Without Delay, Put Some Food Away
What you are going to do—this week—is to make you and your family a little more secure against food shortages and outages.
What you are going to get here is simple flexible advice— reasons—and encouragement.
This newsletter was originally going to follow the one on growing just a bit of food. But the global system is spasming right now. No one knows what’s going to happen, or how bad it will be. So you are going to get food on hand first; after that you’ll take some simple steps to expand your food production.
The Global System is Spasming?
Yep. The globalized world is hugely complex and leaderless. “Leaderless” isn’t a jab at anybody--no one leads it because no one can lead it because no one can understand it. It’s too interwoven and hypercomplex. It’s also highly vulnerable. And its undergoing spasms right now, first over Covid and now over Ukraine. No one knows how it will shake out.
(By the way, this is one reason for the Steader principle of keeping things localized and on a human scale. Political and economic systems that have not been humaniformed are dangerous.)
Putting some food away is the right precaution to take for likely, possible, and small chance scenarios that could be happening soon.
Likely – intermittent random food shortages and even higher food prices.
Possible - longer or more severe food shortages. Severe recession.
Small chance - catastrophic economic collapse. Crippling unprecedented cyber attacks. WW3. Nuclear exchange. Here’s where having uncontrollable and unpredictable giant world systems under stress comes in. None of these are all that likely—we hope—but even a small chance means taking some basic precautions. (John Robb can help you understand why these are risks).
But just take basic precautions. No need to signal how virtuous you are at getting ready. Steading isn’t ideological. Don’t hyperspecialize for just one possible future.
Pick one of the Following that You Aren’t Doing, and Do It
All you need to do is pick one of the following that you aren’t already doing, and do it. Or do them all, they are all easy.
Get some sacks of rice and beans.
Be aware of simple water purification methods.
Make jerky.
Make tallow.
If you had to pick just one, I’d probably pick making tallow. See why below. Or maybe rice and beans. But read down the list below and see what grabs you. And picking just one is fine! Remember the steader principle that a little bit is good enough. Do something now, maybe next week you will be inspired to do something more,
Consider making your choice a discussion with your family or friends. Chores turn into fun when the people you love are involved. Or you might discover that different options grab different folks, you agree to divide and conquer, and now you have built a little mini-community of mutual support. That’s another steader principle: Better together. When you kick around these ideas, if something different comes up that your little handful of people like instead, do that.
Get Sacks of Rice and Beans
Rice and beans are cheap.
By themselves they can sustain life for long periods of time. In a pinch you can get by on nothing but for several months.
They are easy to cook—boil in water, wait. We love the smell of beans a-cookin’.
And they are already part of most people’s diet, so you can always have a reserve on hand without consciously having to rotate your supply. Have several large bags, just buy a new bag whenever you finish an old one.
They are also easy to store. In most areas that aren’t very humid and warm, they will keep for several months just in their bags as bought. In very humid areas, store in a container with some dessicant or use an airtight storage solution.
Yes, there are awesome storage solutions out there. Try them out if you want to. But get the beans and rice now. And on the steader principle that good enough is good enough, just keeping them in a bag or any closed container will usually do. Buckets, tupperware, containers of all shapes and sizes, stacked in the corner somewhere or slid under your bed—it’s all workable.
We suggest having salt on hand too.
There are more nutritious options out there, but this works.
Water supply
In all but the small chance scenarios, you should have water. Which is good, because storing lots of water is hard. If you can, great! But water occurs naturally—they tell us it falls from the sky. Your main challenge might just be sanitizing it.
You can purchase filter systems or you can just be familiar with the DIY methods. The DIY methods are things you can basically improvise if you have the information on how. It can be a print out, a download to your pc or kindle, or something you jot down. (Of course in all but the most catastrophic scenarios, phone and internet will mostly still work). Your DIY methods are bleaching, improvising water filters, natural UV, and boiling (including solar boiling).
Bleach water. Basically, you just need to know the proportions of bleach to water and how long to let it sit. Make sure you have bleach on hand but a little bit of bleach goes a long way. (Don’t overdo the bleach). We’d suggest proportions here but it will stick in your mind better if you take 30 seconds and find the info yourself.
