Category: Food Storage & Cooking

Letter Re: An Oil Trader’s Observations on the Market Implications of War with Iraq

Jim, I’ve been trading crude oil for a few decades now, and in the last two sessions I’ve seen trading like I haven’t seen since Desert Storm, large unexplained up moves, $5.50 yesterday (6/5) and as I type this the market opened $6.00 higher. For a huge liquid market such as Crude Oil, these are large moves. I went to the Jerusalem Post to search out any open source tidbits/indicators and I stumbled upon this article. To buttress this, Gold is up $22 and Silver up 35 cents. The first piece of Israeli ordnance to hit Iranian soil could cause …


Four Letter Re: Healthy Harvest Food Storage and Emergency Supplies

Hello SurvivalBlog Readers: I just wanted to put in a plug for the newest SurvivalBlog sponsor, Healthy Harvest. I’ve been doing business with Jan for at least 10 years. The customer service is great. Jan has always been prompt and responsive in her communications. Her prices are competitive and her knowledge of products is excellent. If you live in the Southwest Washington/Northwest Oregon area, you can pick up the products in person at her warehouse. While Jan no longer has a retail store, she does offer occasional open warehouse days with food samples and discounts on product. She will let …


Budget Preparedness–Survival Isn’t About Stuff, It is About Skills

I often stress that a key to survival is not what you have, but rather what you know. (See my Precepts of Rawlesian Survivalist Philosophy web page.) In part, I wrote: Skills Beat Gadgets and Practicality Beats Style. The modern world is full of pundits, poseurs, and Mall Ninjas. Preparedness is not just about accumulating a pile of stuff. You need practical skills, and those only come with study, training, and practice. Any armchair survivalist can buy a set of stylish camouflage fatigues and an M4gery Carbine encrusted with umpteen accessories. Style points should not be mistaken for genuine skills …


Letter Re: The Importance of Storing Vitamin C

Humans along with a few other creatures do not produce Vitamin C. (We also do not make uricase [Urate oxidase] so are prone to Gout, a human disease). As such we must get Vitamin C from our diet. We have already discussed the need of vitamin C to prevent scurvy. Since it is water soluble and [unlike Vitamins A, D, E, and K, is] not fat soluble, we must take it continually. One important time that you need Vitamin C is in the case of trauma or infection. Animals that make their own Vitamin C increase production immensely in these …


Letter Re: An Inexpensive Source for Bulk Silica Gel Desiccant

Hi, James There is always a need for desiccants for various uses, be it food storage, caching, or other projects. Most who need such things already have a favorite supplier, but I’ll make another recommendation for the sake of saving a few bucks. Any local grocer, pet supply dealer or Big Box store carries silica-gel cat litter in amounts from 3 to 30 pounds: Tidy Cats Crystals is one such product, though there are many. A rounded tablespoon place in a square of mesh fabric purchased in a craft/hobby department (where it can be bought by the yard–think about the …


Letter Re: An Importer’s Insights on the Canned Tuna Market

Hi James I am in the import food business and one of the products that I sell is canned tuna. I know that a lot of survivalists have canned tuna in their larder and thought I might be able to provide some useful information. There are four species of tuna that are sold in cans; skipjack, tongol, yellowfin and albacore. Skipjack is the cheapest and Albacore the most expensive. I have been selling tuna for about 20 years and over the last two years, have seen the raw material prices double. Normally, prices go up and then back down, as …


Some Preparations that You Might Have Overlooked, by Tim G.

