Sunday, September 24, 2017

apocalypse cart


APOCALYPSE CART
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Okay, here’s the deal on always being able to add to my prepper food stocks, even on a budget of $250-$300 a month ( when I make more than that from Very Generous Minions donating, it goes into savings or into the B-POD fund ).  I have a couple of yearly expenses such as property tax, web site and domain name fee, a fee based e-mail service and a couple of other minor items.  Those are easily paid with savings ( $40 each e-mail and taxes, $60 web site, Adobe subscription for PDF file conversion is $25, $150 to visit my parents each Spring, maybe $50 in average bike parts ).  I pay $50 a month for utilities.  The rest goes to food.  At first I was using these extra grocery funds to buy the heck out of meat on sale to stock the freezer ( not the greatest long term storage, but this is for reducing the cost of daily eating to almost nothing ).  We should have a good six months eating worth of 99cent chicken and $1.50 pork and $2 hamburger.  The biggest fight we have is not lack of money for food but if I’m allowed to try to stuff any more meat into the freezer whenever there is a sale ( okay, it isn’t a fight.  It is a “discussion” which I usually lose ).

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Our breakfast is usually free Food Bank items ( the NOL still works there and gets perishable foods.  If the Food Bank had to rely on canned goods no one would get fed.  It is almost exclusively perishable items donated anymore.  As the Health Department is universally a pocket of evil asshats, they insist on commercial grade equipment.  So when a freezer of fridge pukes out, we were buying $2k-$10k units.  Just to give you a little bit of perspective how expensive it is to run one of the bastards anymore.  Not that Director salaries don’t take a huge bite.  What does the Director do?  More like write grant proposals for free Fed money rather than manage the place all that well  ).  If it wasn’t, I would be eating my own ground wheat rather than the whole wheat factory bread, so it would just be pennies a day.  More wheat for a snack.  My $12 sack of wheat is perhaps half gone, months later.  I imagine it will cost $24 to go get another replacement one.  Still, three months or longer for a sack, even at $24, is pretty darn cheap ( at least compared to most other food ).  Lunch is leftovers or if none, about half the time, potatoes.  Most of the time potatoes are free ( even if you have to remove 10% getting rid of all the eyes ), but even if not you are looking at a quarter or two a day.

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So, breakfast and lunch average fifty cents a day ( I don’t count the cost of leftovers, being accounted for in diner ) plus the cost of butter.  We were eating a stick a day between the two of us, two pounds a week ( we use butter for cooking oil as it is the healthiest, mostly, for the mostly cheapest cost.  I’m sure olive oil is better for you, and perhaps even cheaper, per serving, but I can separate the oil from the butter and have both bread topping and cooking oil so it works good for me ), but the NOL has been using a lot less due to gut issues.  I would call it $5 a week in butter ( stocked up at $3 a pound ).  That is all three meals, or four sometimes, every day.  I’ll call butter fifty cents per breakfast and lunch and twenty for dinner ( keep in mind I‘m eating at most a half a pound of meat a day, so the fat in butter is replacing a lot of protein ).  So $1 a day for the first two meals.  It is probably even less that that, but that is the maximum in theory.  Diner is the big cost meal every day.  The NOL eats cabbage for lunch every day ( salad, substituting wilted nasty lettuce with cabbage ), but that is around a buck or two a week and doesn’t add much to the calculation.

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$2 is the average for diner, excluding the butter cost but accounting for the starch.  The main factor there is buying and freezing the meat on sale.  This wasn’t too bad of an initial cost as it was predominantly chicken.  After far too many nights of yard bird, we were motivated to ratchet up our spending.  I’m rather fond of pork for its cheapness and the NOL likes hamburger ( I like it better as the cook, but not as a shopper ).  So, averaging the cost of all three meats, adding a starch and $2 comes pretty close.  We eat potatoes most of the week, with rice and pasta and refried/baked beans and bread being the fall back starches when we get tired of spuds ( if I eat taters for lunch we have another starch for dinner ).  Then there is the TV time snacking, a horrid habit but after a day of healthy foods I’m inclined to treat myself to a small bowl of chips.  It probably doesn’t evenly match the cost of diner, but it is more than breakfast and lunch combined.  Let’s just call the whole thing $150 a month for two people.

