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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