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Category: long-term food storage

Saturday, 8 July 2017

09:51 – It was 72.9F (23C) when I took Colin out at 0715, bright and breezy. More work on science kits today.

I signed up for the Britbox free trial yesterday, and Barbara and I spent some time checking out what they had. We were disappointed, to say the least. Given that Britbox is a joint venture between BBC and ITV, I expected that they’d have their whole combined back catalogs available, with tens of thousands of episodes. That would have been worth paying $7/month for.

Alas, their selection is not even close to that. Probably not 1% of their combined catalogs. When we checked it earlier, I made the mistake of checking just some high-profile series. They had all seasons/episodes of stuff like Upstairs, Downstairs, Inspector Morse, Black Adder, Cadfael, etc.

What they don’t have is much of anything else. No Coupling, no Avengers (old or new), no Danger UXB, no Cazelets, no Good Neighbors, no Poldark, no Foyle’s War, no Jewel in the Crown, pretty much no nothing. I checked probably 50 series that we’d already watched or wanted to watch, and literally 90% to 95% of those were missing.

And even those that they supposedly had were mostly just one season of series that ran for multiple seasons, sometimes 20 or more. Stuff like Emmerdale Farm, which has been running since 1972, had only one season of half a dozen or so episodes. Stuff like Eastenders, which has been running every weekday since 1985, had only the 20 or so most recent episodes. Britbox doesn’t know the meaning of the word archive.

To make it even more useless to us, most of what they had available we already have on DVD. So we won’t be continuing our membership past the 7-day free trial. In fact, I may just cancel today. We’re very disappointed.

Another screed:

Email back from the woman I mentioned yesterday. I’ll call her Kathy. She and her husband Mike are both in their early 40’s. They have a daughter, 17, and a son, 15. They live maybe three hours WNW of us, in a small mountain town. They already have water taken care of, as well as heat. They already keep a few week’s worth of shelf-stable food, along with a lot of frozen stuff. In other words, they’re a pretty typical rural family. As Kathy said, they’ve watched things continuing to get worse and worse, so they decided it was time to get serious about prepping.

They live on some acreage and she gardens, but she says it’s struck her more than once how much work is involved to grow how little food. On average, it might take her a full day’s work to produce as much food as she could buy for $10 at the supermarket. So they consider gardening as a nice supplement to their food supply, but she really doesn’t want to be in a position where they have to grow all their food. Instead, they’ll buy a lot now, when it’s still cheap. Kathy is a nurse-practitioner in a local medical practice, and Mike teaches high school math and science, which is how I suspect they came across my site.

She asked what was involved in repackaging bulk dry foods themselves, how much it would cost, and how much work was involved. The cheapest method is to use recycled PET bottles, if you have a good source for them. The 2-liter soft drink bottles are pretty easy to come by, and they hold anything from about 2 pounds to about 5 pounds of bulk food, depending on type. Fluffy stuff (like oats) is near the low end, while dense stuff (like white granulated sugar) is near the top end. You can clean the PET bottles simply by dunking them in a sink of sudsy water, agitating the water inside the bottle, and then draining it. You don’t need to rinse the suds out of the inside. In fact, the bottles will dry much faster if you don’t.

The 2-liter bottles are fine for most bulk foods. We’ve packaged sugar, pinto beans, and even Walmart macaroni in them, using the top half of a 2-liter bottle as a funnel. Fluffy stuff like flour is more a problem, because it takes forever to get the bottle filled, banged down to settle it, and then filled again until you finally get it really full. We do have 100 or 150 pounds of white flour in 2-liter bottles, but wider mouth PET bottles (like those 1.75-liter wide-mouth bottles Tropicana orange juice comes in) are much, much easier to fill with flour. They’re also better for oats, which you can get into (and out of) a 2-liter narrow-mouth with some effort.

If you don’t have a source of PET bottles, one alternative that’s even better is foil-laminate Mylar bags. LDS sells these in 7-mil (very thick) one-gallon size for $0.50 each. The last time I bought them, they also offered a pack of 250 of them for $96, but I no longer find that option on their site. The one gallon bags hold roughly twice as much food as a 2-liter bottle, anything from maybe 3.5 pounds to 8+ pounds, depending again on the type of food. They’re heavy enough that “sharp” items like macaroni won’t punch through them. You can probably assume that if you’re repackaging 1,500 pounds of dry bulk food you’ll need roughly 300 of these bags, again depending on the specific mix of foods you’re packaging.

Finally, whether you use PET bottles or foil-laminate bags, you’ll need oxygen absorbers. Again, LDS on-line is the best source. They sell a pack of 100 oxygen absorbers rated to absorb 300 cc each of oxygen for $12. You’ll need one or more of these for each container you’re packing, except for sugar, which doesn’t need an absorber. Oxygen absorbers start working as soon as they’re exposed to air, so keep some empty canning jars handy. If, for example, you’ve filled 25 2-liter bottles, leave them with the caps off, lined up on the counter. Open the pack of oxygen absorbers, count out 25 of them, and immediately put the remaining 75 in canning jars and screw on the caps. Then quickly add one to each 2L bottle and replace the caps. If you check back an hour later, you’ll find the bottles have all dented in because the pressure inside them is now lower than atmospheric pressure. Same deal if you’re using the foil-laminate bags. They’ll suck in upon themselves, turning themselves into dense crinkly little bricks of food.

I’ve hesitated to use the foil-laminate bags because we have an ongoing supply of PET bottles (I drink a lot of Coke, and Barbara drinks a lot of orange juice), but also because the LDS Church specifically says that you need an impulse sealer to make a safe seal on the 7-mil bags. And not just any impulse sealer. They recommend ones that they sell, for $410. The $35 ones on Amazon just aren’t good enough. LDS specifically recommends against using a clothes iron. But if you visit Youtube, you’ll find hundreds of videos from people who use a clothes iron set on hot/cotton to seal these bags (for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjPimPIlrXU), and none of them have reported any problems with getting good seals. Many of these people have been doing this for ten years or more without any issues, so I’m reasonably comfortable with the idea of sealing them with a clothes iron.

