Survival Food Storage - Bear Ridge Project

[AZ Prepper]

Some great articles from Bear Ridge Project... Enjoy!

Survival Food Storage - Why Do It
http://www.bearridgeproject.com/2008/03/survival-food-storage-why-do-it.html

Survival Food Storage

The growing economic and social tensions that the world is currently experiencing have drawn more and more people into the survival lifestyle. This way of living conducts your resources towards directly protecting and providing for your family rather than relying on external paid surrogates to feed and secure those closest to you. The survivalist understands that in a disaster situation security and relief are best served by the survivalist, not some faceless bureaucracy whose agenda may be in conflict with your beliefs and freedoms.

The preparation for safeguarding and providing for your family in uncertain times may seem like a daunting task. There are many blogs out there that address survivalism issues but most focus on the sexier aspect of preparation which revolve around guns and ammunition. Admittedly guns are the fun part and deserves great consideration but as far as survival goes you must start with the most basic of items. If you prioritize the basics of life and move from there it helps clear the path.

The goal of the survivalist is to protect and provide for the family under all possible situations. The worst outcome for a survivalist is being forced into a refugee situation where you are no longer in control of your life. Freedom from the corporate/government machine is only realized with a sound survival plan that focuses on the basics.

To this end this series of articles will explore the most basic of survival necessities, food. More directly why, how and where to store survival food supplies. We will look into how much food is needed for various survival scenarios; where and how to store your supplies; the practical shelf life of stored items; how to prepare the survival stocks and most importantly what will it cost and how to quietly acquire them.

Let's look at three possible scenarios where adequate food storage is critical to your families existence and how having adequate food supplies keeps you out of the "evacuation" centers and free of direct state control.

Wildfire

A dry spring and sweltering summer have left the forests around your suburb a tinderbox ready to blaze with the smallest spark. Then one evening you smell smoke and get the call every home owner dreads. "This is the reverse 911 emergency operator. We are ordering a mandatory evacuation for your area due to wild fires. Please gather your family and immediately report to the **** Cheney High School for processing. Disobeying this evacuation order is a criminal offense punishable with a one year prison sentence. Thank you for your cooperation"

Being confined to a high school gymnasium for two weeks doesn't exactly sit well so you pack the bug out bags and camping gear in the truck and head up state for a two week "vacation". You carry with you three weeks worth of energy dense foods that will allow a comfortable stay squatting at a friends farm or distant state park.

With a tank of gas and proper food stores your options are open and any option beats incarceration at the local evacuation center through the duration of the crisis. You maintain control of your life, you are not surrendering your families safety to the local authorities. When the danger passes you return home.

Flu Pandemic

The killer flu is finally here spreading from the population dense cities into the countryside at a lethal pace. Mortality rate is high and a mandatory 24/7 curfew is enacted till further notice to try and get in front of the death wave. No one except critical infrastructure workers outside, period. Bodies should be deposited on the roadside for collection and emergency rations will be distributed to your door as needed by trained contract personnel provided by Kellogg-Brown & Root. To request a food delivery call the local 211 operator. It will be necessary, to prevent hoarding, for you to answer some question regarding your family and household status, you will be billed accordingly.

When the "delivery boy" shows up the first thing they will do is confirm the given answers and confiscate all firearms, you will be assured return of your weapons upon restoration of normal activities. It's for public safety you are told.

To maintain autonomy from the system it would be really helpful to have at least a three month supply of rotated day to day food stocks. This is just a big stock of your everyday eating food. In this scenario the power stays on so however you prepare your foods today would not change. Your stored survival foods will keep you out of the system, armed and independent.

Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP)

With the collapse of the United States economy the rest of the world descends into chaos as countries fight for the dwindling resources. One conflict leads to another and it ends with China detonating one 20 megaton nuclear device at an altitude of 250 miles above Kansas. The resulting EMP covers continental North America and fries all integrated circuits within a 1400 mile radius. China's assumption is that the United States will be to busy trying to restore order to busy itself in the worlds affairs.

Unless they are properly shielded, after an EMP attack, the control mechanisms of corporate institutions and the state will be rendered ineffective which of course brings quick anarchy and loss of freedoms to the unprepared. All communications and commerce systems will be unusable; power is off, phone won't work, gas won't pump and credit/debit cards are worthless ice scrapers. All are rendered equal.

