The Preppers were right all along - Washington Post

[HillsideDesolate]

Seems the tides are turning, I always knew we were right.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...b92b00-5ddc-11ed-a131-e900e4a6336b_story.html
Archived link to avoid giving them click$ The Preppers Were Right All Along - The Washington Post

 

[GC7]

Owning a small deep freeze and buying (and immediately freezing) meat that is on clearance has worked well for me. I'm not exactly "buying cheap and stacking deep" because I have limited space, but being able to have a 6-12mo "meat buffer" is nice.

Buying freeze dried Mountain House and MREs has not paid off yet, and frankly I hope it never does.

 

[THAT Gurl]

I see the author is steadfast in his/her determination to be reliant on others when things go sideways -- and the odds are in my favor that they will. It's called life, kiddo, and there are bumps and humps to get around and over in between the fun, easy times. Some people are just bound and determined to be dumbasses, I guess ...

I enjoy gardening -- so, by extension, I like to make sure what little I manage to grow doesn't go to waste. So ... I also dehydrate, can and freeze dry. I'm finding I MUCH prefer freeze-drying ... I'm excited to see how things go next spring around here -- this is the first time since my accident; it will be 2 1/2 years come this next spring -- that I actually feel like trying to do something other than sit around and ***** about my back hurting. I want to grow EVERYTHING!! Lol

 

[L.C.]

here Is The Artical
In the first seven months of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic brought America to its knees, sales at survivalist supplier Augason Farms surged, tripling its annual revenue. The company couldn’t make its mylar packages of long-storage comfort foods — powdered eggs and nut butters, freeze-dried stroganoffs, casseroles and lasagnas — fast enough.


To meet the demand, founder Mark Augason simplified his production, knocking his 60 products down to the core best sellers and cutting off dozens of distributors so he could funnel his sales largely through Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. “It was like my Super Bowl — it was finally here,” Augason told me. And it hasn’t yet ended.
Augason’s Super Bowl moment has lasted three years and may persist for many more.

Just when Augason Farms and other major survival food brands, from Mountain House to ReadyWise and My Patriot Supply, were beginning to see a softening of demand this summer as Americans returned to pre-pandemic behavior, the worsening impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit, along with rising fuel costs and inflation, and withering drought and heat waves in the western US and Europe. Then came Hurricane Ian, which caused nearly $2 billion in agricultural damage in Florida alone. Survival food sales have remained strong.

Preppers, as the community of bunker builders and food hoarders is known, emerged during the Cold War as fears of nuclear holocaust drove some people to go to great lengths to prepare for survival in a burned-out world. But as the movement persisted over the decades, it has been mostly ignored by mainstream society, myself included, which came to view preppers mainly as paranoid radicals.
So it’s more than a little uncomfortable to confront the reality that this fringe industry is increasingly mainstream. In fact, in an era of growing environmental volatility and geopolitical unrest, Augason and his competitors appear downright prescient, maybe even pragmatic.

Disaster after disaster has reminded us all of the disturbing premise underpinning prepper thinking: We’re increasingly at risk of being cut off from our normal food supply. One recent report predicts that the survival food industry, which now produces very roughly $500 million in annual sales (privately held manufacturers don’t like to share their numbers), will grow by $2.8 billion by 2026.

The growth of this industry speaks volumes about the fear mindset that has crept into mainstream consumer behavior. You probably have at least one friend, colleague or neighbor who has been toying with the idea of becoming a “prepper.” Maybe not building a full-on bunker, but lining their pantries with long-storage food in the event that another major storm, blizzard, wildfire or another public health crisis hits.
“Early on, our market was mostly the people preparing their bunkers for Armageddon or resisting a government they feared would take away their guns,” Aaron Jackson, former chief executive officer of ReadyWise, told me. Like Augason Farms and most other survival food companies, ReadyWise was founded in Utah to serve the Mormon community, which is encouraged by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to prepare for the end of times. But Mormons, and more broadly, men, no longer represent even the large majority of survival food’s exploding market.

