Sometimes you just have to ask... |
"What would Chong Li do?" |
Posted on 04/05/2012 4:52:18 PM PDT by Kartographer
I keep hearing statements about how expensive it is to prep. Although it is not cheap it doesn’t have to be that expensive either. You do not need to stock 20 years worth of food to be properly prepared. As a matter of fact I would advise against it. Stockpiling a large food and water supply means you have to stay put and defend it. That may not be your best option in a lot of scenarios which means you would lose that investment. Do you think you really have enough ammo to defend a 20 year food supply for 20 years? The cost of that alone would be staggering.
One big mistake in prepping that most people make including me is waste when you first start out. Either buying the wrong things (toys and gimmicks) or finding out later as you become more experienced that a lot of the things you bought in the beginning you really do not need.
(Excerpt) Read more at preparednessblogs.com ...
Heck yeah. At that point the rules are tribal.
Sometimes you just have to ask... |
"What would Chong Li do?" |
I have used paraffin to seal jars of pickles and jelly/jam, but never dipped an entire can into paraffin.
Make your own tomato paste, sauce, or other tomato based products. Glass jars aren't that expensive, canning is easy, and you'll know exactly what goes into your food source.
I have some jars of tomato sauce that we canned 3 years ago. Lids are still tight. :)
Careful with those presumptions there......
I have 11 years service in 2 branches of our nations armed forces it was no presumption, those 2 guys who were mouthing off were not shy about letting it be known that they were former US Army, they claimed to be spec ops typical so typical of blowhards but more likely they were only former Rangers or Pathfinders. My point is that not everyone we train in our military is going to be on the morally correct side bad apples exist and those bad apples are very well trained and dangerous. Look at my tag line you can then deduce what I did for the military.
I’m with Johnny.... buy it when you can! It’s not getting any cheaper and your “appreciation” on food is better than a CD or bonds.
” Look at my tag line you can then deduce what I did for the military.”
Latin translator??
;)
If he was worth shootin once he’s worth shootin twice?
Stash a Bible and let God handle the rest.
Another smart plan for prepping is don’t post for the whole world to see just what you are doing.
Survival requires hard decisions. And the right decision will not necessarily be easy to live with. You can live with a hard decision, or you can die.
It’s not just about protecting your space & supplies. It’s you life. Your family member’s lives. The term “Kill or Be Killed” is meant to be taken literally.
These attackers are going kill me, rape and worse for my wife, probably for the kids also. Do you think I am going to then rescue them with the supplies that are needed to keep my wife and kids alive? If you want to live, you will know what to do.
Our veneer of “civilization” is very thin. It will disappear very quickly.
/johnny
I have cases of tomato juice and salsa in glass for that reason.
I don't discount the role that "former" military personnel can play in an SHTF scenario. The military is a microcosm of society as a whole. If they can go over to the dark side and work for organizations like TSA, they can go bad in a worst case scenario. To presume all will go bad, or even that all former military possess a ton of deadly skills and a willingness to use them is a bad start.
BTW- is that tagline French?
A wise man prepares. A fool lives for the moment without a thought of tomorrow.
I believe those statements to be biblically sound.
Kinda my view as well. I wonder if the moral questions will be as clear when the things get iffy.
” I wonder if the moral questions will be as clear when the things get iffy. “
There is a lot of ‘gray area’ in the moral defensibility of actions in extremis..
F’rinstance - if I hang a looter, should I relieve him of items he’s looted from others, or would that make me a looter, once removed??
LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!
Being a cook in the military taught me more management, more logistics, and more intel management than I learned in my former spooky careers as military and later as military contractor.
Spec ops eats at the dining facility when they are home. ;)
I'd rather be a cook. You get a lot of the same skill sets, including knife skills (3 months worth in civilian culinary school in my case), life-saving skills, life taking skills, logistics, and SPs drive you to the barracks and tuck you in when you've had enough beer for the evening.
I'm more proud of being a cook than an Old Crow.