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As we pretty much just split the cost of groceries, and even when we are buying a lot of sale meat one month, more than an average month, my cost of food a month is like $100.  So, as I’ve shared with you before, this leaves plenty of extra to keep stockpiling the crap out of daily grocery items ( for instance, we keep looking for the sale on the only brand of microwave popcorn that actually tastes good and doesn’t tear up our gut, “Cousin Willie’s” white cheddar, which only happens a few times a year.  No way I’m paying $2.25 for three bags of nuked corn, so we wait for the sale of $1.  Then we buy thirty boxes in one shot.  Which is 15% of our monthly minimum.  For one item.  Because I spend at least double of the three meals-at least half of my grocery budget goes to either daily food stockpiling or apocalypse stockpiling ( typical conversation: “Let’s get some more Mac &Cheese”[ I really only like that and angel hair for pasta-not a huge noodle person.  Helpful hint: take a small amount of boiling hot water and mix the “cheese” sauce with butter in it and you can skip the milk-we generally don’t have any on hand since I went back to black coffee ].  “We have plenty of mac underneath the stairs.  Cases of it”.  “That’s apocalypse food”.  “Damn you!”.  Okay, she usually doesn’t damn me, but it is a bit of a fight keeping her out of the storage food.  She still doesn’t really get the finer art of stockpiling, which is why I go shopping with her, or do it myself.  She is coming around more my way, prep wise, but she started at zero and it is work keeping moving forward ).

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Flour and sugar don’t come on sale all that often, but because groceries are all I spend any money on after the first of the month utility money ( I was paying half the mortgage and $50 to utilities but NOL talked me into dropping all that and just stay home to write.  She doesn’t support prepping all that well, but she does my writing.  I have to pay something or I’d feel like a mooch, so I help with utilities.  And I’ve become the House Bitch, doing all the cooking and cleaning.  Plus Yard  Bitch when required, which I did from the beginning ), I can easily stock up on them when they do.  Do you WANT to stock up on too much flour and sugar?  Of course not-not the healthiest stuff to eat.  But as condiments or supplements, they do just fine.  I could never find enough flour on sale to get anywhere close to the amount of wheat kernels I have, so at most, if I keep it up, I’m baking 90% whole wheat and 10% white flour combination.  With a dash of sugar, that won‘t ruin anyone‘s health ( the vegetable shortening, yes, that is very unhealthy.  But not as unhealthy as NOT eating fat in your post-central heat and air hooked to the grid diet.  If you are creating your own body heat in the winter, you need fat.  Not optional ). 

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You don’t even need to buy flour and sugar.  I do, as they are some of the cheapest per calorie and they are a supplement which negates their health issues.  You can stock plenty of other foods more to your liking.  Pasta or rice, beans or instant potatoes.  Powder milk or canned goods.  My point is that you can stockpile food every week.  It doesn’t even take prepping money, it just uses grocery money you were already spending.  By buying daily food in bulk only on sale, the rest can be prepper food.  We talked about this not too long ago, and I’m making very few if any new points.  I only bring it up again as I saw BOTH flour and sugar on sale at the same time and I had zero finance issues stockpiling four months extra calories.  On my very low $3k-$4k yearly income.  Not daily calories, but apocalypse calories.  $35 for four months calories.  Why do you only have six months stockpiled?  This isn’t a new issue, just one I keep harping on.  I had a bunch of article subjects bouncing around my head, but nothing was sticking but this.  I don’t do 9/11 articles ( the date I’m writing this-sorry, minions, you all know I write two weeks ahead.  It just seems I have better reception to articles when I write as if most of you are new here.  At least most of the time ).  The government humped us and if you don’t believe that I’ll wave at you from the other side of the concentration camp fence.  To write on the subject is beating a dead horse and giving slight legitimacy to the Propaganda Corps efforts.