This is the worst possible scenario. Stores will be looted empty within hours and with no method of communicating with the people, panic will rule. You have the complete chaos of a global disaster without any population die-off to thin the starving heard. Wal-Mart will quickly be established as the distribution centers for a starving public where food will be handed out after registration of family and surrendering of weapons. All able bodied people will be conscripted into work units and transported to the great corporate farms to grow the necessary food for survival. Families will be broken up and the Constitution becomes a distant memory.

You hunker down in your dark, cold house with your guns and try to ride out the initial chaos. In this scenario having a multi year survival stock of food and seeds would be absolutely necessary. The only way to protect your arsenal is to stay out of the system and the only way to stay out of the system is to have an adequate food supply.

Note the importance of maintaining a proper survival food stock in each of the above disaster scenarios. Now think about how a small emergency situation...something as small as extended unemployment...would affect your family and how long term food storage would be beneficial.

[AZ Prepper]

Survival Food Storage - Three Plans
http://www.bearridgeproject.com/2008/03/survival-food-storage-three-plans.html


The last article in this series focused on why you should store survival foods. Today we will look at three essential stockpile plans and how they should be used to meet your daily nutritional needs. The plans are prepared from personal experience and represent the nutritional requirements for one person. They should be used as a reference guide for planning your survival stocks, not a blueprint.

Survival food plans are there to keep you and your family alive and out of refugee status during a crisis event or large socio political shift. They exist to help during transitional times not as permanent replacements for traditional food gathering methods. It would be impossible to store enough prepared food to maintain your family for the rest of your existence.

Crisis situations are as varied and complex as your diet. It would be difficult to plan for every potential contingency, all you can do is prepare and attempt to cover as many bases as possible. To that end I would recommend three distinct storage plans to address the varied threats faced by families in todays world. Your survival storage plan should include a 3 week stock, 3 month stock and a 3 year stock.

Nutritional Requirements

Survival situations sometimes require a sacrifice of nutritional value and calories in your food choices. But with careful planning most of the basic needs can be met. As a rule of thumb your caloric intake should not fall below 1600 per day if you want to function with any degree of normalcy. Calorie requirements, as with all things, vary depending on the person and circumstances but 1600 per day is a good general baseline to keep you alive.

3 Week Stock

This grab and go kit is not meant to please your gastro senses, it is meant to keep you alive and out of the refugee system until you can return home.

In a disaster situation such as flooding or wildfires it may be necessary to leave the protection of the home. In such a case it would be prudent to have at least 3 weeks of survival food supplies per person that can go with you. This may sound like a tremendous amount of food but with careful planning the stores will easily fit in a duffel bag or back pack.

I use Mainstay 3600 Emergency Food Rations, they taste like vanilla/lemon cookie dough. These foil wrapped packs are designed for use on lifeboats. One pack contains nine 400 calorie bricks, a case of 10 packs will run you about seventy five dollars. They have at least a five year shelf like and the case is the size of a small shoe box. I keep a case in the truck and one in my partners jeep. There are also two 3 week kits near the back door for grab and go convenience. Now of course food is not the only item in the pack but it is the topic of this discussion.

Many people have been sold on the idea of a seventy two hour bug-out-bag or kit. I personally feel that this is a dangerous plan and creates a false sense of security. Seventy two hours may be enough time to remove yourself from a crisis situation but after that period you are again subject to the relief systems you are trying to avoid. For the space of a shoe box you can maintain at least 3 weeks of emergency food stocks.

If forced to leave your house carry enough supplies to hold you until it is safe to return. The 3 week stock is only used for emergency situations where you are forced to leave your home.

3 Month Stock

The second stocking plan involves daily foods that your family already consumes, just a three month supply of them.

In any grid up emergency such as a health crisis or extreme civil unrest the safest place to be is at home. The absolute ideal would be at home with a huge supply of food and methods of preparation. If you can survive on your own without external intervention your odds of weathering the triggering event greatly increase.

It should be clear that McDonald's every evening is not what we are talking about here. These should be conventionally prepared meals with high nutritional value. Since this scenario assumes that the grid will be up, or at least mostly up, frozen and canned foods are acceptable. The advantages are two fold.

First, you already know how to prepare these foods. There is not the trial and error learning curve associated with first time meals. You will have enough to worry about without needing to learn new skills.

Second, disruption to the family is minimized if common meals are served. You know what your family likes, common meals will comfort and reassure them during the difficult time. If you are serving someones favorite meal it gives them something to look forward to. It brightens their day rather than the drudgery of beans and rice every evening.