So, some specifics. Let’s assume you decide to store 300 pounds of grains per person, and that 100 pounds of that will be flour. You’ll use this to bake bread, make pancakes, thicken sauces, and so on. That’s 400 pounds total. If you buy it from the LDS HSC at $3/can, that’s $300 total. If you buy flour in 25- or 50-pound bags at Sam’s or Costco, you’ll pay less than $0.25/pound. Call it $100 total for 400 pounds. A one-gallon bag holds about 6.5 pounds, so you’ll need 62 gallon bags at $0.50 each, $31.00 worth, and 62 oxygen absorbers at $0.12 each, or $7.44 worth. The grand total, not counting your time or electricity, is $138.44 for the home-packed stuff versus $300 for the LDS #10 cans.

You decide to store 75 pounds of rice per person, or 300 pounds total. If you buy white rice from the LDS Store, you’ll pay about $0.74/pound in #10 cans, or about $222 total. If you buy it bagged at Costco or Sam’s, you’ll pay maybe $0.40/pound. Call it $120 total. You can fit just over 7 pounds in a one-gallon bag, so you’ll need 41 bags ($20.50 total) and 41 oxygen absorbers ($4.92 total). The grand total for home packaging that 300 pounds of rice is $145.42 versus $222 for the LDS #10 cans.

The numbers are similar for other grains/carbohydrates–pasta, oats, and sugar. And LDS doesn’t offer every grain you might want to store. For example, for four people we store about 100 pounds of cornmeal, 10 pounds of cornstarch, 78 pounds of brown rice (we buy this prepackaged from Augason/Walmart in 26-pound buckets), and so on. Also, rather than buying LDS regular or quick oats, we buy 10-pound containers of Quaker Oats at Costco and repackage them, about 20 pounds per person.

Dry milk is an interesting exception. LDS sells it in 1.75-pound retort pouches at $5.40 each, or just under $3.00/pound. That’s cheaper than you can find it in bulk. The problem is LDS non-fat dry milk is absolutely terrible for drinking, the worst stuff on the market. Still, we store three 21-pound cases of it, because it’s cheap and it’s just fine for use in cooking or baking. You can find an interesting comparison of dry milks at http://foodstorageandsurvival.com/the-great-powdered-milk-taste-test-and-review/. It’s more than seven years old, but Angela Paskett is always worth reading. She walks the walk.

For drinking, use on cereal, making up sauces, and so on, we store several different products. First, Augason Farms Morning Moos, which is a milk substitute rather than 100% milk. It’s quite usable. Second, Nestle Nido, which is dry WHOLE milk, with all of the fat. Barbara taste-tested it. She said it wasn’t exactly like fresh milk, but it wasn’t bad, either. Its supposed best-by date is typically a year out, but in fact it remains good stored at room temperature for at least a couple of years (which I determined by experiment) and much longer if you have freezer space for the cans. Third, evaporated (not sweetened condensed) milk. Once again, its best-by date is typically a year out, but it remains good far longer at room temperature. I just used a can the other night that had a best-by date in the summer of 2014, and it was indistinguishable from a fresh can. Keep track of how much milk you use over a month or so for direct consumption and cooking/baking and then buy enough of these products to make up twice that much. (You’ll be cooking/baking a lot more if TSEDHTF.)

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Friday, 7 July 2017

08:53 – It was 68.1F (20C) when I took Colin out at 0710, overcast and drippy.

For the second time since we’ve lived here, Colin made a break for it. When I walked out the drive to pick up the paper, he headed over to Bonnie’s field to sniff around. As I walked back toward the house, he trotted back over toward me, but instead of coming up toward the front door he went down behind the house. I walked over to the other side of the house, expecting him to come into view down along the fence line. He didn’t. So I walked back over to Bonnie’s side of the house, expecting that he’d turned around and was back in Bonnie’s back field. Nope. So I walked down behind the house, expecting to see him there. Nope. Neither was he in our other neighbor’s yard, 100 yards/meters or so down the road. So I came back to the house and woke Barbara to let her know he was missing. She found him sniffing around a couple hundred yards down the road, near where a skunk had gotten run over the other day. We both chastised him.

Another screed today.

I got email the other day from a woman who was about to pull the trigger on a $6,000 “one-year food supply for four people” from Costco for them and their two teenage kids. She said her husband was on-board with the idea, but asked if I had any thoughts.

Hell, yes, I had some thoughts. I told her she didn’t need to spend anything close to $6,000 on a four person-year LTS food supply, and if she did choose to spend that much she could get a hell of a lot better supply than companies like that sell.

Let’s get the good part out of the way first. This LTS food collection provides 2,000 calories per day for four people for a year, or about 2,920,000 total calories. I think 2,000 calories/day is inadequate. I’d shoot for 3,000 or more calories/day, but at least this package provides more calories than most similar packages. Some of those provide as little as 350 calories/day. Seriously. The only thing that would accomplish is letting you starve to death a bit more slowly.

Now the bad news. A very high price, and no meat. The vast majority of the calories in this package come from grains and other cheap bulk carbohydrate foods. Well, what should be cheap bulk foods. But they’re not priced that way here. At $1,500 per person per year for 730,000 calories, that amounts to about 487 calories per dollar spent, which are pretty expensive calories.

Contrast that to the cost of calories in bulk foods that you repackage yourself. The cheapest of those is flour, at around $25 per 100 pounds at Costco or Sams. That 100 pounds of flour contains about 170,000 calories, give or take, or about 6,800 calories per dollar spent. Rice and sugar cost more per pound, but not THAT much more. If you want bulk LTS food, it is much, much, MUCH cheaper to repackage it yourself from 50-pound bags.

But let’s put things on an oranges-to-oranges basis. Let’s say you want to buy your bulk food already packaged for LTS. Go visit your nearest LDS Home Storage Center. A 4-pound #10 can of flour costs $3 there. That’s three times the price of flour in 50-pound bags, but you don’t have to repackage it yourself. That #10 can contains about 6,800 calories, or about 2,267 calories per dollar spent. LDS HSC prices on other bulk foods like sugar, rice, pasta, oats, dry milk, beans, etc. are similarly low in price, considerably more expensive than repackaging bulk food yourself, but much cheaper than what commerical vendors charge for the same #10 can or foil retort pouch.