In less than a decade, said Jackson, the ReadyWise market shifted from about 95% men to more than 50% women, most of them mothers — known in industry patois as “guardian moms” — concerned about a reliable food supply for their kids.

Even Joe Rieck, vice president of sales at My Patriot Supply, a direct-to-consumer brand associated with a right-wing base that sells fire starter kits, gas masks and water filtration pumps along with its freeze-dried kibble, told me: “Ten years ago preppers were considered the crazies putting away food. Today you’re crazy not to. We don’t just sell to the extreme bible-carrying, gun-loving Americans. It’s everybody, because everybody’s affected.”
Every survival food executive I’ve spoken with seemed to agree that natural disasters are getting more frequent and intense. Rieck wouldn’t connect these intensifying threats to climate change — “I don’t think there’s any data that proves that climate change is the cause of making storms and hurricanes worse,” he said. But other executives I spoke with readily acknowledged that climate change is driving the growth of their business: “Global warming affects the droughts and the flooding and that has impacts on crop production. End of the day, food supply takes a real hit,” Augason said.

Josh Wark, senior brand manager for Mountain House, a freeze-dried food company that has more than doubled its sales in the past two years through distributors including REI and Bass Pro Shops, caters both to preppers and to outdoor enthusiasts. He told me that climate pressures inform his marketing strategy: “Our emergency messaging targets people that probably need to be preparing in certain areas, so as hurricane season starts we remind people [in coastal regions] to prepare; we do all the same thing with blizzards and tornadoes and wildfires as well. The intensity, the frequency of these events is going up.”

Indeed, as the market for survival food becomes more regionally and politically diverse, there appears to be a shifting culture within the industry itself — especially among corporate leadership, which is increasingly pedigreed. Wark of Mountain House brought to the company a history of management roles at Post and General Mills. Last year Augason, who dropped out of high school to work in his family’s business, brought in Moir Donelson, a graduate of West Point and Harvard Business School, as CEO to guide the company’s growth. A business that began as a powdered milk operation in the Augason family garage in the 1970s has become the oldest and one of the largest brands in the survival food industry.
And while the core technology behind freeze-dried products is not new, it has notable nutritional and long-storage benefits. It’s a 21st century version of something the Incas started back in roughly AD 1200 when they placed potatoes and ch’arki, a kind of beef jerky, on elevated stone slabs to freeze overnight and then quick-dry in the sun. Today, fresh ingredients are rapidly “blast-frozen” at temperatures as low as negative 112 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the formation of ice crystals that could affect food texture and nutrition. The food is then put in a heated vacuum chamber that causes the ice to “sublime,” changing from a solid to a gas without passing through a liquid phase. Pores left from the vanished ice quickly absorb water when the foods are rehydrated. The process takes nearly double the energy used for canning but retains about 90% of the food’s nutrients and preserves it for far longer — 30 years at a minimum.

I have yet to invest in survival food products myself, in part because I’m optimistic enough to believe that we won’t need them. But I know a growing number of people buying into the survival food trend. I’d first heard about ReadyWise from my cousin-in-law, a former cop in Zionsville, Indiana, who had stashed a supply of the startup’s products in his basement that could sustain his family for six months. My stepbrother, a business executive who lives in downtown Washington, has invested in a one-year supply of drinking water and long-storage food. And my brother, a leading climate scientist, has also begun building a supply in the basement of his West Virginia cabin. He reminds me regularly that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts an increase in average global temperatures of at least 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. “I can’t imagine anything worse than not being able to feed my kids,” he told me. “And the probability of major environmental interruptions in our food supply in our lifetimes is, by almost all accounts, rising.”