DIY water filters. Plenty of places have instructions for how to filter water. Look up more detailed instructions, but here are the basics. Get a container with a hole in the bottom, an upside down 2-liter plastic bottle or a container you punched a hole in. Wad some cloth over the hole to keep your filter materials from running out the hole. Put a layer of crushed charcoal over the cloth (its easy to make, just burn something then put the fire out). Then dirt and grass layers, or something else to filter out large particles, like more cloth. More sophisticated versions can have gravel and other layers. 10 minutes of research will tell you what you need to know. Our neighbor around the corner recommends this set up, gravel optional.
Natural UV sterilization. Put water in a clear closed container. Leave it outside in direct sunlight for several hours. If the water is pretty dirty we assume you’d want to filter it enough first that it would be clear—but we don’t know, we haven’t tried it with muddy water yet. Maybe we will - watch this space.
Boil water. Give it a few minutes of roiling boil. But what if the power goes out, you say? Make a solar oven. You can buy a pricy system and you can also get very precise instructions for free with a little search. Either way will probably work great. But you can improvise something yourself that works good enough. The basic idea is that you use shiny aluminum on a frame or on cardboard—or else use mirrors if you have them—to reflect sunlight onto a dark pot or jar. Thus heating up the dark pot or jar. The more aluminum panels or mirrors you have arrayed around the better. Periodically adjusting your set up as the sun moves will get you better results. But even a kludgy mediocre set up should let you sterilize water over a several hour period. Some friends of ours run a ranch down south. They have a big black container they keep water in for their cattle and in the summer it can get close to boiling without any reflected sunlight at all.
For extra fun, play around with a couple of these techniques with your kids or your friends. People are interested in this kind of stuff, its fun to share.
Beef Jerky
If you find cheap cuts of beef, grab a bunch and make jerky.
There are lots of recipes and methods, and some of those will be great. But you can get by with just cutting up the stuff and putting it on low heat.
A good solar or electric food dehydrator is a great long-term purchase. But for now an oven can work. Put it on its lowest setting and leave the door cracked if the lowest setting is still too warm. Normal temperatures are around 160 F. But this is a forgiving process, you don’t have to be exact. Even the outdoors may work. People used to jerk beef just by hanging it outside in the sun after all. This will take a while. (They do say that beef jerked at even lower temperatures, under 115 F, preserves some of the vitamins. We have not verified).
We’ve tried various thicknesses—thicker takes longer, but can still work. (The thickest we’ve done is about ¾” and that felt like we were pushing it.) If your thicknesses are uneven, no worries, just leave the thicker stuff drying longer. Jerky is ‘done’ when its no longer red in the middle and not bendy. Don’t worry if you don’t get it exactly right.
Cutting out fat means it can store longer at room temperature. But if you don’t cut out smaller bits of fat, no worries, just pat the jerky a couple of times with paper towels during the drying process to get the grease off.
We’ve stored jerky made this way (including with small bits of fat) at room temperature for a month or two. Longer in the fridge and even longer in the freezer.
We’ve also made hamburger jerky this way. A fancy ground meat jerky extruder gives you better results—but we just patted by hand and it worked out OK.
In your worst case scenarios where the power goes out, the jerky you take out of your fridge and your freezer will last longer than thawing meat from the same. Plus your comfort level with the process means you’ll probably be able to do something with the thawing stuff.
Try it. It’s a lot easier and more forgiving than you think.
Making tallow
Tallow is the number one steader recommendation for food to put away without delay.
It stores surprisingly well, is cheap, is healthy, and is invaluable when people start going hungry.
Here’s how you make it. Get beef fat (or sheep), chop it up, cook for awhile over low heat, pour off the melted stuff through a filter (cloth usually). The melted stuff is your tallow. It will become solid again as it cools. At room temperature, its about like butter, maybe a bit less soft.
Tip: the stuff that’s left after you pour the fat off is a good keto crouton. We’ve also had it fried up with shrimp—delicious! Dogs love it, and so do poultry. But this time we tried the weird experiment of blending it up. It came out like whipped butter.
We made a batch of barley bread substituting it for butter or tallow. Good!
That’s the basic method for rendering tallow. There are plenty of detailed walk-thoughs out there. We like this one, but likely any of them will do.
One of the steader goals is to demystify the process of doing a lot of these normal, simple, traditional things. You don’t need to be an expert to do simple human things and take care of simple human needs. That’s why we are reducing tallow making to the basics. We’ve tried lots of different ways and they all worked at least OK. If you do larger chunks, it will take longer. Smaller chunks means more work cutting. More work trimming out all meat before hand means the tallow you make will store longer. Otherwise you’ll get a brown clear liquid collect underneath your tallow that will sometimes go bad after a couple of months if the tallow is left at room temperature. Cooking at higher temps (but probably not to exceed around the boiling temperature of water) means it goes faster but you have to stir more. It’s an extremely forgiving process.