So let’s say you choose to buy all of your bulk carbohydrates, beans (protein), dry milk, etc. from the LDS HSC. (You don’t have to be a Mormon to buy there.) The average cost/pound will vary, depending on the mix you choose (wheat berries are cheaper than anything, flour/sugar/oats cost more, as do beans, and dry milk is the most expensive). If you buy one pound/day per person, that’s a total of 1,460 pounds. Let’s say the cost averages $1/pound, which is a reasonable estimate. You’ll end up with roughly 360 cans, 60 cases. And you’ll have more than $4,500 remaining from that $6,000. But we still have more to buy.

First, buy three gallons or 12 liters (call it 25 pounds) of vegetable oil, shortening, and other oils/fats per person-year. Again, your total cost will vary, depending on what exactly you choose. At the low-end (canola oil, Crisco, etc.) your oil/fat supply will be $15 to $30 per person year, or $60 to $120 total. If you instead buy expensive premium oils (think genuine extra-virgin olive oil) it may be five times that much or more. Call it $140 total, which takes our grand total to $1,600 so far.

The next item is table salt. The average American consumes about seven pounds per year, so you’ll need at least 28 pounds for the four of you for a one-year supply. Sam’s sells 4-pound boxes of Morton’s iodized table salt for about $1.50. You’ll need seven or more boxes, so add another $10.

Then start adding bulk herbs and spices. For onion, if you like it, the cheapest source is again the LDS Home Storage Center. A 2.4-pound #10 can of dry onions costs $9.00 at the HSC, noticeably less than what Costco or Sam’s charges for large plastic bottles of it. But you’ll want a bunch of those large plastic bottles as well. Hit Costco or Sam’s and buy a bunch of whatever herbs and spices you like. Plan on spending at least $100 on herbs/spices, and more is better. That’s a tiny fraction of your budget, and goes a long way toward making those boring bulk foods appetizing. It’s far better to have too much than too little.

Next up is meat. If you’re like most Americans, you average about 200 pounds of meat per year, almost 9 ounces per day. That doesn’t mean you’ll need 800 pounds of meat for your deep pantry. In normal times, meat is often a major component of a meal, but you can instead plan to use meats in the same way you use herbs and spices–as flavoring rather than bulk. (We keep enough canned meat on hand to provide about eight ounces per person per day, but even a quarter of that amount goes a long way toward making appetizing meals possible.) For the last couple of years, we’ve been buying almost exclusively Keystone Meats canned meats in 28-ounce cans. They offer beef chunks, ground beef, pork, chicken, and turkey. All cost $6.28/can at Walmart, except the beef chunks, at $7.74. All of them are pure meat, with no water added, so you get the weight of meat you’re paying for. We still buy fresh/frozen meats, but probably 33% to 50% of our meat consumption is from Keystone cans.

So, if you want to provide 7 ounces of meat per day per person, you’d need 365 cans for a one-year supply. That would cost you about $2,300, assuming you didn’t buy many cans of beef chunks. Obviously, before you order 365 cans of Keystone Meats, you should buy a couple test cans of each type and try using them to cook meals. Assuming you’re happy with them, that would add $2,300 to your one-year deep pantry bill, for a total of about $4,100.

Next up is #10 cans of stuff that LDS doesn’t offer at the Home Storage Center, but are important for making palatable meals. For that, we recommend Augason Farms products purchased from Walmart. The Big Four are powdered eggs, powdered butter, powdered cheese, and bouillon, which they offer in several flavors as a meat substitute. For four people for a year, I’d recommend at least eight cans of powdered whole eggs, which is equivalent to about 48 dozen whole eggs. You won’t be using these for omelets, but rather in baked goods that call for eggs. Eight cans give you roughly a dozen eggs per week for baking, making pancakes, and so on. The powdered butter is primarily for flavoring. Incidentally, it’s much better to mix it with vegetable oil than water. (You can substitute for this in whole or in part with Crisco butter-flavor shortening, which is fine for baking but sucks as a butter replacement for use as a spread.) Depending on how much butter you normally use, you’ll probably want three to eight cans of powdered butter on the shelf. The cheese powder is for making up sauces or just flavoring skillet meals. The mixing instructions for it specify way too little water. For most purposes, you can get by using 1.5 to 3 times the recommended amount of water. We keep about eight cans of cheese powder on hand for four people for a year, but YMMV. The bouillon granules are for making up soups, adding meat flavor to meatless meals, and so on. We keep a can or two of each flavor. We’d stock more if we didn’t stock as much canned meat as we do. Again, different people will want widely differing amounts of all four of these products depending on their cooking habits, but plan to spend $400 and up on these items. That takes us to $4,500 or more total.

Next up is cooking/baking essentials. If you’re baking bread and other baked goods, you’ll want lots of baking soda (one or more large bags), baking powder (at least four 10-ounce cans), three or four pounds of instant dry yeast, a couple large bottles of vanilla extract, a couple gallons of vinegar, and so on. Find recipes you like, note the ingredients they call for, and multiply them out. Even if you buy very large quantities of all of these, the total bill should come to $100 or less. Call it $4,600 total.

Next up is soups/sauces/condiments/syrups, which you can use to turn simple bulk-based meals into something appetizing. Think soups/sauces to use in making casseroles or skillet meals with pasta or rice, pancake syrup to use with pancakes, waffles or oatmeal, and so on. You’ll want 365 or more containers of these items, which can range from one-gallon jugs of pancake syrup down to jars of pasta sauce to small cans of tomato paste and various soups. For a one-year supply for four people, plan to spend at least $400 on these items, although you can easily spend three or four times that much depending on your own preferences. Call it $400 or more, for a total of $5,000 or more.