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Look, I know 1500 calories a day is insufficient.  The reason I keep to that figure is that it gives you options.  If you ONLY see 3k calories a day as your only option, and it must be protein heavy and expensive, you aren’t stocking enough food, pure and simple.  If you stock five years of starch, you can always double down on the daily calories for energy to move.  Or, if things look real bad, you stay secluded and sedate.  If it costs you a thousand bucks for a years food ( the Yuppie Scum MRE equivalent meals in freeze dried to supplement the grain they offer ) which isn’t even much more than 1500 calories a day anyway, you could get three years of wheat ( at the new nosebleed prices, in buckets ) alone, with fat and vitamins.  Would you rather have three years of food, or one?  The time to add protein and meal variety is AFTER you get the bare basics of wheat, shortening and vitamins.  Calories first, then taste.  The grocery store stocking can help you get more calories, since wheat is so high right now.  As long as you have enough whole wheat, you can supplement that with White Foods ( rice-never, ever, never stock brown rice-and instant potatoes and pasta and flour ).  I’d advise half and half whole wheat to white foods, but if you must, financially, reduce the whole wheat I would think you could fly by the seat of your pants and go as low as 25% whole wheat and still have enough nutrients.  You can’t JUST do Calories Only, you must have enough nutritious calories since that is most of your diet.  Fill up and get calories from White Foods, add whole wheat and fat, have vitamin pills and sprouted wheat and you just might make it through the Hunger Times okay. 

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Change your shopping habits and modify your eating habits to be heavier in starch and besides the wheat a lot of your storage foods will be “free” ( at least as far as your budget is concerned ).  If I can do it on my budget, why can’t you?  Do you think food prices are going to go down?  Buy while you can, yo.  Remember?  Stock yesterday on Better Than Nothing, and add to that tomorrow.  Too much crap can go wrong now, too quickly. 

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28 comments:

  1. Okay, edumacate me. Why not instant smashed potatoes ?

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    1. All the nutrients are just underneath the skin, peeled away to process. Only starch/calories remain.

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    2. This totally true. Though even empty calories such as white rice and instant spuds have very long storage life and are good fillers. Food fatigue is a real issue which also need be thought out. A few vegies or beans along with a squirrel mixed in with, can make all the difference to being satisfied versus still being hungry for more.

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    3. White Foods are certainly a desirable part of stocked foods-as long as they aren't primary.

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  2. Jim, I live in the county just north of where you grew up in California. I am surprised of your comments on your food bank. We have been getting fresh carrots, potatoes, onions, and cabbage in the bags every week for the last 4 years. The canned goods are still being supplied with the federal supplied stuff. We don't hand out the amount of meat that we used too but everyone gets meat maybe 3 times a month. Not like 5 years ago...I remember seeing rack of lamb, ahi tuna stakes,and rib eyes being given, but not now.

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    1. Remember, I was in the food bank business for ten years. Used to be all cans, plentiful, with bread and some milk being the only perishable. Now, other than cans from Senior Food and USDA Surplus Food, almost none are donated or given out. To give one example, the Postal Food drive for our town of 15k was 11k pounds nine years ago. Now, after the town grew another 5k, the donation is closer to 2-3k pounds.

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  3. "I know 1500 calories a day is insufficient."
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    No it's not.
    It depends on your level of activity.
    Yesterday, for example, I knew I was gonna be sitting on my ass all day chained to this computer. So I only ate once, at suppertime, 2 slices of box pizza we did in the oven. The rest of my consumption consisted on 3 cups of coffee and about a gallon of water. That's it. How many calories was that? Maybe 1500 calories, maybe less, dunno. Gotta be close.

    Since I was on my ass all day anything more than that would have ended up hanging all over me, then I'd start to look like all the other blobs you see bouncing around, with the exception I don't stare at a cell all day long. In fact, I don't even know where mine is. It ain't laying here on the end of my desk, so it must still be in my vehicle, where I left it 3 days ago, last time I drove it.

