ETA: This is for a "medium one" scenario, not "the big one." Not the end of industrial civilization but things like, the midwest loses natural gas for six weeks starting Jan. 15. The nationwide electric grid goes down for month. All fuel deliveries go away for three months. The goal is to shelter in place in your (hopefully) rural homestead a reasonable distance from the horde. Also, avoid any gubmint roundups taking everyone to centralized "warmth and food" centers, etc.
IOW, life will eventually return to something normalish, but it could get ugly in the meantime,
The Deep Pantry
I have posted thoughts about long term food storage here, and somewhere mentioned a 30+ year experiment in pickle-buckets-in-crawl-space storage that seemed 90% successful. (Dry foods appeared fine but I don’t know how much nutrition they retained).
The “menu” looked like this:
“I picture a (very) full pantry, plus a pound per day per person of dry beans, rice, oats, wheat etc. Plus one gallon per month per person of cooking oil, with this item rotated every three years.”
The idea is that the first-need is calories, which are bulky but store well in these forms. You will still need a source of protein and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), which have limited shelf-lives.
A human doesn’t need much of those however, so the idea is to have plenty of fuel (calories) stored to power your post-collapse hunt for them.
I’m not a fan of making freeze-dried the “core holding” – they’re fine as supplements – because you’d have to spend a fortune to get enough calories from them.
The alternative vision: A year’s supply of calories beats a month’s supply of balanced meals. Long after your neighbor has consumed his relative handful of meals you’ll still have the caloric energy to hunt-and-gather the much smaller quantities of protein and greens that are needed, etc.
So I’ve been thinking about that “deep pantry.” The vision is, what a thrifty farm-wife in the early 20th C might have stocked up. Two obvious categories are herbs-and-spices (condiments) and canned or preserved fruits and vegetables.
My imagination runs out at that point. The “mass quantities” of carb-and-lipid based calories are already taken care of by the bulk storage. The “deep pantry” is about the things that make life worth living not just livable.
Example: There’s plenty of flour and sugar in the bulk storage, so how about some yeast and cinnamon so you can make cinnamon toast? ;-)
IOW, life will eventually return to something normalish, but it could get ugly in the meantime,
The Deep Pantry
I have posted thoughts about long term food storage here, and somewhere mentioned a 30+ year experiment in pickle-buckets-in-crawl-space storage that seemed 90% successful. (Dry foods appeared fine but I don’t know how much nutrition they retained).
The “menu” looked like this:
“I picture a (very) full pantry, plus a pound per day per person of dry beans, rice, oats, wheat etc. Plus one gallon per month per person of cooking oil, with this item rotated every three years.”
The idea is that the first-need is calories, which are bulky but store well in these forms. You will still need a source of protein and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), which have limited shelf-lives.
A human doesn’t need much of those however, so the idea is to have plenty of fuel (calories) stored to power your post-collapse hunt for them.
I’m not a fan of making freeze-dried the “core holding” – they’re fine as supplements – because you’d have to spend a fortune to get enough calories from them.
The alternative vision: A year’s supply of calories beats a month’s supply of balanced meals. Long after your neighbor has consumed his relative handful of meals you’ll still have the caloric energy to hunt-and-gather the much smaller quantities of protein and greens that are needed, etc.
So I’ve been thinking about that “deep pantry.” The vision is, what a thrifty farm-wife in the early 20th C might have stocked up. Two obvious categories are herbs-and-spices (condiments) and canned or preserved fruits and vegetables.
My imagination runs out at that point. The “mass quantities” of carb-and-lipid based calories are already taken care of by the bulk storage. The “deep pantry” is about the things that make life worth living not just livable.
Example: There’s plenty of flour and sugar in the bulk storage, so how about some yeast and cinnamon so you can make cinnamon toast? ;-)
