Month: November 2014

10:32 – Bonnie couldn’t make it yesterday. The battery in her truck died. So I guess we’ll just have that multi-year accumulation of leaves/compost cluttering up the place until next weekend.

As Barbara and I were dry-packing sugar yesterday, I noticed Colin watching. Later, he asked me how we would store his year’s supply of dog food. I told him we weren’t going to bother storing any extra dog food, and his ears went down flat. They stood right up again when I told him he’d just have to eat human food the whole time, the same as the rest of us. After all, for the first 30,000+ years of their partnership with humans, dogs ate what their people ate. Dog treats were invented around the Civil War, but it’s only since the 1930’s that the familiar dry meat/meal dog food has even existed. Colin is now looking forward to the Zombie Apocalypse.

11:34 – I’m doing laundry and my other usual Saturday tasks. Barbara just got back from running errands. Our friend Bonnie Richardson is stopping over sometime this afternoon in her pickup to haul off a load of leaves for her compost pile. For years, Barbara has been piling leaves in the natural areas in the back yard, so the lower layers should already be pretty well composted. Bonnie has quite a bit of land devoted to her garden, so I’m sure she’s constantly on the lookout for more compost.

We just finished transferring a 50-pound bag of white granulated sugar from Costco into 14 empty wide-mouth PET nut jars, also from Costco. With the white sugar in #10 cans we got at the LDS Home Storage Center, that takes us to about 200 pounds total. I didn’t bother to erase the old dates on the jars, because sugar stored in those PET jars remains good indefinitely. There’s no difference between month-old, year-old, and decade-old white granulated sugar, assuming proper storage. On average, Americans each consume about 150 pounds of caloric sweeteners per year, mostly white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, so those 200 pounds are only about a 16 person-month supply, although we do have additional sweeteners like maple pancake/waffle syrup stored. At some point, I’ll pick up another 50-pound bag or two of white sugar at Costco and transfer it to clean 2-liter soda bottles, which’ll take us over 300 pounds total.

We also have more than 250 pounds of white flour, macaroni, and spaghetti in #10 cans from the LDS HSC, along with about 200 pounds of rice. At some point, I’ll pick up another 150 or 200 pounds of white flour at Costco and transfer it to one-gallon Mylar foil laminate bags with oxygen absorbers, but before I do that I want to experiment a bit with white flour. In particular, I want to experiment with quick bread recipes, which require neither yeast nor kneading nor long rise times.

Most commercial quick breads and home baking recipes use double-acting baking powder, but the problem with that is its limited shelf-life. Baking soda works just as well and many people prefer the flavor of bread made with baking soda, but using baking soda requires also using some form of acid to react with it to create the carbon dioxide bubbles that cause the bread to rise. We have 25+ pounds of baking soda packed for long-term storage, but I’m debating what to store as the acid. One option is vinegar, so that’s what I’ll test first. If it works well, rather than storing gallons of vinegar (which is essentially 5% acetic acid) I’ll store a liter of glacial (99% acetic acid). The stuff I have is both ACS reagent grade and FCC (food) grade, so one liter of it can be diluted to form the exact equivalent of 20 liters of distilled white vinegar, more than sufficient to cover 25+ pounds of baking soda.

11:30 – November is coming in like a panda. That is, not the cute, furry pandas that women and children love, but like a real panda with fangs, claws, and a really nasty disposition. Today it’s raining, in the low 40’s (~ 5C), and with wind gusts to 30+ mph (48+ kph).

I keep getting emails from people that begin “I’m not a prepper, but …”. As in, “… I’ve stored a few months’ supply of food for my family” or “… we are in the process of relocating to a small town because I’m concerned about civil unrest in the cities” or (my personal favorite) “… my wife and have bought a riot shotgun and AR-15 rifle for each of us, along with a thousand rounds per gun”.

My usual response starts “Yeah, you are a prepper by any reasonable definition.” In fact, using a strict definition, nearly everyone is a prepper. If you store extra batteries for your flashlight in case of a power outage, you’re a prepper. If you keep a few cans of food on your pantry shelf and a small woodpile for your fireplace in case you’re snowed in, you’re a prepper. If you buy a disused missile silo and stock it with enough supplies to last a hundred people for a decade, you’re a prepper. It’s all a matter of degree.

I’m not sure how or when it happened, but somehow in many people’s minds the idea of being prepared for emergencies has become something to be embarrassed about. This is a new phenomenon. For tens of thousands of years, people were no more aware of the concept of prepping than fish are of water. It was just something everyone did as a matter of routine. If you didn’t store food in the summer and autumn, you and your family would starve to death that winter. If you didn’t lay in a supply of firewood, you’d freeze. And so on.

I think the root of the problem is that since WWII life has become too easy and that, despite history and all of the evidence to the contrary, most people believe “it can’t happen here”. This phenomenon is limited to the Baby Boomers and later generations, all of whom grew up safe, protected, and amidst plenty. Earlier generations, those who reached adulthood before, say, 1950, knew hardship: war, rationing, economic depression, soup kitchens, fearsome plagues like the Spanish flu and polio, and so on. They were perfectly aware that real emergencies were commonplace and that it could happen here. And essentially all of them prepared to the best of their abilities for such events.

Even as late as the 60’s, preparedness was the norm, probably because the adults who were making the decisions had lived through the Great Depression and WWII. Many families built and stocked basement fallout shelters, some minimal but many extensive. When I was growing up, I knew of at least half a dozen families in our immediate neighborhood who had done so. Even those who hadn’t built a formal shelter often stocked considerable amounts of shelf-stable foods, commercial or home-canned.

All schools had stocked shelters, and students participated regularly in drills. Not just for nuclear attack, but for other emergencies like tornadoes and severe winter storms. As a second-grader in 1962, Barbara spent a night in a fallout shelter with other students, eating shelter biscuits and drinking canned shelter water. Even young elementary school students knew where to go and what to do in case of an emergency. Nowadays, even most adults are completely clueless. This is not a good thing.