Bang for the Buck

I’m a day late. Generally, I try to post every Sunday, but had a small emergency that delayed me. Anyways, here goes.

I’m a regular reader of many survival or preparedness related blogs. And on these blogs, you’ll often find equipment reviews. Heck, I do a few myself. What annoys me is that with all of these reviews, the reader is often being told that this knife, this rifle, that water filter or the newest bit of load bearing equipment is, if not touted as THE way to go, then at least ‘one of the very best’ out there. And that can lead to gear envy.

Yup, the dreaded gear envy. Sadly, no one is reviewing your old Puma-Tec knife and singing its praises. No reviewer is talking about your old Remington 870 Wingmaster and extolling it as the best thing since sliced bread. And so it goes, on and on in every category of gear you can imagine. The marketplace has or is going to come up with something better than what you have, and aren’t you a schmuck for not having it?.

If you’re smart, you’ll realize that your old 870 will do the job, and getting a 12 gauge with a military styled stock in black or camo will not make you a better shot. Having the latest in ‘combat’ knives will not make you a more deadly knife fighter. ( In fact, two things about that: 1. If there is somebody in arm’s reach trying to hurt you, you’ve already screwed up royally. 2. To quote a novel and a recent TV program: “Stick them with the pointy end”. But I digress….)

In reality, newer fancier gear will not significantly improve your survivability. There is something called the 80/20 principle that runs something like this: 80% of your result is achieved with the first 20% of inputs. The remaining 80 % of input will increase your result only an additional 20%. An interesting business principle, but how does that apply to us?

What it means is that a good, serviceable knife will do the job. The extra ‘oomf’ you get from a bigger fancier knife will cost you a lot of bucks for marginal improvement. The same goes for firearms, water filters, binoculars and almost every piece of equipment I can think of.

The only place I don’t see that being the case is with food and water. There, another week’s worth of supplies is just that. It a definite one to one, where the value received is exactly the same per unit of input regardless of the amount of input.

So think about it the next time you are trying to decide between more storage food and a new rifle, or more water and a shiny Rambo knife: Decide where the best value for your dollar is. Make sure you’re putting out 20% for an 80% result, and not the other way around.

It's common sense.

Originally posted June 20, 2011 @ CPN

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.

Crops, Consumers, and Cash

It must have been a hard fall for everyone. Posting has fallen off sharply on the other blogs on CPN, and I'm starting to feel a bit like Cassandra these days. Signs seem to point toward a major economic hiccup occurring sooner than later, and time to prepare is getting a little tight. Yet the activity on many boards, not just these, is declining. My hope is that people are too busy preparing to read blogs....

But if you aren't, take a look at the chart at the head of this article. That shows you the price increase in some basic foodstuffs along with things like gas and heating oil over the past year, and it's a bit of an eye opener. Consumer prices haven't risen too sharply here in Manitoba to reflect these increases as yet, but I believe that they will. Even if you aren't fully committed to the idea of food storage, perhaps you might want to lay in a few extra nibbles, just in case.

Getting food in our society is a delicate and fragile dance of producer, processor, transporter retailer and consumer. It doesn't take much for this dance to be interrupted, especially at the supply end by Mother Nature.

Here is an article that details 5 threats to different crops:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/5-dangers-to-global-crops-that-could-dramatically-reduce-the-world-food-supply

The author of the article seems a bit paranoid and the tone of the article is faintly hysterical, but the problems are real, and worth knowing about. Another article, somewhat less end of the world-ish, but perhaps more sobering:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/25/impending-global-food-crisis

Talking more about price volatility than hyperinflation, it nonetheless makes a scary case for food storage. In Britain, the cost of food has risen 22% in just three years. That should make you stop and think!

I urge everyone to think about their food situation. Make sure you've stored as much as you can. Just a few dollars dedicated to this every week will build you a respectable reserve in no time.

The other thing I urge you to do is think about gardening. Yes, I know it is winter in Manitoba, but start planning and practicing the art of producing your own food NOW. Almost any yard or apartment balcony can produce a startling amount of food with the right techniques.

It might not be a matter of life or death. It might just be a matter of enjoying cheap food while everyone else devotes more and more income to purchasing food. Or it might be a matter of enjoying fresh nutritious veg when everyone else is armwrestling over wilted carrots at the grocery store. I don't pretend to know where things are headed, foodwise. I DO know that without the ability to produce at least some of your own food and stores of what you cannot produce, you are a hostage to whatever fate throws your way.

Do something about that now.

Originally posted November 01, 2010 @ MPN

Revelation 6: verses 5-6

I’m not religious, but the imagery is appropriate...

If you read a lot of news, you’ll likely know that Russia is banning the export of wheat for the remainder of 2010. The Russians have lost at least 20% of their crop, and are ensuring that there is no homegrown shortage. As Gwynne Dyer wrote in a recent column about this: “If anybody starves, it won't be Russians.” At least, not yet.

I believe that we are likely at the maximum population that our agricultural capacity can carry. It’s likely that without heavy inputs of fertilizers, water, and pesticides that we are far exceeding what the planet can actually feed. Global warming or not, we’ve seen how vulnerable our food supply is to the weather.
Here in Manitoba, a bumper crop around Portage La Prairie has seen upwards of four inches of rain on it in places. If you get just the wrong breaks, that crop might rot in the fields. Add that to the smallest acreage of wheat seeded on the Prairies this spring since 1971, and you have the potential of another major exporter limiting its exports.

The ‘reserve’ of wheat around the world is now about 50 days, down from three times that not that long ago. It would not take too much more bad weather or failed harvests to shrink that number further. Indeed, it may shrink anyway as the world population continues to increase. So what is the bottom line for you?

Right now, likely nothing at all. Oh, you might wind up paying a bit more (or a lot more) for flour and products made with them. There might be food riots in faraway places like Mexico or Pakistan, but nothing like that here. Life will likely trundle along without much notice of the increasingly thinner margins that are developing between the plenty we still enjoy, and the famine that much of the rest of the world endures periodically.

So as you butter your toast, bite on that bagel, or chow down on that bowl of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, give some thought to the future. Maybe an extra bag of flour in the larder isn’t such a bad thing. It might just keep one horseman from your door.

Link to the Dyer article I quoted. A worthwhile read:

http://vueweekly.com/front/story/grain_wars/

Originally posted august 20, 2010 @MPN