Some of the things I will mention might have been covered before, but it never hurts to mention them again. Some readers might have missed them. I can tell you from experience that people will tease you about your preparations, but when something happens they will come calling. My own brother borrowed my new-in-box chainsaw and my [12 VDC] jump starting [battery pack] to light up the area so that he could saw in hours of darkness. I told him to keep the jump pack charged. Several months later I got the chainsaw and jump pack back. The saw will …


Lacto-Fermentation–Enlisting Trillions of Microscopic Allies in Your Fight for Survival, by Gospel Guy

In a world with no power from the electrical grid how can perishable foods be stored? Drying and canning are common solutions but are not suitable for all foods. Canning in particular is troublesome due to its dependence on access to industrial supply chains for new lids or seals, the need for precise control of temperature and time, and its consumption of large amounts of energy. The easiest, cheapest and most overlooked method of food preservation is by lacto-fermentation which has the advantages of making the food more digestible and neither precise measurements nor exacting temperature controls are necessary. Lacto-fermentation …


Letter Re: Storing Treet Brand Canned Meat

Mr. Rawles, First, I would like to say thank you for honoring our Lord in your work. Thanks also, for writing your novel “Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse”. It is excellent. I have been recommending it to all of those I love. As I have been preparing for a while, I have been more often cooking my prep food and trying to adjust to that life style. I have been caching “Treet“. It is a canned [spiced luncheon] meat that has a consistency similar to bologna. I have been storing Treet rather than Spam, because it is supposed to keep …


Surviving During the Crisis (Translated from the Energie & Klima Blog)

JWR’s Introductory Note: The following is a re-post from the Energie & Klima Blog, which was kindly translated by SurvivalBlog reader Martyn B., a multi-lingual Danish ex-pat that lives in Spain . To read the original article in German, see: Überleben in der Krise Within the next two years, the price of oil could rise to $150 to $200 per barrel, analysts of the investment bank Goldman Sachs forecasted yesterday under the management of the famous chief analyst, Arjun N. Murti. According to the news agency Bloomberg, the cause is stated mainly as being that the supply of oil cannot …


Letter Re: Do-It-Yourself Meat Canning

Dear Jim, Here is some info that other like-minded survivalists might find useful. There was a recent article on television about beef and chicken being priced very reasonable due to the fact that the market is being flooded by farmers trying to unload their product before it costs them more to feed and ship than they can sell it for. I checked it out and yep they were right. Sam’s Club has boneless, skinless chicken breast and beef tip roast for less than 3 dollars a pound. I paid that same price for it a year ago. Anyway, considering this, …


Letter Re: Long Term Storage Food Vendors are Now Painfully Short on Inventory

Hi Jim, I would be interested in you analysis of this: Nitro-Pak, is not even accepting orders for #10 cans of food. Emergency Essentials, (www.BePrepared.com) is out of over half of their #10 can selection. Notice that [presently] you cannot order even wheat in cans or pails. Is this happening throughout the food storage industry? What is up with all this? – Paul D JWR Replies: The storage food industry is relatively small and simply doesn’t have the capacity to handle orders from more than 1% or 2% of the population. Because of the recent headlines about global food shortages …


Letter Re: Household Food Costs Escalating in England

Jim, It is not just USA that may is seeing food and fuel prices increase, here on the other side of the pond in the UK we are see the same. Problem here is that out government are trying to persuade us that inflation is low. Due to keep moving the goal posts and accounting methods. There is now a worldwide crisis over supplies of key crops such as corn, wheat and rice that has triggered food riots in some countries. In the UK it has brought the biggest rises in bills in a generation. A family which spent £100 …


Wars, and Rumors of War

I got a hoax press release on Friday about Chile declaring war on Peru. But meanwhile, there are lots of real wars gong on. Fierce fighting has broken out in Lebanon. And to top it off, crude oil spiked to an all-time high of $126 per barrel, in part because of tensions between Venezuela and Columbia. In the midst of all this war news, the ongoing global grain shortage crisis is likely to cause additional civil wars, and possibly cross-border wars. It is all too clear that we are living in very dangerous times. Let’s call them fragile times. In …


Is Survivalism Just “Unbounded Imagination of Anxiety”?

It never fails that when the mainstream media writes about survivalists, they try to lump us together with racists and tin foil hat whackos. Failing that (since the whackos represent such a miniscule fraction of “survivalists”), they will often trot out a psychologist or other “expert”, to try to convince the general public that preparedness is irrational and that it is evidence of some deep-seated paranoid delusion. This was the case in the recent BBC news article titled: “Do you need to stock up the bunker?”. The article focused on Barton Biggs, who is a well-known and relatively mainstream hedge …