Finally, you might want to stock up on canned and/or dried fruits and vegetables. These aren’t essential for good nutrition, but many people will want them on hand for flavor. Buy canned versions rather than dehydrated, let alone freeze-dried. A #10 can of corn or peas or green beans or fruit at Sam’s costs anything from $3.50 to maybe twice that, and provides a lot of veggies for the money. If you like vegetables and/or fruit, plan on spending maybe $500 or $600 on these items, which takes you up to maybe $5,600. Oh, and don’t forget to buy several Costco-size bottles of multivitamins.

All told, you’ll spend a bit less than your $6,000 budget, and you’ll be eating immensely better than you would be with that four person-year kit. You’ll have many more calories stored, and you’ll have enough meat to make those meals worth eating.

But what about that 25-year shelf life? It doesn’t matter. Nearly all of the dry stuff in #10 cans and retort bags has best-by dates 10 years or more out, and most of it is 20 or 30 years. And even that is pessimistic, as I know from personal testing of very old LTS food.

The canned meats and other wet foods have realistic use-by dates five years or more out, and nearly all of them will remain nutritious and tasty for much, much longer. And anyway, you should be using canned meats and other wet foods routinely in your everyday cooking, so nothing is going to go bad.

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Thursday, 6 July 2017

09:52 – It was 73.5F (23C) when I took Colin out at 0710, sunny and windy. More work on science kits today, with Barbara volunteering at the Historical Society museum this afternoon.

Commercially canned meats versus home-canned meats

As a basis of comparison, a 1.75-pound can of Keystone canned ground beef costs $6.28 at Walmart.com, with free shipping on orders of $35 or more. Canning that same 1.75 pounds of ground beef yourself requires buying not just the fresh ground beef, but a canning jar, a pressure canner and accessories, and the fuel required to process the jar. And, of course, your time.

I checked the prices at Sam’s Club. Ground beef in bulk, depending on exactly how much you buy and whether you go for the 80/20 or 90/10, costs $3/pound give or take $0.25. Call it $3.00. So 1.75 pounds of ground beef costs about $5.25. That leaves you $1.03 to work with if you want to break even. Sam’s doesn’t offer much in the way of canning jars, so I checked Walmart.com. Two cases of wide-mouth quart jars (24 jars) with lids and bands costs $18.98, or $0.79 each. That quart jar will hold anything from 1.5 pounds to two pounds of ground beef, depending on how you process it. Call it 1.75 pounds on average. So, at $5.25 for the meat and $0.79 for the jar, we’re already at $6.04. Even assuming we don’t allocate any of the cost for the canner and other equipment to this batch, we have $0.24 per jar left to pay for our fuel, effort, and time.

Yes, you can re-use the jar once it’s empty, although you’ll need to buy a new lid for it. Those run about $0.20 each in quantity. Or you can buy re-usable Tattler lids, which run roughly a buck apiece, but can be reused repeatedly. Let’s say you get ten uses out of each lid. That takes your cost down from $0.20 per run to $0.10. On that basis, your total materials cost drops to about $5.35 per 1.75-pound jar, or about $0.93 less than buying the can of Keystone ground beef. Given the time, effort, and fuel required, I don’t consider that anything close to break-even, which is why we don’t can ground beef.

Granted, this is worst case. Walmart also sells Keystone 1.75-pound cans of pork, chicken, or turkey for $6.28, and those meats are less expensive than beef. And, of course, you can often find meats on sale. In fact, one of my correspondents buys all of his meat on the expired rack at his local supermarket. This stuff is typically one or two days short of its sell-by date, so the supermarket knows they’ll have to throw it out soon. That, and no one wants to buy meat that close to its sell-by. So he often gets tremendous deals when he offers to buy everything on the expired rack. He often gets 40 or 50 pounds at a time and pays 33% to 50% of the normal price. He then takes it home and sticks it into the freezer until he has time to do a big canning run.

So, yes, if you do what he does, you may end up getting 50 pounds of nearly-expired fresh ground beef for $50 or less instead of $150. On that basis, he’s spending less than half of what the commercial Keystone meat would cost, even counting the cost of the jar and lid. He has the biggest (41.5 quart, $450) All American canner, which can process 19 quart jars per run, so he and his wife get roughly 35 pounds of meat canned per run. They do the same thing with chicken, turkey, pork, and bacon, buying all of them only at a deep discount. They figure their home-canned meat will be safe forever and will taste just as good in five years or more as it did the day they canned it, so they’re accumulating a lot of home-canned meat. At last count, they were up to 300+ pounds of meat in more than 150 quart jars. Per person, for their family of six. That’s almost a ton of meat, and should be enough to last them 18 months to two years, eating as much meat over that time as they eat normally. And they’re always eating really cheap meat.

If you’re willing to do what they do, it does make economic sense to home-can meats, even after the cost of the canner. Otherwise, not so much.

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Monday, 1 May 2017

09:09 – It was 60.9F (16C) when I took Colin out at 0650 this morning, gray, drizzling, and windy. We’ve had another 0.4″ (1 cm) of rain since yesterday evening. Up here, April showers bring May showers. Of course, we live in a rain forest, almost literally. If we head half an hour or so down the road towards Boone, we’re literally in a temperate rain forest. Sparta averages something like 56 inches (1.4+ meters) of rainfall per year. Another 4 inches or so and we’d qualify as a literal rain forest.

Barbara is off to the gym this morning, followed by various volunteer stuff. She’ll return home sometime this afternoon. As soon as I post this, I’ll make up a pot of white rice. We’re having beef fried rice for dinner tonight.

Frances and Al left Winston early yesterday to head up here, arriving about 0900. They spent most of the day working in the garden with Barbara. Al re-tilled the garden patch with our rototiller and then ran over it again with his small cultivator. They planted a lot of different stuff, including green beans, tomatoes, peas, a couple kinds of squash, cantelopes, a row of potatoes. and so on.

What they didn’t plant was some of the stuff we’d tried last year and found didn’t do very well in the garden. Our broccoli grew last year, but something ate it. So this year Barbara is planting broccoli, lettuce, and several other things in pots and grow bags up on our back deck to keep them away from the deer and other vegetable-ivorous fauna that munched them last year.

