Apartment Survival: Food

Assuming that you have your water supply squared away, it is now time to think about food. Again, the absolute minimum recommended by authorities is three days worth of food, but given what we’ve seen in Japan, where it has taken ten days or more to reach some communities, my personal recommendation is to have at least three weeks of food and water on hand. If you can store more than that, then by all means do so.

There are as many schools of thought about what you should set aside as there are types of food. One option beloved by the camo crowd is the military field ration. Known as MREs in the US and IMPs in Canada, these are pre-packed rations intended for troops in the field. They tend to be somewhat bulky until field stripped, may not be considered tasty by all, and their storage life can be considerably compromised by high temperatures. The advantage is that they may be eaten cold or hot (some come with a chemical heater) and each ration is about 1200 calories, with a complete set of breakfast, lunch and dinner giving you roughly 3600 calories. They are pretty much nutritionally complete for the short term, although they can be deficient in some elements (Canadian IMPs do not have enough folic acid or calcium to meet requirements long term, for example).

Another option is commercial freeze dried hiking/camping food. These usually come in packages of two or four portions, and generally require significant amounts of water to make them palatable. Add to the fact that in my opinion that they are fairly bulky versus the calories they contain, plus their high cost per serving, they would not be my preferred option. In their favor is a long shelf life, and that they are widely available everywhere from camping supply stores to Walmart.

If you decide on a commercial product as part of your storage, consider something like Datrex emergency rations. They are small in size, high in calories, and reasonable in storage life (5 year). Remember that you are always trying to get the most calories for the smallest size (and price). You will need to do some research to see what is most appropriate for your situation.

Then there is the bucket brigade, those storing buckets of wheat or beans and other things in food grade buckets, complete with oxygen absorbers, mylar bags and/or CO2 filling. While this option can be cost effective (bulk buying) and great for long term storage (25 years is claimed for wheat stored properly), the sheer weight and bulk of these buckets may make it a difficult option for the apartment prepper with limited storage.

An easy way to start storing for emergencies is to store what you eat now. It’s easy enough to buy three instead of two cans of tomato sauce or an extra package of noodles the next time you go shopping, and if you stick with a weekly buying program you will build up an impressive amount of food very quickly. The downside of this is that you’ll need to create a rotation system to ensure older stock gets used and replaced, but this is relatively easy to do.

I believe that if you are trying to get some serious food in reserve as an apartment occupant, your initial focus should be on the conditions in your living space. If you are in an apartment that swelters in the summer, you will not want to store foods that have their storage life adversely affected. The second thing to look at is your storage space. It might be damp, prone to insects or rodents (I’m thinking storage lockers here), or have other conditions that must be reckoned with.

All of this should help you decide on what type of food you store, whether IMPs or cans of tuna, and what you store it in. Don’t be discouraged if your space is limited as there are likely spaces you haven’t thought of using, For example, simple things like plastic containers that slide under your bed will allow you to store an impressive amount of food and not compromise your living space. Dual purpose wherever you can. A blanket chest holding a single layer of cans of tuna under your spare bedding is now a blanket chest plus!

Storing food is only one aspect of preparing to sit it out in your apartment. If you have good sunlight exposure, there is no reason not to be growing herbs by your windows. If you have a balcony, you are better off than you imagine. Using square foot gardening techniques (look it up) and containers, you can raise an impressive amount of food for the space available to you. I have seen one arrangement that used a bleacher like structure of containers that maximized both sun exposure and storage. Remember that in certain situations, a balcony full of tomato plants might make you attractive to others, so caution must be exercised.

Again, getting access to the roof of your apartment is a must. While caution must be used in loading the roof with the weight of containers, soil, and plants, there is likely a lot of unused space getting a lot of sunshine up there. You might even be able to get access now, and get practiced at container gardening.

Other usable room might be available if there are abandoned apartments in the building. This might give you additional balconies to use, or you might even have your own greenhouse of sorts if there is enough light and warmth.