/johnny
Think about it. If they are trying to kill you, do you really want to give them another chance? You might want to spend some more time on the range if necessary so as to kill them with one shot, not just wound them.
” life taking skills, “
Hey - SOS ain’t *that* bad!!!
;)
The longer you are alive, the higher the odds are that you will make it in the long haul.
I am working on the premise that surviving several weeks will jack up my long term odds a huge amount. But I am shooting for preparations of 3-6 months on as many fronts as is realistically practical.
Food and medicine stores for the longer haul. Water for prep for long term is very tough. Gotta be realistic about that, unless I win the lottery.
Bugging out? Multiple storage areas and destinations? These are impractical for most of us. So we store what we can and plan to protect it as best we can.
I am old enough that the realistic attitude for me is to stand my ground. Either I hold my ground or I make those that take it pay a heavy price. I think I am sufficiently equipped to do one or the other.
One final thought. The really scary thing is that in the event of a SHTF, it is just as likely that the forces of our government will as much a threat to our individual survival as our fellow citizens.
They had to beat that out of me the second enlistment. A lot had changed in 18 years. But I was an NCO, and I had to behave. Mostly. ;)
And actually, the life taking skills I was talking about were the slaughter and prepping critters while taking a government paycheck.
/johnny
Darn- Some people have all the luck! All I did was jump out of airplanes, freeze my bum off in weird places in the world, and eat worms and Opla. :)
It's all in .pdf form ready to download.
” It’s ‘Chipped beef and gravy on toast’. “
I’ll deny it if you quote me, but I actually liked the stuff, especially after a long mid-watch... ;)
(Even better if the Cook’s Helper on the line has figured out how to cook over-easy eggs to go with it.. ;))
It's not that hard... Maybe it's because I grew up in a family that builds water and sewage treatment plants for over 100 years, but we have local surface water, a water table that in the rainy season comes up to 2 feet, and we get about 30" a year here.
And it's not hard to make it safe.
Remove the stuff from it. Whatever it takes. Filter through gravel and sand to remove big chunks, drip it through charcoal to remove the bad flavors, add chlorine or idodine or boil it to kill the bitty nasties that are left.
Add air to it to make it palatable.
/johnny
Any attackers that you don’t kill will know your capabilities the next time they come, which they surely will, and possibly with a lot more friends. That would be the friends that they have told about you and what you must have that is so worth defending.
I started prepping right after the stock market crash in '08. The tomato paste was one of the early items I bought sometime in '09, so they had been in storage for over 2 years. They were casualties of my learning process and I won't buy any more tomato products in cans. I had only used about a third of the box, so obviously I didn't use them up fast enough to warrant buying an entire case. What I'll do now is use up the canned tomato products I have and save the stuff I'd put in glass. Thanks for the tips FRiends!
Past this old guy’s bedtime..
bttt til morning... ;)
I did 6 months in Alaska at a frigging Army camp (And I mean camp.... rustic for a zoomie). Cold enough.
I've eaten worms, cooked and raw, but never in uniform. That was just as a commercial cook.
But I can take apart any critter that God put on earth after it is dead, and maybe cook it. And my knives are sharp enough for any spec-op to borrow. I have good knife skills, and years of experience with very sharp ones.
I have no idea what Opla is, but I might well try it. 'Splain me. ;)
/johnny
I had a bumper crop of tomato’s last year. They are easy to grow. Keep the roots damp (not wet). If they’re in a large pot or 5 gallon bucket, make sure the pot stays relatively cool or the plant won’t produce and grow long and leggy. IIRC, we canned over 20 quarts of canned tomato’s and sauce last year.
Opla is Alpo, spelled backwards. During training, it was given to us as a "delicacy" of the indigenous personnel we were trying to win over.
Yeah, at times the training cadre had a sick sense of humor, but it actually wasn't bad.............
The pet food was the first thing I stocked.
Back when I had dogs, I wouldn't feed mine anything I wouldn't eat. Same with my catz. Cat food smells MUCH better than it tastes.
