The news
about food production is terrible, and will only get worse. Expect grocery store prices to rise -
because that's the last thing the financial oligarchy can count on you to buy. Food is not an option.
Regular
listeners will know I've been preparing a food insurance stash for my family,
including 4 adults, two brothers-in-law and one good-as-family friend, for a
total of 7 people. Most of the others
are in denial, wonder if I'm crazy, and prepared to watch me do the work and
pay for it all. I'm officially
classified as poor, so that adds to the challenge. If I can do it, you can do it.
I started
off with a 3 month plan. Not knowing
when a crisis may develop - in a few months or three years from now - I decided
to begin with long-term storage. Of
course that was after a period of doubling up on regular purchases. Living in earth quake country, we've had a
decently stocked pantry, plus 5 gallon jugs of water, for years. But now I want to feel confidence we'll be
able to eat for at least 3 months. That
would give us time to adapt, and decide what to do next.
At this
point, we can't afford a couple of thousand dollars for commercially prepared
long-term food packages. And our
minimal budget means it will take several months just to get the basics. Here's how it's gone so far.
To keep it simple for my simple
brain, I assigned one food-type per month. December was
National Grain Month for our household, January for rice, February, beans.
Properly
packaged raw wheat, known as hard red
wheat berries, can last for 15 years of more. I headed out to a wine-making brew-it-yourself shop to buy 10 5
gallon pails, with tight fitting rubber lids.
These are food grade plastic, so I expect no nasty chemicals. A local supermarket bakery also gave me another
5 smaller buckets - the 4 gallon size.
On the
Net, I found a place to order two specialty items: Mylar bags, and oxygen
depleters. To fill 5 gallon buckets,
you want the 20" by 30" barrier bags. Twenty four of them cost 29.90.
You can store food in buckets without these bags - but eventually oxygen
gets into the food. Oxygen may cause
discoloration, and eventually deterioration of the food. For example, rice without a Mylar barrier
bag will be slightly off color, but still edible if stored cool and dry, after
5 years. With the bag, and a couple of
small packets called oxygen depleters, the rice should last at least 10
years. We don't know when the big need
will come.
Oxygen absorbers are harmless mixes of iron and salt
in a packet that looks like a sugar packet in a restaurant. I got a large bag, likely a hundred or more,
of the 750 cc size for 17.95. That will
do most of your storage needs. One
tip, before you cut open the plastic packaging, be sure and have an air-tight
quart sealing jar handy. These babies
start grabbing oxygen as soon as you open the packaging. They get hot, if just left out, and then
weaker to useless. Stuff them all in a
sealer jar or two. You will hear the
lids pop down tight within a couple of minutes. Then take out the two or three packets you need for every big
bucket.
National
Wheat Month did not go as planned. I
wanted a mix of the more expensive organic hard red wheat, and some cheaper
wheat as well. Note it doesn't matter
whether that is hard red winter wheat or hard red spring - they both make good
bread. You can get the good organic
stuff from any food co-op, with an advance order. It's not cheap though, at three dollars 33 cents a kilo in Canada
in early 2009. A 20 kilo bag, which
fills a 5 gallon bucket, can cost up to 66 dollars. I found it at 52 dollars at a granary out of town, but I could
only afford to buy three big bags, or 60 kilos - for just over $150, big money
for me. But that's months worth of top
quality bread, at a time when good bread is already over 4 dollars here in the
supermarkets. The price of wheat will
only go up.
My
fall-back was to find some #3 grade hard red wheat - that's the stuff used for animal feed. After many enquiries, to both bakeries and to a grain expert here
in town, all agreed that anyone can make decent bread out of so-called animal
feed. The only difference is the #3
grade missed the last stage of cleaning - you may need to use a sieve or
otherwise clean it out before using.
And you may need to add some wheat gluten to get the best rising
qualities when baking. I ordered two
pounds of gluten from the local food co-op for $14, and that should make
hundreds of loaves of bread. You can
make your own gluten - there's a You tube video showing how.
Now the
mystery: nobody in this city of grain shipping could find any animal feed
wheat. I wanted 3 25 kilo bags, which
would have cost only 22 dollars a bag.
The local co-op tried and failed.
I phoned the grain traders, they couldn't explain it. I presume the farmers ordered their feed
ahead, but so far, no one can explain to me why this very basic wheat item has
completely disappeared in our region.
If any of my listeners know, do tell.
Write me at ecoshock dot org.
Bottom
line: I don't have the amount of wheat I want yet.
Having
raw wheat without a mill is useless.
Yet the best grain mills are mucho dollars. As the financial markets crashed further, I wanted a backup which
could feed us. So I ordered the cheapo Back to Basics Grain Mill for $75
dollars from an American online source.
It arrived two weeks later. This
little hand grinder attaches to your counters with a clamp. The hopper is small. It takes some muscle power to get flour, but
it does produce flour, and can grind other products as well.