    Today however I'm out in the shop getting some stuff done. Building 3 small tables out of discarded and worn dick boards for out on the porch. Throw-away stuff will be converted into things we will use. So I'm eating like an animal today. No breakfast cept for 1 cup o' mud. Lunch was a chicken sando and some chips. About maybe 30 oz's of water. And for supper I'm doing 1/2lb burgers on the grill with potato salad from the deli at Kroger and maybe a serving of some sort of frozen vegetable. Afterward, maybe another mud, and of course more water. All consumed water is tap water that has been run through the Brita filter pitcher. Even our 5 cats and 1 dog get filtered water. Just about all available water now is undrinkable and has to be filtered. This rotten assed gov't is systematically destroying this entire planet and will continue to until it self-implodes or some with some stones takes it out first. I don't care either way as my life will go on with minimal impact.

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    1. I wonder if I have a tapeworm? I eat 1800 calories or so, perhaps 2200, and all I do is bike a half hour. I used to be able to just drink coffee for breakfast and now I need bread.

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    2. I think you burn it off differently as you age, plus, the type of stuff you do to burn it. While I do a lot of stuff it's not the real arduous stuff I used to do. Thing is, stuff starts to break as you get older and pain is, well, more painful to me now, so I don't take a lot of chances. I hate to hurt. LOL

      Was up on a ladder last week installing a difficult ceiling fan, for maybe an hour or so. For the next 3 days my feet arches were screaming bloody murder. I hadn't been on a ladder since last fall so my feets weren't used to it and the un-used muscles let me know it. Gettin old ain't for sissy's.

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    3. Getting old is your body telling us we are wasting oxygen the breeders could be using. Remember my theory on age 45 being our max? Great-grandchildren no longer need our help, time for a new generation to take over ( assume year 15 breeding ). No one wants to be superficial, of course.

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    4. On average I'd say my intake averages only like 1500-2000 calories per day. My body weight has remained at 200 lbs for the last 35 years. Except for right after my accident when I dropped fifteen lbs. Now days I free myself to walk at least a mile per day and have gained back those lost lbs. Yet only eat around a quarter lb of meat daily. The rest in carbs and vegetables.
      The FOL (forever old lady lol ) eats like half what I do. Yet she walks ten to twelve miles a day at work. She does housekeeping and litter removal at the local zoo here. She is one fit woman at 71 years old too. She has legs to die for because of all that walking too. I swear the woman eats like a bird.
      All of us have different metabolism, and burn our fuel at various rates.
      Look at the Chinese...a billion strong and pretty much on vegies and rice alone with small bits of added protein.

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    5. The last ex lived on just a few hundred calories of beer a day. Forever. Modern science on calories is really still back a century plus ago.

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    6. Actually, I'm thinking that modern "science" has been so corrupted it's almost meaningless for those of us lacking the time / energy / intelligence / expertise to analyse the reports.

      Companies, education sector, government, media etc etc have been lying to us for so long now.

      Anyway I digress. I used to work for a weight loss food factory. They give you chocolate cake and biscuits. How's that healthy? Of course it was only small bits.

      Also, companies know how to game any system of measuring "good". How's aspartmane "good"? Yet diet soft drinks are low in calories so they're better than non diet.

      Additionally to save on making another comment - Thanks for the prompt to look at how much money I'm wasting on food. I'm identifying huge savings I can make. Cut out booze would probably buy me a FLIR LOL jokes lord Bison I make jokes

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    7. I'm actually having great fun at making fun of FLIR's. It takes the place of freeze dried foods. Please feel free to join in the fun :)

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  4. When I saw your article title, I thought for sure you were writing about something like garden carts or game carts. I'd sure like to hear your thoughts about those.
    Peace out

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    1. Extra mechanical contraptions are just another set of back-ups, parts, expense. Game-get a stick and two people carry. You should always have a buddy in case of raids. Garden-get the kids to be beasts of burdens. All post-collapse, obviously. Beware my article titles-I can be too clever by half.