I got an interesting email yesterday from a long-time reader who tells me that I’ve been wrong all these years about Mormon food storage recommendations. The LDS Church recommends only 3 months’ food storage, says he, and he offers a Wikipedia link as evidence.

Wikipedia is wrong, as it so often is. Until the late 19th or early 20th century, the LDS Church recommended its members store seven years’ worth of food and other supplies. In the early 20th century, they reduced that to two years, and by the mid-20th century they reduced it to one. In the last decade or two, they started explicitly recommending members keep a 3-month supply of the foods they ate regularly, supplemented by additional LTS foods such as wheat, beans, honey or sugar, oil, and so on.

Without doing an exhaustive check of LDS literature, I’m not entirely sure of how much of that LTS food they recommend, but my impression is that they leave that decision to members. The main issue is that the LDS Church operates world-wide, and in some countries it’s illegal to “hoard” food.

I think that although the LDS Church is no longer explicit about how much food to store, members in the US who store food generally go with the one-year recommendation. That, incidentally, is only maybe 6% to 10% of LDS members in the US; despite the popular impression, most LDS members, particularly those who live outside Utah and the rest of the majority-LDS areas, do not follow Church recommendations on food storage. The average LDS member probably keeps a lot more food on hand than the average non-LDS member, but probably not even three months’ worth let alone a year’s worth or more.

I correspond with a lot of Mormons, and they probably average a year’s worth or more, but my correspondents are self-selecting so of course they skew more prepperish than the average LDS member. In fact, more than a few of them keep two years’ worth or more on hand because that’s what their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did.

 

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Thursday, 27 April 2017

08:37 – It was 57.1F (14C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, gray and breezy. Barbara left at 0745 to run errands down in Winston. She’ll make a Costco run on her way back.

I gave her a small shopping list for Costco. In addition to the fresh stuff that she’d mentioned–ground beef, rolls, bread, butter, etc.–I’d added my stuff:

♦ one 50-pound (23-kilo) bag of bread flour
♦ one 50-pound bag of white rice
♦ one 50-pound bag of white sugar
♦ three #10 cans (3 lbs. each) Costco regular coffee
♦ one box of 312 tea bags
♦ one or two cases of evaporated milk
♦ large bag of chocolate chips
♦ one or two two-packs of peanut butter
♦ one bottle Costco vanilla extract
♦ one case of green beans
♦ case of tomato paste
♦ canned cream soups

Nutritionally, that’s roughly 300,000 calories. Call it four person-months. Barbara commented that she’d read on my page that we were taking a break from adding food. I said that we were, except that I planned to continue adding bulk staples incrementally.

Barbara feeds Science Diet dry dog food to Colin. He gets one cup (106 grams) twice a day. It’s 19.6% protein, 14.9% fat, 2.4% crude fiber, and 58.0% carbohydrates. Colin also gets lots of treats and human food throughout the day. I made a rough estimate of his total food intake to use in planning how much LTS food we need for Colin. In a long-term emergency he’ll be eating what we eat. (Unlike cats, which are obligate carnivores, dogs are, like humans, omnivores.) Long story short, it turns out that Colin, at 65 pounds, needs about 0.5 person worth of nutrition.

* * * * *

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Monday, 10 April 2017

09:19 – It was 48.2F (9C) when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, bright and sunny. When I checked just now, it was already up to 60.5F (16C).

Herschel from Shaw Brothers showed up about 0745 to fix the toilet in the master bath. He was wearing a USMC cap. I didn’t realize he’d been a Marine. As it turns out, he was in from 1980 to 1986 as a Marine sniper. When I asked him where he’d served, he replied, “A lot of places we weren’t supposed to be.”

Barbara will be happy to hear that I’m finished ordering bulk LTS foods for now. Before I add much more, we need to get what’s already sitting around in piles organized, inventoried, and shelved. When Barbara read my page yesterday she said she didn’t think we needed more shelving and that just organizing the existing shelving would suffice. I’ll defer to her on that one. If there’s one thing librarians are expert at, it’s organizing and shelving stuff.

I signed up for the ham radio General Class licensing course being held locally. I also ordered the ARRL textbook for the course, although I probably don’t really need it. IIRC, the exam is 35 multiple-guess questions selected from a universe of something like 500. The ARRL book lists all of the questions with the correct answers. My memory is nowhere near what it used to be, but memorizing 500 questions/answers should still be well within my capabilities. And IIRC, you need to score only 70% to pass.

Barbara said she had no interest in getting her ham license, but I’m going to see if I can convince her to attend at least the first class with me, mainly just to meet everyone. The Technician Class exam is even easier than the General Class exam, and I’d like to see her get her Technician license. I don’t intend to run anything other than 2-meter rigs anyway, and a Technician Class licence would give her full privileges on 2M. We have a local 2M repeater whose footprint covers all the way east to Greensboro and all the way south to Charlotte, so if Barbara does get her Technician class license I’d probably install a 2M mobile rig in her car.

 

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Thursday, 6 April 2017

09:42 – It was 46.3F (8C) when I took Colin out around 0730 this morning, drizzling and breezy. That was probably our high temperature for the day, as snow/sleet showers are supposed to move in this afternoon. We’re to get one to three inches (2.5 to 7.5 cm) of accumulation.

Last night we had heavy rains, bright lightning, and loud thunder starting just before midnight and continuing periodically for a couple of hours. Colin was not amused. When he’s terrified, he jumps up on the bed and tries to force his way behind us and on top of us. I hate to yell at him when he’s already terrified, but at one point he was standing on my throat. Given his size, that’s no joke.

Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then building more chemistry kits. She heads down to Winston mid-morning tomorrow, by which time the worst of the snow/ice should be gone, and returns Saturday afternoon at some point.

We just started dinner in the slow cooker. Two cups of rice, five cups of chicken bouillon, a couple cans of cream of * soup, and several large chunks of chicken. I think the recipe says it’s sufficient to feed four to six people, so we’ll get at least two if not three meals out of it.