Building this store is really quite simple. Just buy a couple of extra items each time you do the shopping, try to move towards items with longer shelf life. You will need a pantry area where food can easily be organized for rotational purposes. First in, first out. Watch expiration dates but remember the these are recommended dates, not drop dead dates, do not waste the food.

Special attention needs to be paid to bread and other time sensitive foods. Rather than attempting to secure extra bread, buy the raw ingredients and learn bread making. Or even better purchase an inexpensive bread maker and pick up a few packs every week. Remember powered milk and eggs, buy a good stock of them for storage, don't worry about rotation of these items. Don't forget spices.

Three months is the minimum for this survival plan. You want to ride out the disruption with zero external needs until either thing return to normal or additional step are necessary to secure your family. In this case additional steps refer to a survival garden which would need at least three months to mature. In reality you should build this food store to the largest size that can be physically supported at your home.

Not only is this plan an easy solution for grid up crisis, it also serves as a safety net for times of unemployment or economic hardships.

3 Year Stock

This is your fall back plan and consists of life sustaining food items that can be stored for at least twenty years. This is not a food store that you use except in dire long term emergencies. You build it and bury it.

A global disaster or unprecedented trigger event may make it necessary to leave your comfortable, well stocked home and seek the protection of your retreat cabin. With proper planning being removed from the consumer supply line will not be a problem.

You should plan on building an emergency three year survival storage plan based around dried wheat, rice and various beans. Inexpensive dried grain products are placed in five gallon bucket outfitted with omega lids (screw-on resealable lids). Stored properly this stock can last twenty to thirty years making it the ultimate insurance plan against disaster.

One five gallon bucket holds eighty cups of dried grains. We will go into how much of each grain fills a bucket, how much it costs and where to purchase it in the next article. A one year supply of food for one person consists of roughly fifteen buckets. For one person you will need to store forty five buckets to get to three years. That may sound like a tremendous amount of storage room but a single bucket has a diameter of a little under twelve inches and is about 18 inches high with the omega lid. So forty five buckets require fifteen square foot of floor space and about five foot of head room stacked three high. The buckets should be properly labeled with contents and date stored.

If your family is larger you may consider using fifty five gallon drums to store your food stocks. I would recommend against this. Here's why, if one of your five gallon buckets cracks and starts to rot the products inside you will only lose the five gallons. But if that same rot started growing in a larger container you would lose fifty five gallons of food stocks. Since you will not be checking the contents of the containers after they are stored you will not know if the food has spoiled until it is needed. A five gallon loss is easier than fifty five gallons to weather.

Plus five gallon buckets are easily transported if you needed to relocate your supplies. Additionally you would only need to unearth the food stores required rather than digging up the entire stock. This protects the remaining survival stores.

The buckets will need to be wrapped in protective plastic trash bags or sheeting and placed in a location that is secure, dry and cool. The cooler the temperatures the better, I would recommend an underground storage chamber like a deep root cellar or lined and covered trench. Cool temperatures are necessary to maximize nutritional retention and storage life. If your basement is cool and dry it would also work very well. Freezing is not a problem for dried grains.

Special consideration needs to be paid to preparation. You will need a large crock pot to cook and reconstitute the grains as well as a hearty food mill to grind the wheat and other products. Preparation will be on a wood stove or solar oven. Baking soda is also a necessity to reconstitute beans that have been stored for five or more years.

A three year supply of staple food items will give you the confidence necessary to forge forward in life, not linger in the refugee camps waiting for handouts after a disaster.

Careful planning will allow you and your family to weather the chaos related to social upheaval or natural disaster. Take solace in knowing that what ever happens you are well prepared with your 3 week, 3 month and 3 year stock of emergency food supplies.

[AZ Prepper]

Food Storage - Real Numbers
http://www.bearridgeproject.com/2008/07/food-storage-real-numbers.html




How much food do I need for my family and what will it cost.

The picture to the left represents one years worth of food for one person. It may seem like a lot but think about how much food you consume in a years time. There are 15 five gallon buckets holding a variety of dried foods that will provide a baseline 1800 calorie per day diet.

This diet will be supplemented with fresh game provided by hunting and fishing...note the .22 and fishing gear. As well as hunting/field dressing manuals, beer brewing/wine making equipment, chainsaw to supply the wood stove and 30 twelve packs of ramen noodles although not all are shown. Food cost of roughly $300 all gathered at WalMart.

