Food on shelves

[Matthew]

My 'prepping' knowledge is next to none but I would assume that if I were to be stocking up on food and so on then it would be heavy on things such as tinned fish/meat because they dont need cooking and have a lot of protein along with dried foods such as pulses and grains. Also go for a lot of vitamin supplements as well.

Pickled stuff strikes me as being perhaps the survival food of the post-fall i.e once you are trying to achieve your own self-suffiency without recourse to modern storage methods. You might store the raw materials for the pickling process itself in terms of jars and so on but beyond that it does seem a little odd.

[edwin]

Yes, pickling does seem post-fall when you have a surplus that has to be eaten the rest of the year. waste in storage accounts for a huge proportion of the world's food supply today. I wonder if the habit of doing it amongst preppers isn't a sort of family hangover from what their grandparents did and thus has a virtue of its own. Sort of preparing the homestead more than practical prepping.

I can remember salting runner beans and storing them in Kilner Jars with my parents but the amount of salt used would be very extravagant PA.

Mind you it does amuse me to see what some stuff is considered essential for the PA food economy with its inevitable inclusion of food from the Shopping mall culture.

[Matthew]

Nov 1, 2012 10:11:26 GMT edwin said:

I can remember salting runner beans and storing them in Kilner Jars with my parents but the amount of salt used would be very extravagant PA.

.

And here in lays the rub in terms of what I see as being REAL prepping. Access to both coal and salt would be, in my opinion, the two real key elements to any sort of long term recovery from a SHTF senario in the UK and by default the rest of the world really.

I still think coal would be king in a pandemic aftermath senario but salt would have a massive role to play as well.

[davidc]

There's a couple of things relevant here:
1) inclusion of foods from the current culture - Some people adapt quickly to change but some don't. If you are stocking to maintain your life rather than for pure survival then a buffer that allows time for adaptation is extremely useful for maintenance of morale. That is especially true for children. the old adage, 'people will eat anything if they are hungry enough' has been proven to be false time after time and anyone who ahs raised kids knows how true that is for them.
2) preserving now - leaving it until after a disaster before you start learning how to grow and preserve your own food is a way of planning for starvation. The more you practice before it happens the better your chances of getting it right after it happens. Definitely stocks should include the basic ingredients such as salt but you shouldn't only know how to pickle things you should know how to make the vinegar and how to grow or where to find the spices to go with them. Salting, dehydrating and other methods are also skills needed for preservation of the crop if you are to get through 'the huungry months' of late winter and early spring.

[Matthew]

My in-laws come from the Dalmatian region of Croatia so I have grown used to eating a lot of dried ham and figs and so on. What amazes me is how long oranges last. They also have a real taste for salted cod in that part of the world although cod is not a regional fish. Read a fascinating book about the history of salt some years ago and the roll that salted cod played in trade was amazing.

Out of interest how did you make vinegar for pickling and so on ?

[davidc]

Producing good quality vinegar isn't a simple process but basically you leave fermented fruit juice (usually apple or grape juice) open to the air and it will attract the vinegar fly. The vinegar fly carries aceto bacteria which infects the juice and turns it to a vinegar starter, you then add a small qunatity of that to other containers of juice and they will also turn to vinegar. However, this vinegar is about twice the strength of the commercial stuff so it needs to be filtered diluted, and then tested, for good results. The time it takes for the process varies according to temperature and other conditions but it usually works in the long run.