The upshot is this: There are any number of good and practical (and very sobering) reasons to be adding long-storage food supplies to your pantry. But we should be putting far more energy into supporting regenerative farming and the next-level technologies that can help us build a climate-resilient food supply, while also voting in politicians who take climate change seriously. Let’s be sure we’re not fiddling with freeze-dried fettuccini while the planet burns.

 

[joegrizzy]

Owning a small deep freeze and buying (and immediately freezing) meat that is on clearance has worked well for me. I'm not exactly "buying cheap and stacking deep" because I have limited space, but being able to have a 6-12mo "meat buffer" is nice.

Buying freeze dried Mountain House and MREs has not paid off yet, and frankly I hope it never does.

yeah i have nothing against astronaut food but a lot of that stuff seems ridiculously overpriced and something tells me it doesn't taste very good.

imo buying and storing canned goods is just as viable as freeze dried.

 

[GC7]

yeah i have nothing against astronaut food but a lot of that stuff seems ridiculously overpriced and something tells me it doesn't taste very good.

imo buying and storing canned goods is just as viable as freeze dried.

Joe my concern with canned goods is preservatives and plasticizers (the coating on the inside of aluminum cans). If you are good about cycling through them once a year, you're probably fine, but I've seen a lot of youtube videos where people open up decades old canned food and a lot of it just doesn't pass the test for me. A lot of the acidic stuff will create pin holes in the can and you get air/bacteria infiltration, and some substances can dissolve the inner lining and then you are eating metal contamination.

These past 2 years gave me a lot of time to re-evaluate and freezer is my preferred way (plus vacuum packing). No preservatives, no bacteria, and often times no light exposure. I know electricity and the mechanicals are the obvious weak link, but I figure as long as the following 2 conditions are present I'll have the motivation to want to live:

1. Electricity is reliably flowing (either from the grid, or because I can procure gasoline easily enough to power a generator)
2. Replacement deep freezes can be easily purchased because the economy is still somewhat functional

If conditions 1 and 2 above break, that's it for me. I was born into a modern and functional world and I have no fantasies about IRL World War Z or Mad Max.

 

[joegrizzy]

Joe my concern with canned goods is preservatives and plasticizers (the coating on the inside of aluminum cans). If you are good about cycling through them once a year, you're probably fine, but I've seen a lot of youtube videos where people open up decades old canned food and a lot of it just doesn't pass the test for me. A lot of the acidic stuff will create pin holes in the can and you get air/bacteria infiltration, and some substances can dissolve the inner lining and then you are eating metal contamination.

These past 2 years gave me a lot of time to re-evaluate and freezer is my preferred way (plus vacuum packing). No preservatives, no bacteria, and often times no light exposure. I know electricity and the mechanicals are the obvious weak link, but I figure as long as the following 2 conditions are present I'll have the motivation to want to live:

1. Electricity is reliably flowing (either from the grid, or because I can procure gasoline easily enough to power a generator)
2. Replacement deep freezes can be easily purchased because the economy is still somewhat functional

If conditions 1 and 2 above break, that's it for me. I was born into a modern and functional world and I have no fantasies about IRL World War Z or Mad Max.

i have no doubt the same concerns, but i also acknowledge i'm dealing with leeching issues with literally *everything* so i have to make amends somewhere.

i haven't *seen* things that are heavily acidic like tomato eat thru canned linings, but i def hear these concerns. that being said, *every single time* i thaw out a frozen piece of meat from the deep freeze my mind says "....is this still safe? did this go bad somehow? am i going to make everyone sick?"

no matter what. so even with meats from the deep freeze, i have the same concerns even if not warranted. i DO have two deep freezers and a vac sealer. i've got plenty of gennie power to backup the freezers, but then it becomes gas. i keep 20 gallons in tanks that i've tested to keep it fresh enough to at least run my gennies for 8 months, but after that i'm down to whatever i could get from whatever store. so yeah, i understand lol.