And I've eaten dog (Mexico and Korea) and cat (New Mexico), and most of God's fuzzy little creepy crawlies. And a lot of the slithering little barstids, too. Many of the feathered ones, and some of the skittering quadrapeds.
But I got that attitude from a) culinary school b) travel c) a mis-spent youth with friends in 'that crowd'. Not from the military.
Tactical skills are great and required, but even army guys can learn those.
Logistics... that's where things get won and lost.
/johnny
If we have a roman or byzantium style collapse, they are food that I will eat.
I'll cry. Grown man hiccup bawling. But I will eat them after I get over it.
/johnny
You need to date all cans with a magic marker .. Use First in First out. FIFO.
You need to use your stuff and replace to keep it rotated.
Stocking up and losing it to spoilage is money wasted.
As a Marine, I’ve eaten my far share of ‘bizarre’, but I have not, and would never eat my pets.
That’s why you prepare. Lived on the Gulf Coast my whole life, Hurricanes ect...
My dogs and cats (yep got both) get along, and will eat with each other, eat the same food if they have too.
Plus, my cats are almost good at watching for strangers as the dogs.
But, each will do what they think they have to.
“Latin translator??”
I believe it means, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Ouch! I have a lot of those now, thankfully, they’re fairly new yet. Been considering dehydrating them - now it seems that it may be necessary to do so.
“I came, I saw, I conquered.” Ah, U.S. Army Sniper School.
Thank-you for your service.
I'm definitely an Urban Prepper. I have limited space and my "plan" involves getting out of here if at all possible. I do have a place to go outside of town. But I started keeping things stocked up here back in '08 and it has really made a difference. I used to be one of those run-to-the-store-every-day types of people. Now I actually cook more often because I almost always have everything I need to make anything I want. Things like instant milk that I never kept before because I don't drink milk. Now if I need one cup for a recipe, I have it and I don't worry about wasting money on a bottle that goes bad and takes up space in my fridge. I stock up on meats on sale and freeze them, so I always have a selection of whatever I might be in the mood for. It's changed the way I shop and I think I eat better now than I did before.
I also started canning a couple of years ago and as with all my prep plans, it's been a learning process. I canned all sorts of things at first that I never ate. Now I know what I like and when the produce is available and how much I'll go through. So I don't bother with pickles or more than one or two cans of jam because I'll never eat it, but I put away tons of peaches and pears and green beans. (And from now on - tomato paste!)
That sounds like a good idea!
“Put the first 4 or 5 prominently on display will help cut down on the workload.”
Should these 4 or 5 all have DC addresses?
Just exercising the Death Panel clause.
“Do you kill them in cold blood, leave them to die slowly where they lie, or take them in to patch them up, using up your space, food and medical supplies, the keeping of which was pretty much the point behind shooting them in the first place?”
Joshua was told to ‘kill ‘em all’. Had he been obedient, there would not be the middle east problem that we have today. That is not ‘in cold blood’. Follow the instructions to Joshua, and have a backhoe at the ready.
“Two words: Hog Feed”
And allow only hogs to be left for food in the infested portions of Michigan.
Study up on obligate carnivore eaters and binge omnivore eaters.
Catz have to have vitamin K daily, or liver damage results quickly.
Dogs, eat when they can, and can go days without food. Their healthy diets are very different.
And yes, my catz are good at watching for strangers. I'm hard of hearing, but when the cat bails out of my lap and goes under the bed, I'm going to bet that someone knocked at the door, and I didn't hear it. Love 'em for that.
When I had catz and dogs together, they did great after day 3. Everyone had their pecking order. Catz slept on the big retriever in her crate instead of invading my foot space on the bed.
But I will eat them, if needed. And they are way down on the list after the family and the neighbors if things are only mildly harsh.
/johnny
That is very odd. I have never had issues with canned goods unless they got too hot or too cold at some point. Were they seriously out of date? I have opened cans that were truly past their date just to see how they held up and haven’t seen an issue. Rotating is really important as you know- seems we all have things that seem to move themselves to the back of the cupboard to hide though.
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