges being filed.

09:50 – Riots have broken out along the southern tier of the eurozone. Riots as in Molotov cocktails and rioters throwing bricks at police, who are responding with rubber bullets. (Those, incidentally, are no joke; they can seriously injure or even kill people.) Greece is really at the tipping point. Even moderate, formerly middle class people are now talking about revolution. As one commented, what do they have to lose? As another said, all it’ll take is a spark. And they’re going to get that spark as it becomes clear that what Greece has agreed to will not be enough to secure any kind of long- or even medium-term funding.

I was amused by the list of demands made by the European Trades Union Convention, nearly all of which are utterly impossible to meet, for both political and economic reasons. Here they are:

• Economic governance at the service of sustainable growth and quality jobs,
• Economic and social justice through redistribution policies, taxation and social protection,
• Employment guarantees for young people,
• An ambitious European industrial policy steered towards a green, low-carbon economy and forward-looking sectors with employment opportunities and growth,
• A more intense fight against social and wage dumping,
• Pooling of debt through Euro-bonds,
• Effective implementation of a financial transaction tax to tackle speculation and enable investment policies,
• Harmonisation of the tax base with a minimum rate for companies across Europe,
• A determined effort to fight tax evasion and fraud,
• Respect for collective bargaining and social dialogue,
• Respect for fundamental social and trade union rights.

16:14 – I’ve spent a little bit of time visiting some of the prepper sites that have been linked to in the comments recently, and there’s something I really don’t understand. A lot of these folks seem to be overly-concerned with the shelf-life of stored foods. I mean, are they really storing 25- to 50-year supplies of food? If not, why do they care about the difference? Or perhaps they’re stocking grains and other foods by the ton, figuring that maybe their great-great-grandchildren might have some use for them.

I also think it’s interesting that they take stated shelf-lives as gospel. For example, we just bought some canned chicken chunks at Costco. They have a best-by date three years from now. I promise you, they’ll be fine a lot longer than that. After 10 or 20 years, they might show some darkening, but they’ll still be perfectly edible and will have probably 95% of the nutrition that they have now. Heck, they’ve found 4,000 year old Hostess Twinkies in Egyptian tombs, and they were still edible.

I also wonder about some of their choices of specific foods. Do they eat this stuff now, or are they figuring that it’ll be better than nothing if they get really hungry? I suppose cost is part of this. People decide what they can afford and how much food they want to store and then buy whatever that multiplier dictates. Still, I think that’s a stupid way to go about it. We buy stuff that we eat anyway. We just buy extra. So what if the canned and dry stuff we eat is a year old? If nothing else, it provides a buffer in case anything we buy is contaminated with salmonella or something. In terms of flavor and nutrition, year-old stuff is fine. Two-year-old stuff is fine. Geez, five-year-old stuff would almost certainly be just as good as new stuff. Sterile is sterile. Preserved is preserved.

Read the comments: 29 Comments
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- // end of file archive.php // -------------------------------------------------------------------------------