As the
Depression deepens, I am committing to baking bread for our family, likely
daily. I'll need a grain mill I can
stand to work with. I have ordered a "Wonder
Mill" - an electric model which claims to produce 100 pounds of grain
an hour. It costs $325 here in
Canada. I'll pick it up, to save
delivery costs. If the electric grid
goes down, I'll still have the Back to Basics Model. The Wonder Mill is the replacement for the "Whisper
Mill" which apparently went out of business. It's a counter-top model, and supposedly quieter than older
designs. However, all these electric
mill designs are very noisy. But you
only need to run them for a few minutes, for a week's supply of flour. I might add that fresh flour from wheat
berries contains a lot of extra healthy nutrients that do not survive in the
store-bought bread processing and shipping.
You get special nutrition from home-ground, home made bread.
So much
for Wheat month. On to rice January. This turned out to be much easier, once I'd
checked out about 8 different stores for the best prices on large 18 kilo, or
nearly 40 pound, bags of rice. Keep in
mind with rice, if the worst comes, you don't even have to cook it to eat
it. Put rice in a pot with water for at
least 6 hours and you can eat it without cooking. That is what makes rice the queen of survival foods.
One local
low-cost supermarket had a loss-leader on rice, 18 kilos of name-brand Thai
rice at $22 and 75 cents a bag. I
bought 6 bags, which filled 6 five gallon buckets. Now we have about 240 pounds of rice. Later that same week, I saw exactly the same rice priced at 38
dollars, in another branch of the same corporation. You must hunt like a hunting dog to find the good price and be
prepared to swoop in and get it.
With rice
and wheat installed in buckets, sealed up in Mylar, it became bean February. There are so many different kinds of beans
to choose from! And you need beans to add
necessary proteins and other goodies to your rice. Online research showed me that black beans are particularly
healthy. I bought two 10 kilogram bags
of black beans, leading to two 5 gallon buckets. It was 26 dollars a bag.
Beans are fairly cheap. I also
got another two 10 kilo bags of kidney beans, 10 kilos of garbanzo beans (also
known as chick peas), and 20 kilos of green lentils.
Lentils
are small but heavy. Ten kilos fills
only a 4 gallon bucket. It's best to
find the right size bucket, as you want as little air as possible at the
top. Air contains unwanted oxygen.
I will
also be using a pressure cooker to put pre-cooked beans into glass sealing
jars. If the power goes out for a
while, I can add these to my uncooked rice, and we'll survive.
Coming up
in March: national condiment month.
We still don't have all the spices, sugar, salt, baking powder, vinegar,
and other dried veggies that can turn survival food into really tasty
meals. We'll get that in March, now
that the basics are there.
To store
these buckets, I built a simple wood rack 8 feet long, two feet
wide. The two shelves is just a pieces
of half inch plywood cut in at the lumber store. The supports are made from the cheapest 2 x 4 stud material. Total cost including 8 lag screws and some 3
inch ardox nails: $46 dollars. Part of
the idea, and I may be a fanatic about this - is to avoid stacking buckets on
top of one another. Your insurance comes
from maintaining the air seal. If you
put a heavy bucket on the lid below, it may press down in the center, and
weaken the seal at the edges of the bucket below. This two shelf support system holds 3 levels of buckets, two
across. Plenty to feed a family for up
to a year.
After
March, I'll relax a bit on the food front, knowing we aren't going to
starve. We'll start adding more canned
food in April and May. Then in June the
real canning season begins with the berries.
We hope to can a lot of vegetables as they come in, to one liter or one
quart sealer jars. For that, listen to
my explanation of living with the pulse economy, in the Radio Ecoshock Show for
February 27th, 2009..
Overall,
I feel more relaxed, even as the economic and climate news gets worse.
At least we'll have some time to figure out other options, and we have
already saved a ton of money buying in bulk.
I doubt we'll ever see food prices so low again.
I'm also
pleased to tell you this approach to handling high food prices is catching
on. Various American newspapers have
reported house wives who are using the pantry as their store, rather than going
out and buying those ridiculously priced little packages, not to mention the
horrible fast food that drains our pocket books.
Last week
I ran into another local radio producer who lives in a semi-rural area close to
Vancouver. He said his family were so
enthused by suggestions on this program: they talked to neighbours about
it. Beyond neighbours, they also had a
network of families looking after developmentally challenged kids - the last
people who should suffer if the supermarket shelves are suddenly emptied in a
panic. Of if food inflation becomes
punitive. The result is an instant food
co-op. Ten families agreed to pool one
thousand dollars each to make a big bulk order. A local supermarket offered them food at cost plus a tiny percent
markup just for handling. Another 40
individuals and families have expressed interest in buying in. The group has arranged storage spots for
those without any cupboard space - and the whole thing has taken off. That's just another example of the
micro-networks of people I expect to spring up during this new
Depression. People who will work
together, rather than burrowing behind hidden walls with guns. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Who knows
the future? I'm Alex Smith, and I
don't. But I do feel better having food
insurance, just as we have health insurance and car insurance.