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    2. Carrying a deer with a pole is fr city slickers.
      One needs learn the backpack method of inserting the fore limbs of the beastie thru the hind leg tendons.
      Many times I've carried bucks out that went 150 lbs this way. When I used to be healthy ha ha.
      Now days I built a single wheel cart for this. Much easier than putting it all on your back too.

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    3. Your method is surely superior, but for resource scarcity situations...

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  5. People just get wore out having some scammer standing there wanting a handout.

    You go to the store and they ask "Would you like to round that total up? It's to save the wild tapeworms, a good cause."

    Me and two of my kids went to a fundraiser it was to buy a service dog for an eighteen year old girl that has diabetes. She lives in a million dollar house and is going to start college for a four year degree. Oh! Yeah! Sure! I can see you are really hurting!

    And then there are all the bums you see on the street corners holding up the signs with their sob stories. If they can stand there all day, then they sure can go and get a fuc**** job!

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    1. Wild tapeworm. LOL. You're killing me!

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    2. Me thinks there is an epidemic of tapeworms in Muricans.
      Then there are those which need one heh heh...

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    3. The Evil Ex could use one, that's for sure. I finally saw her-unfortunately-after ten years-and she went from bubblicious to beach ball and can't breath very well. Jesus, die already, would ya? How much fast food Chinese and Doritoes with cheese dip can one person consume?

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  6. Recently there was an article in the Lugenpresse about how many people shop at all three of our major supermarkets buying the cheapest items at each one (there are pretty much only 2 supermarkets with a smaller 3rd player.... just so we are on the same page you guys cry about Walmart who have about 1/3 of the us market. Our big two have 90 odd percent... maybe even 95% of the market)

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    1. Damn, so you guys are pretty much just shopping at the Company Store.

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  7. "Too much crap can go wrong now, too quickly."

    My co-worker told me the USAF flew those stealth bombers WITH nuke payloads along the south / North Korean border. They flew low enough that the NORKS saw them but they couldn't detect them. That's a big "F.U." message. However I can imagine that Kim Dim Sim will just strike first because that'll be the only way he gets a punch in.

    I'm just glad he doesn't know about Australia. Oh hang on, our retarded government has been yapping away talking tough for so long China has issued 4 of 5 thinly veiled threats and NORK has threatened us as well.

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    1. Wow, great job guys. Stick with the superpower that will drop you at the drop of a hat ( and a dollar profit ). Is your PM related to Trump, or did they both just come from the same Special Education class?

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  8. My grandparents came from the old country so they cooked real food to my parents. My parents who are late eighty and early 90 and are still living independently at their house and still drive, eat a subsistent diet of a few peices of toast for breakfast, a half hamburger and some starch for lunch and a small piece of meat and some dessert, ice cream for dinner. Oh yes, loads of coffee and tea. They are very thin but have outlived everyone they know. They probably have some deficiencies but my Dad showed no illness till early 80 with heart stuff and my Mom had a heart attack on her 89th birthday but they stitched her back and she is running like a top at 92. Her memory isn't as good. But she took a five Mile Walk to downtown three days ago. Anyhow, they can't be using more than 600 to 1000 calories a day. Same diet they always lived on and had done arduous labor all their lives and raised five of us. I chalk it up to living in the country, drinking good water, dancing(they still go,) and not eating alot. I'm sure genetics also plays a part. Oh and they are ornery as hell, don't do anything that is conventional, fight it tooth and nail. Don't want to go in a nursing home and barely go to the doctor when told.Want to die in their house.They,re pretty spry.

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    1. My stepmom lived for years on literally coffee, vitamins and 500 calories a day ( + or _ ). I'm sure she would rival your folks for cussidness. Only slowed down and mellowed in early 70's. If we know so little about calories and nutrients, how much do we know about Gore Warming or etc.?

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