Barbara has been taking the Winston-Salem paper since she returned to Winston-Salem after grad school in 1978 or 1979.  The WS Journal has the same problems as any other newspaper. Several days ago, they announced significant staff cuts due to declining circulation and advertising revenue. The paper also keeps getting small, both in page count and actual page size. This morning we got the first example of their new layout. Things have changed a lot. The editorial page, for example, used to be a double page spread at the end of the first section, with the back page of that section devoted to weather and similar items. The back page is the same as it was, but the editorial section is down to a single page instead of a two-page spread. No great loss, since the WSJ is a typical liberal/progressive rag. Their editorial staff has never met a government spending or social welfare program it didn’t endorse.

Oh, that science kit that I shipped to Canada on 3/22 and that somehow ended up in Paris, France has now finished its European vacation and is now back in Canada. It cleared Canadian customs (again) and is now in the hands of Canada Post. We’ve had several foreign shipments take odd detours along the way, but this is the first time we’ve had one detour to a different country.

FedEx showed up with a dozen cans of Keystone pork yesterday. Lynn had speculated in the comments about the number of cans that would be damaged. Of the 12 cans, 9 were pristine and 3 showed minor dings. Nothing serious. In fact, at first glance all 3 appeared pristine. It was only as I ran my fingers over them that I detected a slight dent in each. Nothing that would be unusual for cans on the shelves at the supermarket or Costco.

The 10 cans of Keystone beef chunks that I ordered at the same time are en-route and supposed to arrive today. The dozen cans of Keystone ground beef are supposed to arrive tomorrow in three (!) shipments, of 7, 4, and 1 cans.

 

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Monday, 3 April 2017

09:49 – It was 48.1F (9C) when I took Colin out around 0730 this morning, damp and with heavy fog. The forecast for the rest of this week is pretty crappy, with heavy rains/thunderstorms today and rain/snow the rest of the week, with temperatures falling below freezing starting Thursday and into the weekend.

We got some of our plants started yesterday in small pots: five pots each of amaranth, St. John’s Wort, basil, dill, sage, rosemary, oregano, thyme, parsley, and jalapeno peppers; six pots each of broccoli and California Wonder sweet peppers; and eight pots each of Salad Bowl lettuce, ruby red onions, and Black Seeded Simpson lettuce. The two lettuces and jalapeno peppers are Burpee hybrid seeds. The others are all heirloom/open-pollinated. A lot of the other stuff like tomatoes, green beans, squash, turnips, parsnips, garlic, potatoes, etc. will be direct-seeded in the garden over the coming weeks.

We’re going to make up another batch of barbecue sauce today and have pork barbecue sandwiches for dinner. I’d ordered a bunch of stuff from Walmart to make it up, including three 114-ounce jugs of ketchup, two 105-ounce jugs of mustard, and four bottles of Worcestershire sauce. The first time UPS damaged the order, and Walmart re-shipped it. That was to arrive March 27th, but on March 24th I found out that UPS had also destroyed the second shipment. I figured Walmart would re-ship automatically, but as of this morning they hadn’t. So I contact their support via Chat and asked them to do so. I just go the confirming email that they’re reshipping it, so I’m hoping the third time will be a charm.

After initially having reservations, Barbara has decided that she really likes the Keystone Pork. We’ve used it so far for barbecue and in the slow cooker to make pork gloppita. We’ll be using it regularly for normal meals, so I’d better order another couple of cases.

Keystone claims a 5-year shelf life officially, but I’ve spoken to them about shelf life. One woman there told me that while they call it shelf life, in fact it’s a best-by date, and even that is really pessimistic. She said she’d eaten several of their meats that had been packed ten or more years previously and she couldn’t tell any difference between them and stuff they’d just packaged. Like most canned goods, these canned meats have actual shelf lives of decades. Other times, I talked to two different people there, who said pretty much the same thing.

Unfortunately, Walmart will let me order only the pork and beef chunks. I’d like to order more of their chicken and ground beef, but even when Walmart has those allegedly in stock they won’t let me add them to my cart. I just get a message that tells me they’re unavailable and that they can’t ship or deliver them to my nearest store with that combination of options. Oh, well. We like both the beef chunks and the pork, so that’s what I’ll order.

Speaking of which, just for a giggle I decided to check Target on-line yesterday. They do carry Augason products, although not Keystone meats. The problem is the same as it was the last time I checked, a year or two ago. Their prices are much, much higher than Walmart for the same items. They’re usually even higher than Amazon, which is saying something.

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Wednesday, 29 March 2017

09:45 – It was 55.2F (13C) when I took Colin out around 0715 this morning, sunny and clear. Barbara is waiting for a dump truck of mulch to show up so she can get the strips of raw dirt along the driveway mulched. The driveway is about 45 yards long and has dirt along both edges, so she’ll be hauling a lot of wheelbarrow loads of mulch today and probably tomorrow.

We had instant mashed potatoes with the leftover pork gloppita for dinner last night. I used the Walmart Great Value potato flakes. The first time we used them, I used only the dry potato flakes and water to reconstitute. They ended up okay, but kind of blah. Not surprising, considering that the Walmart flakes are 100% potatoes. (The Idahoan dry potatoes that we used to get in 3.25-pound boxes at Costco/Sam’s also include dry milk and lots of other stuff that may shorten their shelf-life.)

Yesterday, I made them up according to the instructions on the box for four servings, but substituting weights for volumes for reproducibility. Rather than fresh milk, I used enough water to provide the total amount of liquid specified and just added a quarter cup of Nestle Nido dry whole milk to the dry potatoes. I did use two tablespoons of real butter, but that could easily be substituted for by a fluid ounce of vegetable oil and a bit of butter powder. The result was pretty much indistinguishable from the Idahoan just-add-water potatoes, which is to say pretty decent. Barbara said they were fine, and she’s the ultimate arbiter.

I’d bought just one 26.7-ounce box of the Walmart potatoes to test. I have four cases (42 pounds) of LDS instant mashed potatoes in our deepest pantry, which I bought when my initial goal was one year’s worth of food for Barbara, Colin, and me. LDS sells them for about $3.36/pound, versus $1.60/pound at Walmart. That’s a big enough difference that it’s worth the minor time and effort to repackage the Walmart product in 2-liter bottles, so I’ll go ahead and order another 42 pounds of the Walmart  potatoes and repackage them. In PET bottles with oxygen absorbers, they’ll be good for at least 20+ years and probably 100.