Tallow is healthy fat. You want some on hand. We recently read a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) sermon that gave one man’s account of the hungry times in Germany at the end of WWII. He said
May I share with you some experiences that I, along with millions of other Europeans, had in the days of devastation, total destruction, and starvation that became a reality for so many survivors of World War II. These experiences helped me to recognize and appreciate the basic necessities of life and to separate true needs from false wants. Since my conversion and because of my World War II experiences, I now have a deep appreciation for the revealed plan of [storing food].
Frequently I am asked, “What were the most valuable items in the days of starvation in Germany?” The answer is difficult to believe, because some of the experiences we had seem to be totally illogical and contrary to human nature. The items of highest value were tobacco and alcohol, because people who live in fear and despair, who have not learned principles of self-control, tend to need in times of panic some drug to escape the dreadful awareness of reality. I have seen people give their last loaf of bread and their last meager supply of potatoes just to obtain a bottle of brandy. How fortunate we are as members of the Church that we learn to develop a feeling for the true values of life and the necessity of self-control, so that in times of need there will be no panic, but we will be prepared.
As for what we needed, the food item we relied on most was vegetable oil. With a bottle of vegetable oil, one could acquire nearly every other desirable item. It had such value that with a quart of vegetable oil one could probably trade for three bushels of apples or three hundred pounds of potatoes. Vegetable oil has a high calorie content, is easy to transport, and in cooking can give a tasty flavor to all kinds of food items that one would not normally consider as food—wild flowers, wild plants, and roots from shrubs and trees. For me and my family, a high-quality vegetable oil has the highest priority in our food storage, both in times of daily use and for emergency usage. When vegetable oil is well-packed and stored appropriately, it has a long storage life without the necessity of refrigeration. We found ours to be in very good condition after twenty years of storage, but circumstances may vary in different countries and with different supplies.
We do not recommend human consumption of vegetable oil or other industrial products. But the point remains. Fat is wonderful for hungry people. We recall reading years ago one anthropologist’s account of all the work he and some locals went to to kill a water buffalo, because they had heard it was fat. And how crushed they were when it turned out to be lean.
Try eating beans and rice and salt with and without fat. We have done it. Without fat, it tastes like diet food. With fat, it tastes rich and savory.
Tallow stores well. We’ve had tallow sit out on our counter, no seal, some brownish liquid on the bottom, that lasted for a month or two. (We don’t advise this but after a bit on the edges showed signs of going bad, once one of use decided to demonstrate his manly fortitude and/or lack of sense by scraping off the edges and eating the rest. Did he get the just punishment of his folly? He did not. Nothing bad happened). Tallow will of course last longer in the fridge and even longer in the freezer (the tallow that lasted a month or two on the counter had been in the fridge for a few months first).
Tip: pour your melted tallow into a cookie pan. When it cools, cut it into squares and store it in the freezer or fridge that way. If you get the squares the right size, they are very convenient for just tossing one into the pan or the pot when you are cooking something.
But if you are careful about trimming the meat, filtering the tallow, and put the tallow in a container with a good seal, it should last for many months at room temperature. Here’s the batch we just put up, now sitting on a pantry shelf. It’s not canned, but we did sterilize the jars first. We expect it will be good for a good long while.
First thing, of course, is you need to get the fat. Sometimes butchers at grocery stores will sell you some. But an independent butcher or a slaughterhouse is going to be cheaper )often free). Or a local farmer who sells animals. They will also get you fat in quantity. What this means is this is a great opportunity to do it together with friends and family. Put it out on facebook or other social media and see if there is anybody local who has some tips or who wants to go in on making the tallow with you. Used this way, technology makes your life more human, not less.
Or if that’s too much for you, stuff your freezer with butter. Butter should also work for long-term storage at room temperature in a sterile closed container, but I’d pick one small jar to try it on first.
We do our tallow the way we do rice and beans. We have a lot on hand and at some point, well before we run out, we do a new batch. The amount we have on hand varies, but we always have some.
Pick one on the list and do it. Your friends and family are lucky to have you. And you are lucky to have the wisdom and skill that you do.