Note that there are no expensive #10 cans of various high end survival preps. For your basic bulk needs #10 cans are not cost effective. When you start to refine and specialize the food stocks then #10 cans of dried fruits, powdered cheese and possibly powdered eggs are warranted but the basics should be purchased first and from local grocery supplier. These are foods that need colorful menu planning and preparation experience to be fully appreciated.

I have a couple of years of food already stored with plenty of spices and bullets. This batch will be added to the existing supplies and work will begin on the next set of buckets. Each additional set of 15 I add different types of products increasing the variety of foods available. On the buckets that are being actively consumed I use omega lids. These are fancy screw top lids that are resealable. If you can afford it all your buckets could be outfitted with these handy items. Be sure to label you buckets on the top and side with the product and date stored.

One five gallon bucket holds 80 cups of dry stock.

How many many cups of each product are needed yearly to meet the 1800 calorie daily baseline.

For instance you decided that you need one cup of white rice per day either at lunch or dinner, this is 650 calories or about 1/3 of your daily intake. It works out to roughly 365 cups or 4.5 five gallon buckets worth of white rice. Now round the amount up to 5 five gallon buckets. Simple

Decide what dry products your family will eat and how many cups a day are needed. Once you have the number of cups just convert it into buckets. I usually round up, this give me some padding and possibly product to barter with.

How many pounds of each dry product are needed to fill a five gallon bucket.

These numbers are very close to true but might vary slightly depending on the brand and size of the product being stored.

Brown Rice
32 pounds per five gallon bucket
670 calories per dry cup

White Rice
3o pounds per five gallon bucket
650 calories per dry cup

Pinto Beans
32 pounds per five gallon bucket
620 calories per dry cup

Elbow Macaroni Small
21 pounds per five gallon bucket
420 calories per dry cup

Quaker Oats
12 pounds per five gallon bucket
300 calories per dry cup

Lima Beans Large
30 pounds per five gallon bucket
600 calories per dry cup

Black Beans
32 pounds per five gallon bucket
620 calories per dry cup

Pancake Mix
20 pounds per five gallon bucket
420 calories per dry cup (6 midsized pancakes)

Ramen Noodles
3 twelve packs taped together store like one 5 gallons bucket
380 calories per brick

White Flour (with 26 packs yeast)
20 - 25 pounds per five gallon bucket (26 loafs at 14 slices per loaf is 364 slices)
440 calories per 4 slices

Note that if you go to WalMart and buy 63 pounds of elbow macaroni the clerks will ask questions. Have a clever lie ready before hand. I tell them I am preparing meals at a church camp...they smile and nod approvingly.

I am not giving exact costs because they vary regionally and are increasing rapidly.

[Blueyes49]

Please help-I cannot use Mainstay 3600 Emergency Food Rations for my bug-out bag, because, I can't eat it (I am truly gluten sensitive, which means no flour at all, except for alternative flours). Do you know of any substitutes out there?

[AZ Prepper]

Instead of those food rations, why not just put in some PowerBars, Clif Bars or something else like those? If those are not gluten free (which they probably aren't), find something that is. And if you can't find anything, there's gotta be some recipes out there to make your own. I'm sure Chef Tess here on this forum has a recipe... maybe she'll chime in.

I don't know of any substitutes out there. But whatever you find, please let us know so that the next person in your same situation will have some options. Good luck!

[Blueyes49]

Thanks, AZ. I'm a pretty good cook, so I think I can put something together, and make it nutritious. The only thing I'm up against is the shelf life of my own bars, etc.

I'm going to check out Life Tabs, and see if they make sense for my situation also.

[Blueyes49]

I found food bars at world pantry that are non-gluten, supposedly good-tasting, and will last up to one year (I'll get one and report back). If I purchased these, I would seal them in plastic bags with my sealer, and place an oxygen absorber in the bag before sealing, just for good measure. And hide them from my teenager.

[72HourPlan]

Here is one Gluten Free bar you might consider, stored properly you could expect a 1 year shelf life I think.
http://www.freshharvestproducts.com/

I used to eat "brown rice energy bars" about 20 years ago from a company in California, but for the life of me I cannot remember the product or the company, I had my ski parka choc-full of those rice bars, and when I stopped skiing I stopped buying them.. :-( I will keep thinking and maybe remember.

[72HourPlan]

Also just found :
http://www.larabar.com/about/special-diets

and a Google search for "Gluten Free Energy Bars" returned several promising results.