Red State Green

This is a series about learning to feed yourself. The idea for this came from this post. You might want to read both of those first to see where I’m coming from before you comment.

1. Learn to garden
2. Stock up <– we are here
3. Find out who your neighbors are
4. Find local food sources (within 25 miles)
5. Learn to cook
6. Think about your meat sources (this is optional, of course, for you vegans out there, but think of it as a ‘bonus’ should your carnivore friends have a question)

Stocking up

When people talk about ’stocking up’ it has a variety of meanings.

Some take it as preserving the things you harvested, like making jam or hanging up garlic braids (both of which are fun). This is something I’ll talk more about in the “learn to cook” section of the series.

Some look at ’stocking up’ to mean ‘go buy a year’s worth of food’. There are certain subsets of the US, notably the survivalists and the Mormons, who do this as a matter of course, albeit for different reasons. I want to talk about this whole issue for a moment.

You have to be careful when buying in large quantities like that. Sometimes people just go ‘buy stuff’ without thinking through:

• Do I eat these things normally? Buying a year’s worth of canned spinach when your family hates it doesn’t make sense.
• Do I know how to use this? Buying wheat grains in bulk when you don’t have a hand mill (since in a real disaster, there’s a high probability the power will be out), have never ground grain before, and don’t know how to bake, even if you had a solar oven (remember the gas might be out too!) might mean facing a very steep learning curve right when your life is already chaotic.

Okay, I don’t believe in ‘the apocalypse’ so I doubt the gas and electric will suddenly go out, barring an ice storm or something short and drastic like that.

But take a long view of things. Something that is going to require you to use the food you’ve spent so much money to buy (ie. you really can’t buy food at the store for a year) will mean changes you should be ready for. It’s like buying a gun but never learning how to load it, clean it, or use it, hoping you’ll figure it out when the time comes to shoot.

You also need to think about rotation. A year’s supply of food is great. You should be using it, and buying more as you go. This food should already be part of your diet. When a year from now comes along (or whenever the expiration is on all that stuff), what are you going to do with it? Just throw it away?

Besides, with stress (changing your diet abruptly is a form of stress) comes illness. You want to already be accustomed to eating this way *before* the disaster hits. If that thought makes you go “eww”, you know you bought the wrong things.

A similar issue is storage. Do you have room to store all this? Do you know how to store it so bugs and rats don’t eat your stock? It would be horrifying to need your food then find out it’s ruined.

These issues are why I’m not a big fan of this form of ’stocking up’, at least at this point in my life, where I don’t have the skills I need yet. When I develop these skills, I might change my mind about it. But I plan to grow my own wheat grains anyway.

There are categories of things that I think are good to stock up in, and they’ll be different for each family:

• Foods/spices that you know you’ll never be able to provide for yourself. Things like salt. I don’t know of a local salt supplier, but salt is something you need to live, it’s not a luxury. If you live in an apartment, you know you’ll never be able to grow your own meat (although keeping rabbits might work, depending on your sensibilities). Canned meat might be a good thing to stock up on. Think it through and see what you really need to buy.
• Medications you have to have to not die. Your doctor should be willing to give a hundred-day prescription of most medications. It’s not a huge stock, but if missing a week would kill you, having that stock on hand is something to think about.
• Special needs items. Is the baby in your home bottlefed? You should stock up on baby formula. Do you have a medical condition that requires catheters or other equipment? If you require a wheelchair, do you have parts and tools to fix it if something happens? I know this is nitty-gritty stuff, but it could mean life or death. A large proportion of people who died in Katrina were the elderly and babies. Think about your whole family, and what they might need.
• Ways to make fire. Everyone should be able to make a fire if they need to. Lighters, spark makers, matches… get a variety of methods. That and some candles and you’re set for lighting. Add a fire pit, barbecue grill or solar oven outside and you’re self-sufficient for cooking, too. (DO NOT use a fire pit or barbecue grill indoors. Carbon monoxide fumes will kill you.)
• Water. Do not forget water. You cannot have too much clean water. I’ll talk about this more later on.

Not a huge list there. (I figure if I forgot something, you all will be sure to tell me. )

Most everything else, you can provide (if you learn how to garden), or else you can make do with an easy alternative (like cutting up rags to make washable TP). Most people don’t really need that much stuff to survive.

Figure out what you can do. Figure out what you can’t provide yourself and can’t do without, and stock up on that. When you get good enough at gardening, you might find you don’t need to buy much at all. But if you’re going to buy, spend your money wisely.

Next, we’ll talk about finding out who your neighbors are. Stay tuned.