The grounds around your apartment building bear looking at as well. There may be space where a garden plot might be dug. Gardening may be difficult if the area is not protected from animal or human poachers. Still, it is worth looking at if you are going to be in your apartment through the growing season. If so, you need to be prepared preserve your harvest. There is little point to going through all the trouble if what you grew rots before you can eat it. Remember that canning/preserving, like gardening, are skills you need to learn now, before they are absolutely critical.

Another thing to check on is the possibility of there being edible landscaping on the building grounds or on local streets. In my on neighbourhood, there are Nanking cherries, crabapples, and lingon-berries on public property within a block of me. Others may also be seeking the same supply, so cooperation might be necessary if there are a number of you trying to harvest the same resource.

A better strategy might be to go after wild edibles. Depending on where you live, there will be a variety of ‘weeds’ that are edible and contribute necessary nutrients to the diet. There are things like purslane with its high iron content, or the Vitamin C content of wild rosehips, as well as things like burdock and cattails that can supply some starch to the diet. Proper identification is the key to safe consumption, as nearly seventy-five percent of all plants are toxic to humans to some extent and even some edibles (like acorns) need processing for safe eating. Again, it is a skill you need to acquire now, not after your judgment is clouded by hunger.

Finally, consider doing some guerilla gardening right now. This can take a variety of forms. One is to garden a little plot in an out of the way spot. It might be the space between two buildings, a vacant lot or similar spot but it will allow you to practice technique as well as seeing where you can garden undisturbed. This should be at some remove from your apartment to avoid leading folk right to your home. Another is by planting certain crops in out of the way areas. The plants are then ignored and left to fend for them selves. My favorite for this is Jerusalem artichoke, a very hardy plant that will self propagate and has an edible root that stores very well. I’ve also done this with different varieties of squash, but with less success. The final method is to try to spread wild edibles. My choice for this is burdock, which I’ve managed to establish in several ‘secret’ locations by harvesting seed and planting it.

It might not be five acres and self-sufficiency, but I believe you can bug in to your apartment without sentencing yourself to death by starvation. It takes work, forethought and lots of practice, but you can develop a storage and gardening program that will boost your survivability.

Next, apartments as shelter.

Originally posted April 10, 2011 @ MPN

Food Storage

If you are new to putting back a little food storage, you’ll likely do what I did many years ago, and read books (or these days surf the net) looking for how-to articles, which usually have some sort of list of what to store. I have a couple I’ve seen over the years that I like, although I’m a big fan of developing your own list that essentially comes out of your day to day grocery consumption. It will of course require common sense modifications (powdered milk vs. fresh is an easy example), but it will be things that:

1. You WILL actually eat.
2. Since you will eat it, there is a better chance that you WILL rotate your storage in a timely manner.

That said there are some seriously BAD storage plans out there as well. The faults are many, including but not limited to:

1. Being nutritionally unsound. Deficiency diseases are not fun.
2. Far too bulky. Having a few hundred cans of beans and weenies is all well and good, but have you tried getting them in your car? What if you need to go somewhere else?
3. Require too much preparation. If at least part of your supplies cannot be eaten cold as is, you’re not thinking through your possible scenarios properly. What do you cook with when you’re off grid and out of propane? If it’s dehydrated, where is the water coming from to re-hydrate?
4. And the greatest sin, being too expensive. You can assemble your own food reserves far cheaper than buying a pre-packaged ‘kit’, or buying individual freeze dried meals.

