I’ll give you a crash course on venison and rabbit. After that, you’ll have to ad-lib.
Dude. He said partially.
Y’know Rich, your spine’s lookin’ mighty tender. You live near a power plant or eat a lot of bananas or somethin’?
I marinate it with vodka regularly.
A week after the hurricane and insane lines for water, cash, food, and fuel. It’s going to be rough for people who live on an island in hurricane alley.
Is this a good time to check our preps?
Man, just imagine how this thing with Syria could escalate.Between Trump and his buddy Putin, no backing down until it’s too late? It’s possible. It has happened before, in August 1914, and with the tech these days, escalation could overwhelm any calmer minds.
So, yeah, perfect opportunity to “play” prepper and get ready for … who knows. A regional conflict would not have much impact on day to day but an EMP or limited nuclear strike, or some kind of cyber attack could disrupt our economy, even food deliveries. I don’t think it would throw us into a Mad Max situation but just want to avoid being helpless if a situation where food becomes scarce for 3~6 months.
Living in Florida, we always have water and MREs stockpiled. Considering a generator for the next hurricane season. No basements here though so we’re probably still screwed.
Water and MREs will probably see you through most any scenario. At least you won’t be standing in lines at Wal-Mart in the beginning.
Are these MREs any good to eat? How long do they last? I might want to order some of they last for many years.
They’re called MREs, not MGEs.
I just keep some of this stuff around:
Bonus is that it’s really meant for camping and i can go hiking / camping with it. I will say though it tastes a lot better in the field than at home though.
Yeah, Mountain House stuff is surprisingly good cooked outdoors over a fire. I can’t say I’ve ever tried them at home.
I became a Mountain House Man still as a kid when after crossing the same stream like 20 times and then walking through stinging nettles above my head for two hours, then camping on the side of a hill in the middle of a thunderstorm, we heated up some Mountain House on the backpacking stove. Good stuff in that situation.
The problem with MH from a survivalist perspective is that you need fire & water to prepare them, and they are not particularly calorie dense for the cost. Frankly they don’t make sense for long term preparedness ($20+ dollars per person per day, or there abouts). OTOH, if you just want a few days supplies on hand they’re fine.
Are these mountain house meals self-heating? If not, is there any cooking kit someone can recommend? I am envisioning something that may not be used for many years, but still operate efficiently when needed.
They’re not self heating but they do last several years, and are also very light. All you need is boiling water to make them.
I use one of these to heat small amounts of water rapidly in camping situations. (The jetboil system does boil water faster by about 30 seconds than a typical open flame stove, so it would use less gas. But it is more bulky.)
But of course anything that burns can boil water with a pot.
If you’re playing you may as well get a iphone-charging wood burning camp stove, while you’re at it. It would take a lot longer to boil water, but… you can charge your phone! Kind of.
The problem with prepping is that even if I did gather all of the rope, wire, knives, guns, and other equipment to rough it, I have no idea how to use it. I’d be just as dead with it as I would without it, as I have no idea how to set snares, hunt, fish, or otherwise live off the land when the limited supply of food you can reasonably carry runs out.
I’ve actually thought it pretty sad and ironic, that I could be set up with sufficient equipment to live off the land, but I would still be dead, as I have no real way of using it.
Frankly, a lot of those skills that are necessary strike me as not easily learned (or at least not quickly enough to make yourself self-sufficient before you die). The types of people I know with those skills are my former small town classmates who have been out shooting and trapping things in the woods since they were five years old.
I’m sure that you could teach someone how to theoretically set a rabbit snare in a brief period of time. But I just know from my own experience of trying to learn to fish, that I am clumsy. I still take inordinate amounts of time just to tie a basic fishing knot, and it usually looks terrible (and still far too frequently strips so that I lose the hook). I cannot imagine getting up to speed on something like survivalism that quickly (or being able to really know how to do it without frequently practicing it in the wild).
End of Civilization survival is so bat crazy though you’re just as likely to get shot by a rando being the Ultimate Survivalist as some newbie that has no idea what they’re doing. As i’ve said over and over if that’s the world we live in, get a sailboat and float down to some uninhabited island and wait out the storm.
What “rational” disaster prepping is though is just building up your “pantry” so that you have food and supplies in case of unforeseen shortages. Makes the most sense in hurricane areas.
Probably the most feasible, non-act-of-god disaster situation are terrorist/missile strikes against a significant portion of the gasoline refineries; most grocery stores only have just-in-time supplies and would quickly run out if transportation broke down.
This is the story of a kid who wanders into Alaska and dies living off the land.
This badass carpenter otoh, moves to Alaska by himself and carves out a cabin and a plot of land and hunts sheep and survives by himself for decades. (He does trade for some goods and does use some metal tools and stuff, but by and large is self sufficient as you can be.)
Shooting a gun is pretty easy. There are lots of squirrels in most areas. You should be able to shoot some squirrel. The problem is how many rounds of ammo are you going to stockpile? Even a thousand rounds will be gone in less than a year if you’re taking 4-5 shots per day to bag a couple of squirrels.
If we’re reduced to anarchy and we have to hunt and gather to survive, I’m not planning on lasting. If I wanted to prep it would be supplies enough to bridge the gap between the fall and then restoration of order. Even if I knew how to live off the land, there would be bands of desperate people all over. When it’s down to survival, people will fight over food and supplies.
The shooting part is pretty easy, yes, but as you mentioned, there is the ammo issue. And knowing how to clean and care for the weapon so that it does not get mucked or jam well before that ammo runs out.
And think about those squirrels. Perhaps for sake of argument I could, terrible eyesight aside, manage to get some squirrels every once in a while. But that would lead, I think, to “rabbit starvation.” Where are the rest of the vitamins and minerals needed for survival going to come from? I highly doubt I could find sufficient edible vegetation from the land.
But then, on top of everything else, there are just all of the things that are part of survival. Perhaps part of this is because I am living in the northern U.S. where we just had a couple of feet of snow in April, but I have no idea how to actually survive in the woods. I could not build a meaningful shelter that would work for moderate climates, let alone somewhere with inclement weather like we have here. Same goes for finding safe drinking water (yeah, I suppose I could try to find some streams/rivers that wouldn’t poison me too badly, maybe), replacing clothing that wears away over time, etc.
There is just so much in my everyday life that I take for granted that comes from Wal-mart and a landlord that would not be there, and that I could not replace.
I think you’d learn very quickly what could and could not be replaced. If you look at situations like the Seige of Leningrad people find ways of getting by. For most it’s just warmth/food/water/clothing in that order - it seems like in cold places water tends to be easier to find than heat. There’s almost nowhere better than you house you could go to “in the wild” and would only go there if you were driven out of it by some strange circumstances.
Still, there’s a reason that settled civilization started in the warm places in the world. It’s interesting reading The Secret History of the Mongols that it was considered a death sentence to be banished to the Siberian forest rather than live on the trackless plains of Mongolia; because Mongolia was a place of herds and grazing, and Siberian forests neither hunter nor farmer nor nomad could survive. We just have this distorted view of nature because we’ve preserved the hard to reach, unprofitable and dramatic places as preserves, and people get confused and think that “the mountains” are where you want to live.