 

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Thursday, 23 March 2017

09:44 – It was 28.5F (-2C) when I took Colin out around 0715 this morning, with a slight breeze. Barbara got all of her errands run yesterday. She has a haircut appointment at 1030 this morning and will make a Costco run on her way home. She should be back by mid-afternoon.

Email the other day from another newbie prepper. I’ll call her Tiffany, but this time that really is her name. She and her husband are both in their early thirties. Both have decent jobs with reasonable job security. They have no children, and aren’t planning to have any. They live in a rural-ish area about 25 miles from the nearest town, which is about 30,000 population. She’s been reading my blog regularly for the last two or three years. They’ve been kind-of prepping for the last couple of years, but Tiffany calls their efforts hit-or-miss. When they think about it, they pick up an extra dozen cans of this or that at the Super Walmart, but she says they have only maybe a three-week supply of food. She wanted to know if I could send her a list to work from. She’d like to start by getting ready for a 3-month emergency.

They already have a good start on a lot of stuff. They have a woodstove upstairs that they could cook on if need be, as well as a fireplace with a woodburning insert downstairs. Their normal water supply is gravity-fed from a springhouse, with a 12V pump to pressurize their tank. That ordinarily runs from house current, but could easily be changed over to 12V battery power. Even without the pump, the gravity feed produces enough water pressure to provide water at the faucets and toilets. They have a decent first-aid kit. Her husband hunts and both of them shoot clays, so they have two shotguns as well as a bolt-action rifle and have accumulated a reasonable amount of ammunition suitable for self-defense. They have three dogs, which Tiffany says let them know any time anyone approaches the property. They have battery-operated LED lanterns and FLASHLIGHTS as well as several old oil lamps, with a good supply of batteries and lamp oil. The only thing she thinks they’re really short on is food.

So she asked me to assume that I was starting with no food and wanted to buy enough quickly to last two people for three months. What, specifically, would I buy? She says they’ll eventually expand that to six months and probably a year, but for now she just wants to make a serious start. So I replied as follows:

Hi, Tiffany

All of what I write below assumes that you’re feeding only two people for three months. I don’t know how big your dogs are, but I’d also store the same foods for them and in the same quantities you’d store for a person of equal weight. For example, if your three dogs weigh 50 pounds each, that’s the equivalent of one 150-pound adult.

Incidentally, the quantities listed below are going to sound huge, but they’re actually just adequate. Don’t forget, you want this food to hold you without outside resupply. You won’t be able to make your weekly supermarket run, nor will you be eating out, ordering takeout, and so on.

The main consideration is calories. Figure on at least 2,200 to 2,400 calories/day for yourself and 2,800 to 3,000 calories per day for your husband plus whatever you need for your dogs. Carbohydrates provide about 1,700 calories per dry pound, as do proteins (meat, beans, etc.). Oils and fats provide about 3,800 calories per pound. You need an adequate mix of all three for good nutrition. In addition to raw calories, all of the carbohydrates except sugars also contain significant amounts of protein—typically 10% to 15% by weight—but grain proteins are not “complete”. Supplementing grain proteins with meat and/or bean protein makes it complete.

I’d recommend that you start by buying adequate quantities of both bulk staples and canned goods, as well as some supplementary dehydrated items to cover you for three months. Try to get the following categories covered equally:

Carbohydrates – 180 to 210 pounds per adult or dog equivalent

You can mix this up however you like, but I’d recommend the following as a starting point. Adjust as you see fit, as long as the total is 180 to 210 pounds. All of these foods provide about 1,700 calories/pound.

60 to 75 pounds of pasta (macaroni, spaghetti, egg noodles, etc.)
48 to 60 pounds of white flour (for bread, biscuits, pancakes, thickening sauces, etc.)
30 to 50 pounds of rice (white rice stores forever; brown rice for five years or more)
30 to 60 pounds of white sugar (or honey, pancake syrup, etc.)
6 to 10 pounds of oats
6 to 10 pounds of corn meal

Adjust according to your own preferences. If you don’t plan to bake (which is a mistake) or make pancakes/waffles, you can get by with a lot less flour, but make up for it by weight with another carbohydrate. If you hate rice, don’t buy any, but again make up the weight with another carb.

Protein supplement – at least 15 pounds per adult or dog equivalent

Although all of the carbohydrates listed except sugar contain significant amounts of protein, it’s not complete protein because it lacks essential amino acids. You can get these missing amino acids by adding beans, legumes, eggs, meats, etc. to your storage. Beans are the cheapest way to do this, but most people prefer meat, eggs, etc. Note that canned wet beans should be counted as one fifth their weight in dry beans, so while 5 pounds of dry beans suffices for a month, if you’re buying, say, Bush’s Best Baked beans, you’d need 25 one-pound cans of them to equal the five pounds of dry beans.

We keep about 100 pounds of dry beans and lentils in stock for the 4.5 of us, but most of our supplementary protein is in the form of canned meats. Cans of chicken from Costco or Sam’s, Keystone Meats canned ground beef, beef chunks, pork, chicken, turkey, etc. You can order Keystone canned meats from Walmart on-line. A 28-ounce can of most of them costs just over $6. We order them in cases of 12 at a time. They also have 14.5-ounce cans, although they cost more per ounce. They might be better for you if you’re planning to feed only the two of you. Also consider the 12- to 16-ounce cans of meats like chicken, roast beef, ham, tuna, salmon, Spam, and so on. The actual shelf life of canned meats, like other canned foods, is indefinite assuming the can is undamaged. Keystone, for example, rates their canned meats at a 5-year shelf life, but in fact they will remain safe and nutritious for much, much longer.

Although the five pounds per person-month is a minimum, you’ll probably want more. For a three-month supply for the two of you, I’d buy 90 cans of meat, plus extra for your dogs. One can per day to split between/among you. That’s going to be the most expensive part of your LTS food purchases, at maybe $200 to $300 for 90 cans. If that’s more than you want to spend at one time, you can substitute dry beans pound for pound for some or all of the meats, at roughly $1 per pound.