Anyways, here is one of my ‘bad’ lists from the internet. This list is an older one, but still pops up on different forums from time to time. The idea is to buy five dollars of food per week, and at the end of a year, you have:
• 500 lbs of wheat
• 180 lbs of sugar
• 40 lbs of powdered milk
• 12 lbs of salt
• 10 lbs of honey
• 5 lbs of peanut butter
• 45 cans of tomato soup
• 15 cans of cream of mushroom soup
• 15 cans of cream of chicken soup
• 24 cans of tuna
• 21 boxes of macaroni & cheese
• 500 aspirin
• 1000 multi-vitamins
• 6 lbs of yeast
• 6 lbs of shortening
• 12 lbs of macaroni

Supposedly, this will give you “1,249,329 calories which based on a 2000 calorie a day diet will provide enough food for two people for 312 days!” It might, but let’s go through this line by line to see what faults (if any) there are in this plan.

a) 500 lbs of wheat – ok as far as it goes, but there are basically only three ways to use it: Eating it hot or cold as ‘wheat berries’ requires water and fuel. Processing it to flour and then using it requires both of the above plus special equipment. Not quite as cheap when you look at the big picture, since it requires other inputs.
b) 180 lbs of sugar – Sugar is a necessary ingredient in many things such as bread, as well as being a sweetener, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have. You need to think about whether you need 180 pounds of it, and if substituting some other foods might not be a bad idea. By the way, just under 25% of the roughly 1.25 million calories that this list gives you are from the sugar!
c) 40 lbs of powdered milk – Fine, but remember it requires water as an input to use it.
d) 12 lbs of salt – Fine, except I think there is too little of it. You’ll need it as a vital component of food preservation, not just as a spice.
e) 10 lbs of honey – Its ok, but again, not a real stand alone food. About 16,000 calories here.
f) 5 lbs of peanut butter – Better, but not enough of it. If you look at the whole list, there aren’t a lot of fats/oils on it other than the peanut butter. And at nearly 2700 calories to the pound, a very nice calorie/weight ratio.
g) 45 cans of tomato soup and …
h) 15 cans of cream of mushroom soup and…
i) 15 cans of cream of chicken soup – Seriously?? Nearly fifty pounds weight in those 75 cans of soup, giving you only 14,700 calories or about a week of calories for one person. And that’s without looking at the water and fuel inputs required for best results. Dried soup base is a far better option here.
j) 24 cans of tuna – good, just not enough of it. If this list is supposed to feed two people for 312 days (10 months), then you each get a half can of tuna every two weeks. Pretty sparse, protein wise.
k) 21 boxes of macaroni & cheese – bulky, but high in calories. Water and heat inputs required. It would be a bad choice for me personally, as I hate this stuff!!! But since you only have enough to eat one box every two weeks, you won’t get sick of it, I guess.
l) 500 aspirin – It’s not food, so why is this on here? To keep your arteries from clogging from all the crap? This should be in a different category of preps altogether.
m) 1000 multi-vitamins – you’ll need them, since there aren’t any vegetable or fruits being stored on this list.
n) 6 lbs of yeast – I assume so you can bake bread. Nice to have but not strictly necessary, as you can make unleavened bread, or make sourdough starter if you must have raised bread.
o) 6 lbs of shortening – baking and cooking. Again an ok thing, but not stand alone food.
p) 12 lbs of macaroni – At last, a good choice! This is your wheat processed and condensed. It stores as well as most foods, if not as long as wheat in pails, is no worse to prepare than anything else on this list, but has a pretty high calorie to weight ratio. Still requires water and heat inputs.

There you have it, my critique of what I see as a “bad” list. It is of course better than no storage at all, but a little forethought will give you a better balanced, higher calorie list for your money. Which beings me to the one thing I DO like about this list: The idea of a regular weekly allotment of a small amount of money to food storage purchases. It’s an older list, so I suggest that five dollars per week is a bit small. I’m currently conducting an experiment on what you can amass on one dollar a day (i.e. $7/week) and it seems to be working well.

So what about your own experiences with purchasing food for storage? Do you have the ‘ideal’ one-year list? Or a list of don’ts instead of dos? Feel free to share them.

In the meantime, keep putting away food, if only a little every week. Any amount is better than nothing. Given the last crop year and the current prospects, it is worthwhile to do so as an inflation hedge, if for no other reason.