Chapter 2 – Food and Water Preps

 

The most commonly asked question of kids and adults at the end of the day is also the one we need most address in building up the bulk of our preps. What’s to eat? Food and water are vital for life. After air, there is nothing that we need to sustain us more than water. Without it, we are unlikely to live beyond a few days. In rare circumstances, an individual might make it a week without water. No one lives if they aren’t drinking fluids consistently.

 

1) Store some water. Water can be stored relatively easily. If you are able to shelter in place, you need to store at least one gallon of water per day per person. That can be as simple as having spring water delivered monthly to give you and your family a constantly renewing 30 day supply. It can be done through basic filtration and storage. You can also set up means of collection and purification around your home.

 

If you exhaust your stores of water, you have options, but you need to be planning for these contingencies early on. You start by collecting water. This can be rain water or ground water. If you live above an aquifer, you have a head start. A well is a great way to get drinking water without relying on the weather. But if you need to collect, that’s not the only thing you must do to have renewable water supplies.

 

2) Water purification. You’ll need basic survival skills to purify water you can collect. The first means of water purification is accomplished by heating the water to a high enough temperature that you kill any pathogen that may have taken up residence in the water. Your best bet is to bring the water to the boiling point. The second way to accomplish this is through tablets that can be added to your water and purify them. Stock your pantry with these tablets and you can convert any water you collect into drinkable water. Make sure you have manufacturer’s guidelines for the tablets so you know how much water each tablet will purify. You will want to make sure you filter your water to remove any debris before purifying it.

 

If your supply of these tablets is exhausted, you still have options to clean your water of bacteria and parasites. But you’re going to need to use a common household cleaner – bleach. As with the tablets, make sure any debris has been removed from the water before starting. The best bleach to use to purify your water will have no scents or perfumes added to it. Likewise, avoid chlorine bleach as chlorine can have toxic side effects if too much is ingested. Use eight drops of bleach in a gallon of water then the gallon should rest for a minimum of a half hour before you or anyone else drinks it.

 

If you have a bottle of bleach and you don’t happen to have a dropper, you can create your own by pouring a small amount of bleach into the cap of the bottle, tearing off a small piece of paper towel, and soaking most of the paper towel in the bleach. Then you can take it out of the cap and hold the piece of paper towel over your water and let two drops drip off the paper towel and into the water.

 

Water purification is the most basic and important survival skill you can learn. Second on the list is gathering and preparing food for consumption, when you are dealing with limited supplies. This involves hunting and trapping, knowing which nuts, seeds, berries and leaves are edible and which are poisonous. It also involves certain food preps to preserve foods for an extended period of time.

 

3) Food storage. Basic food preps begin with shelf stable consumables like dehydrated meats and fruits. Properly dried foods can last several months. In addition the grocery store around the corner has no shortage of options that will sit happily on your shelf without decomposing for months if not years. Many modern foods as shelf stable for long periods of time. Check out a box of breakfast cereal. Often the better if used by date is eighteen months to two years into the future. Likewise canned goods picked up in the grocery store will last for several months if not a couple of years.

 

Using these pre-prepared, pre-packaged options will not create an ideal clean eating diet. They will however stock your shelves with calories that can easily be consumed in the event of a disaster that disrupts your local grocery store’s supply chain.

 

4) Advanced food preservation techniques. Advanced preps provide greater variety and longer shelf lives, but require more work and technical knowledge. Curing, pickling and fermenting all involve the alteration of the composition of food to make it inhospitable to bacteria and other microbes. These are not arts, but are in fact science. Ignorance of proper procedures will result in illness at best.

 

Smoking is an ideal means of preserving meats. Smoking is a little bit curing, a little bit dehydration and a little bit of smoke.

 

Sugaring fruits that have been dried ensures a consistency of taste and longer shelf life. Additionally, the process of preserving fruit in jellies or jams is based on boiling the fruit with sugar to release pectin that creates a gel. That gel and the sugar suspended in it makes microbial infestation impossible.

 

Canning requires a high level of commitment to cleanliness. The resulting well preserved tastes last several months or years. Cans acquired at the grocery store have been heat treated to cook the food destroying any pathogens that may have been captured when the can was sealed.

 

If you have steady access to electricity, you can extend the shelf life of fresh meats, fish, dairy, fruits and vegetables by storing them properly in your refrigerator. This will buy you a week to a month. The best basic means of preserving food for the long term requires power. Freezing will preserve food well for months to a full year.

 

You can prepare for the loss of electricity for extended periods of time by employing cool/cold food storage outside your home. These would need to be constructed well in advance of a crisis, but outdoor refrigeration can be accomplished through the use of icehouses and root cellars. They won’t require power, which makes them very useful for emergency situations.

 

5) Grow your own. This is the apex food prep. Growing your own fruits and vegetables gives you steady access to healthful, nutrient dense food options. If you raise squash, beans and corn, you can even grow food that will provide you with a complete complement of protein. Not an easy feat without meat.

 

Additionally, growing food that will feed livestock whether rabbits or chickens or larger critters like pigs and cattle, will allow you access to more fresh food options. Chickens can provide eggs, cows give milk and while there is no shortage of hard work maintaining a farm, it provides the surest supply of food available.

 

6) Meal Replacements Options. Of course, this is the 21st Century and while we don’t have flying cars and other technological marvels, we do have an ever growing supply of food replacements. One of the most common is a product called Soylent, which can provide a complete supply of nutrients, vitamins, minerals and calories without the need to cook or prepare food. Sure it’s boring and bland, but Soylent has much to recommend it. First, you can reverse engineer it and obtain the ingredients to custom create a solution suited for your health goals. Second, it is completely shelf stable and takes up a tiny amount of space in comparison to traditional food options. Third, it is inexpensive per meal. The one thing you need to enjoy your Soylent is lots of water, which we already sorted out earlier in the chapter, and a healthful fat like olive oil, which stores rather well.

 

With food and water covered, we can progress to the next level of basic survival skills. Our ability to stay healthy and to deal with minor cuts, scrapes and bruises is an essential skill to survive.