a big thing for me is i have many large cuts, pork shoulders, whole loins, etc. unless i run them thru the bandsaw while frozen (which i'm not above doing), i've got to thaw and then cook (if i've got JUST a freezer and have forsaken a fridge) the entire piece. if i'm making rice or a filler with it, that's a LOT of food to then have to keep refrigerated or fresh in some way.

i no doubt make lots of things like jerky then vac seal that. i have some that is i dunno... probably over 6 months old at this point. haven't tried it in a while lol but last time i had a bag it was still really good. so thawing big cuts then drying them is optional, BUT running the dehydrator for 6-7 hours PLUS keeping the meat in a chilled environment for marinating before hand becomes another resource issue. pressure cooking then vac sealing becomes a bit less intensive, but not as tasty lol.

 

[GC7]

i have no doubt the same concerns, but i also acknowledge i'm dealing with leeching issues with literally *everything* so i have to make amends somewhere.

i haven't *seen* things that are heavily acidic like tomato eat thru canned linings, but i def hear these concerns. that being said, *every single time* i thaw out a frozen piece of meat from the deep freeze my mind says "....is this still safe? did this go bad somehow? am i going to make everyone sick?"

no matter what. so even with meats from the deep freeze, i have the same concerns even if not warranted. i DO have two deep freezers and a vac sealer. i've got plenty of gennie power to backup the freezers, but then it becomes gas. i keep 20 gallons in tanks that i've tested to keep it fresh enough to at least run my gennies for 8 months, but after that i'm down to whatever i could get from whatever store. so yeah, i understand lol.

a big thing for me is i have many large cuts, pork shoulders, whole loins, etc. unless i run them thru the bandsaw while frozen (which i'm not above doing), i've got to thaw and then cook (if i've got JUST a freezer and have forsaken a fridge) the entire piece. if i'm making rice or a filler with it, that's a LOT of food to then have to keep refrigerated or fresh in some way.

i no doubt make lots of things like jerky then vac seal that. i have some that is i dunno... probably over 6 months old at this point. haven't tried it in a while lol but last time i had a bag it was still really good. so thawing big cuts then drying them is optional, BUT running the dehydrator for 6-7 hours PLUS keeping the meat in a chilled environment for marinating before hand becomes another resource issue. pressure cooking then vac sealing becomes a bit less intensive, but not as tasty lol.

Joe as long as your deep freezers don't have automatic defrost, any chunk of fresh meat you put in there will basically be no different once you thaw it out years later. There will be some minor degradation of flavor but if you're talking a whole chunk of animal muscle then any bacteria will only be on the outside.

Back in Jan of this year I bought a 6lb prime rib on clearance at WM and it sat frozen as hard as a rock in my deep freezer until this past week. I let it defrost 2 days in the fridge and then cooked it and it had the same qualities as if I had bought one from a prime steak house.

 

[OK Corgi Rancher]

I think if you're buying those mass-manufactured, freeze-dried foods you're probably doing it wrong. If you're diet sensitive (you know...like not being able to tolerate 14000mg of sodium a day) those foods won't work for long. I inherited quite a bit of that stuff when I married last year and I can't believe how much sodium and sugar are in some of those "foods". I'm down with the idea of home canning or freeze drying. I wish I could afford a freeze dryer. That's just not in the budget right now.

But we're slowly but surely becoming more and more self-sufficient. We don't have a long-term food solution yet because we don't yet have room at the new place. But we will before too long. And we just laid out, fertilized and tilled a 2400 sq ft plot for a garden.

We went out today to try to find some chickens or guineas to go with the goats but no luck. We'll pick some up soon.

 

[enuf]

I have some pork that came from a friend who raised a couple pigs. He took them and had them processed and the butcher wrapped the items in freezer paper. It has been kept at 0 degrees. How long is this good for or when should I toss it. Between deer, elk, quail, pheasant, beef, fish, and this pig - and really just me and the wife now, it can be a challenge to eat it all in good time.