There is a section on this website called Food - Can Help Others. You can find it here.

I bring up this thought because it is my answer to the people who say that if things go south, they would rather have bullets than food. I have been hearing more of this sort of talk lately, as we get closer to the next big event. Frankly, I tend to stay away from the subject, because I have very strong personal feelings about it, and my opinions tend to offend almost everyone. But the time to be cautious is passing. So here’s what I really think.
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I mean that two ways. (1) Don’t rely on frozen food for an emergency, because (2) there may be no freezers working.

In a serious emergency and practically every disaster situation, electrical power goes out. It can stay out for weeks. Or longer. We’ve seen it happen this winter in various locations around the country as power lines are taken out by trees that have been simply weighted down by snow and ice.

There are factors that can make food in a freezer last a while with the power off. It may be winter outside, and all you have to do to keep the food sub-zero is take the freezer outside. But that isn’t possible in most places. The other possibility is to have an alternate source of power to generate electricity. If you have something like a wind power generator, or a real solar setup that gives you lots of juice, you’ve got it made in the shade… if you want to divert that much of your precious auxiliary power to a freezer. As far as having a gas-powered generator, unless you live next to a gasoline cracking plant, you’re going to run out sooner or later. Probably sooner.
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All uncooked grains have an intrinsic problem that appears over time. There are insect eggs that are in the product which eventually hatch in the package. This is not from carelessness on the part of the companies that pack the food. It is just a fact of life.

It is true of all uncooked grain products: cereal, rice, all pasta including spaghetti, oatmeal, flour… you name it. Over time there will be tiny insects in the unopened, carefully stored package. It is not your fault. It is not anyone’s fault. We just have to deal with it.
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Whether you store food from the grocery store or buy pre-packed emergency food, you need to check expiration dates as time goes on.

The essence of emergency food is that you need to keep it in storage, because you never know when you will need it. Which means that most of the time you will not need it (although you’ll feel awfully good about it when the time comes). Some prepackaged emergency food is intended for very long storage, up to 25 years. You do not have to check that type very often, lol. But some emergency food has a shelf life of perhaps five years, and some only a year or two. If you mix types or buy quantities at different times, you need to schedule checks every month or two.
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We have always had as our featured supplier of survival food an extremely reputable company called Nitro-Pak, which has been around for over twenty years, has a 120-day guarantee, and has, in my personal opinion, the widest and best selection of survival food for an emergency or just about any disaster scenario.

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I had not planned on referring to MarketWatch.com again so soon, but a post today caught my eye. I have not been able to contact the writer of the post, a certain cbently. So if you, cbently, would like additional attribution other than what I’m giving you right now, just let me know.

This astute Wall Street trader said today:

I have worried about this for some time, but I have become convinced that in the headlong rush to restart the excessively consumer credit-dependent portion of the economy people will be encouraged to spend by being given implicit assurances that there will be no significant consequences if they fail to repay.

For example, at one time some people may have worried that defaulting on a car loan would lower their credit score, thus impacting their ability to obtain credit again in the future. In these days, the lending standards will simply be officially lowered in order to invite them back to the consumption table. There is no significant consequence for failure to repay. By doing so we will create an even greater financial catastrophe.
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MarketWatch.com is a site run by the Wall Street Journal, and has fairly up-to-the-minute stock market data. But the real draw for me are the posts to the main article, that you get to by clicking on the main article. I don’t read the article itself, since it’s basically just rah-rah puff by the Journal. I go directly to the posts.

Many of the posts are written by pretty sharp people who have been trading for some time. They are small traders, representing those who invest their money directly and do not depend on the fund managers to make their decisions for them. To make money, they have to have some sense… as well as dollars to invest.

There has been a very interesting change in both the substance and tone of their posts. A few weeks ago, it was, ‘oh boy, the market is volatile, so there is a change to make some money’. Then it changed to ‘uh… the market is doing strange stuff.’ Then the bailouts started, and it was ‘guys, this is getting very strange… I can literally see the clandestine manipulation of the government and other big players in the stock prices,’ which they call the PPT, or Price Protection Team, which was formerly just a rumor, a boogyman that many did not believe in.

Next the mood changed to, ‘(expletive deleted) I have NO idea what the market is going to do. It goes up on the worst news. It’s like it is disconnected from reality.’ And these pretty smart people started to basically panic. ‘Okay, that’s it… I’m not trading any more… but I don’t know what to do with my money.’ Some suggested gold, which is usually a pretty good hedge against falling stock prices. But gold is acting weird too. Some are looking for it to go from about $850 to over $2,000 and ounce. Others, looking at the obvious manipulation of stocks, aren’t so sure.

Which brings us to the really interesting comment I saw in one of the posts. It said that if food could be compressed so that you could get as much value as an ingot of gold in the same space, that would be the perfect investment. Because you can always eat food, and there may come a time where gold may be worthless because of either strange market pressures, or perhaps because of the government not allowing people to have it any more. There are already some restrictions, apparently.

I think that is brilliant. The perfect investment right now is food.

We still can’t compress it to get $800 worth in the palm of our hand. But the freeze-dried food and other emergency food supplies available are pretty condensed and very storable. I think it is worth far more than gold. Because even if the value of gold skyrockets, if there comes a time where there is a severe scarcity of food, gold may not do a person much good. Who would sell the food they need to live for a pretty piece of metal?

Not me.

I was sent an interesting post by a friend today, regarding seeds. Before I tell you where to find it, let me say that we have been starting to grow a little of our own food. We trying to do it completely organically. I figure there is no use in learning how to grow stuff with fertilizer and chemicals and pesticides that will disappear if things go truly south.

It is, I admit, a little hard at first to go entirely organic. For one thing, you find out that there are garden insects that you WANT in your garden, ones that will greatly help to control the pest insects. Astoundingly, these helpers will come by themselves to your garden, if you will let them. It’s like there is this incredible balance that wants to establish itself, if we can muster the wisdom to just get out of the way enough.
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