Oils and Fats – at least 3 quarts/liters or 6 pounds per adult or dog equivalent

Oils and fats do gradually become rancid, but stored in their original bottles and kept in a cool, dark place they last for years without noticeably rancidity. Saturated fats (lard, shortening, etc.) store better than than unsaturated fats. Poly-unsaturated fats have the shortest shelf life.

We store a combination of liquid vegetable and olive oils, lard, shortening, etc. We also keep anything up to 40 pounds of butter in our large freezer. In a long term power outage, we’d clarify that by heating it and separating the butter solids from the clear butter, and then can the clear butter to preserve it.

For the two of you for three months, covering this requirement can be as simple as buying two 3-liter bottles of olive oil, lard, shortening, or another oil of your choice, or a mix of those. Plus whatever you need for your dogs, of course.

Dairy – at least 9 pounds dry milk per adult or dog equivalent

This amount is all for cooking/baking. If you want to drink milk, have it on cereal, etc. you’ll need more. You can buy non-fat dry milk already in #10 cans, or buy it in cardboard boxes from Walmart and repack it yourself. (There’s also a full-fat dry milk called Nestle Nido that’s sold in #10 cans and has a real-world shelf-life of at least a couple of years and probably much longer.) For instant non-fat dry milk, the cheapest option is the LDS on-line store, which sells a case of twelve 28-ounce bags (21 pounds total) for $46.50, or just over $2/pound. There’s a $3 flat shipping charge no matter how many cases you order. If I were you, I’d order a couple of cases. Just note that although LDS dry milk is fine for cooking and baking, it really sucks for drinking.

Another alternative is evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk, although it’s mostly water so you’ll need to buy about five times as much by weight. For drinking or use on cereal, consider a milk substitute like Augason Farms Morning Moos (dumb name, but by all reports it’s the closest thing to real fresh milk). It comes in #10 cans and has a very long shelf life. It’s mostly non-fat dry milk, but with sugar and other ingredients that make the reconstituted stuff taste close to real milk.

Salt – at least 2 pounds per adult or dog equivalent

Buy iodized salt. Sam’s sells 4-pound boxes of Morton’s iodized table salt for about a buck each, so a three-month supply for one person is about $0.50 worth. The shelf life is infinite, so buy a lot. Repackage it in 1- or 2-liter soft drink bottles, canning jars, Mylar bags, or other moisture-proof containers. (You don’t need an oxygen absorber.) After extended storage, the salt may take on a very pale yellow cast. That’s normal. It’s caused by the potassium iodide used to iodize the salt oxidizing to elemental iodine. That’s harmless, does not affect the taste, and still provides the daily requirement of iodine (which the soil around here is very poor in).

Meal Extenders/Cooking Essentials (varies according to your situation)

You can survive on just beans, rice, oil, and salt, but the meals you can make with just those foods will get old after about one day. Even if you’ve stored a lot of canned meat, you should also store other items that add flavor and variety to your stored bulk foods, such as:

Herbs and spices – buy large Costco/Sam’s jars of the half-dozen or dozen herbs/spices (sperbs?) you like best. In sealed glass/plastic jars they maintain full flavor for many years. Your preferences probably differ from ours, but at a minimum I’d suggest: onion and garlic flakes/powder, cinnamon, thyme, parsley, dill, mustard, rosemary, pepper, cumin, etc.

Sauces and condiments – store your favorite sauces/condiments (or the ingredients to make them). We store spaghetti sauce, alfredo sauce, canned soups, ketchup, mustard, pancake syrup, etc. in quantity. Rather than storing barbecue sauce, we store bulk amounts of the ingredients to make it up on the fly. (See http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2017/03/04/saturday-4-march-2017/)

Which brings up another issue. You need to plan your meals and figure out how much of what you’ll need to make them. For example, we intend to have a dinner based on that barbecue sauce once every three weeks, or 17 times a year. The recipe makes up a quart or so of sauce, which with a 28-ounce can of Keystone beef chunks or pork or chicken is enough to feed the 4.5 of us. (The buns are just part of our flour storage.) To know how much we’ll need to store to do that for a year in the absence of outside resupply, we just multiply everything by 17.

17 – 28-ounce cans of Keystone canned beef, pork, or chicken
25.5 cups (11+ pounds) of white sugar
25.5 Tbsp (12.75 fluid ounces) of molasses
25.5 cups (204 fluid ounces) of ketchup
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of prepared mustard
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of vinegar
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of water
17 Tbsp (8.5 fluid ounces) of Worcestershire sauce
17 Tbsp (8.5 fluid ounces) of liquid smoke hickory sauce
34 tsp (77 grams or 2.7 ounces) of paprika
34 tsp (194 grams or 6.8 ounces) of salt
25.5 tsp (59 grams or 2.1 ounces) of black pepper

Cooking/Baking Essentials – varies according to your preferences

You’ll almost certainly want to bake bread, biscuits, etc., so keep at least a couple pounds of instant yeast (we use SAF). On the shelf, it’s good for at least a year. In the freezer, indefinitely. You’ll also want baking soda, baking powder, unsweetened cocoa powder, vinegar, lemon juice, vanilla extract—all of which keep indefinitely in their original sealed containers—and possibly things like chocolate chips, raisins and other dried fruits, jams and jellies, etc.

Multi-vitamin tablets/capsules – one per person/day

Contrary to popular opinion, fruits and vegetables aren’t necessary for a nutritious, balanced diet. Still, most people will want to keep a good supply of them. As usual for canned goods, canned fruits and vegetables last a long, long time. We buy cases of a dozen cans each at Costco or Sam’s of corn, green beans, peas, tomatoes, mixed fruit, pineapples, oranges, etc. (Note that pop-top aluminum cans are problematic. Where a traditional steel can will keep foods good indefinitely, the pop-top cans don’t seem to do as good a job. I recommend you stick to traditional cans, and of course that you have at least two manual can openers.)

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