freeze dried dingus

FREEZE DRIED DINGUS

Have you all heard the phrase “a bag of dinguses”?  Okay, it’s the other “D” word, but I don’t wish to offend those of the gentler constitutions and more refined sensibilities who wouldn’t say “crap” if they had a mouthful of it.  Probably the same types that slavishly lather antibacterial gel on their hands, then take an antibacterial wipe and clean the shopping cart handle, then go walking around the store touching everything else other, dirtier, more unrefined and of the lower classes people already touched as they picked up a product, looked at the ingredients, disliked what they saw or noticed the price and then placed it back.  If you touch anything in a store, you’ve just negated the whole antibacterial wipe process!  Hell, the cart was just out in the sun or freezing cold, which did more to kill germs than you did with your stinking wipe, and all the germs are lurking inside.  Or, on the bottom of your shoe.  Do you take your shoes off with an antibacterial wipe?  No?  Why are you even reading this?  You are going to DIE!  Germs will KILL you!  Run!  Run away!

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Anyway, a bag of dinguses is most emphatically NOT a good thing.  When you are told to eat a bag of them, or when you exclaim, hey, what just happened now is a big old bag of dinguses, you are expressing a very undesirable state of affairs ( or wishing it upon another ).  And yet, people go buy several cases of #10 cans of freeze dried dinguses, and think it is a good thing.  A #10 can is FAR, far worse than a bag of dinguses.  It is more expensive and lasts longer!  Now, I’m not here to shrill an all wheat diet like I normally do.  I want to talk about what is in a years supply of freeze dried food and offer a much better menu, consisting of more calories, and far more meat, for the same price.  Freeze dried foods are not the worst survival supply you can buy.  That horror would be a $5,000 fifty caliber sniper rifle or a FLIR scope.  They have a niche purpose ( the freeze dried foods, not the rifle or scope ).  If you are older than the hill Jesus was buried in, they weigh  almost nothing.  So if you are crippled you can carry around the cans easily.  Me?  If I was all crippled?  An AR-15 with a butt ton of loaded magazine ( or better yet, an AK-47.  You can’t see very far, so you might as well get the one that won’t jam ), a nice supply of beef jerky ( not that weird turkey or pork jerky, that they now sell because beef is getting scarce-thanks a lot, Texas!, but perhaps a few cases of that shelf stable bacon too ), and a few bottles of whiskey.  Come the time, kill as many as you can and go out with no pain.

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Freeze dried does last thirty years so at the end of that three decades you have actually saved money, usually ( from buying the food at lower prices due to inflation, and lack of replacement cost of other methods ).  But, oy, the up front costs.  For $300, I could have a year supply of butter.  Granted, it is half the amount as fresh, but considering how much longer the grid is going to last, still not a bad trade-off.  So, yes, despite all my spoofing, freeze dried isn’t worthless.  But it is a very expensive convenience food.  Convenience being the operative word.  By mixing a bit of labor to replace cost, you get much more for your dollar.  Because you know what you are getting for convenience?  A near vegetarian diet.  If I wanted no meat in my diet, I’d rather spend $300 than $1500.  Which is what the cheapest yearly supply is for freeze dried ( with one case of #10 cans of wheat kernels ).  But there is no real meat and no fat.  So I’d be better off with $300 worth of wheat and shortening.  The only thing you sacrifice is a bigger range of food.

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The freeze dried food isn’t even healthy!  Oh, sure, there are plenty of fruits and vegetables.  And then they give you TVP!  Textured vegetable protein is the worst thing to eat!  It is soy, and soy, if not fermented, is terrible for you.  Remember my acorn analogy?  Eating soy without proper preparation is like eating acorns without removing the poisons first ( tannin? ).  I don’t even think the soy is cooked long enough, which is a minimum with all beans or they pass through your digestive system without releasing their nutrients.  So, you take the worst bean and prepare it the worst way, and you call that sufficient protein.  Hippies had a lot of good ideas going for them philosophically, but nutritionally they were morons.  Soy is poison.  If that isn’t bad enough, the menu includes margarine, fake cheese, and white foods such as instant potatoes, pasta and cream of wheat.  But they throw in oatmeal and soup, for variety!  Wow, why that is certainly worth the extra money!  I’m not saying freeze dried foods are bad, but I am saying commercially packaged survival one year foods are full of crap and a lot doesn’t need to be at freeze dried prices.

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The pasta, cream of wheat, rice and oats, popcorn and instant potatoes, do they really gain all that much from being nitrogen packed in a #10 can?  Are you really worse off by placing the dry goods in a Mason glass jar and vacuum sealing it with that jar attachment doohickey on your bag sealer/vacuum packer that is around $50?  It is convenient to have all these in #10 cans, but is it necessary?  Do you even want all those foods in your one year food supply?  If so, why not go in bulk and Mylar bag them in buckets?  Why #10 cans?  Unless you are THAT old and weak, or crippled, and we already covered that plan.  Jerky, whiskey and semi-auto.  See, I’m not completely opposed to semi-auto.  And if you are planning on moving, and want the light weight of #10 cans, aren’t you worried about damaging them?  If you damage a can, there goes $15-$20.  If you damage a whole case of Mason jars, every single jar, it is the same loss, more or less.  Is a five gallon bucket of pasta all that heavy?  I suppose the spaghetti noodles might poke through the Mylar.  Are other noodles acceptable, instead?

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All these questions should be highlighting how you have been hoodwinked into buying convenience alone, at the high price of dollars, the high price of nutrition-less foods and the high price of elimination of animal protein from your diet.  Sure, you can get higher priced plans with freeze dried meat.  But isn’t $1500 high enough as it is?  How many years of food can you buy at $2k each, or $2,500, or $3k?  I’m not discounting the $1500 a year.  I personally would not pay that much.  But if you are going to, don’t buy a crap menu.  Buy much better food.  For the same price.  The freeze dried menu is ONLY good for the fruits and vegetables.  All the other food is calorie only white foods, or worse, fake soy meat, with only a little fat, and that the worst fat of all-margarine.  You would be better off just buying shortening.  Both shortening and margarine are made with the same hydrogenated process, turning fat one step away from plastic.  You might as well buy the cheaper one so you get more of it.  Margarine is mostly flavoring, water, texturing and a smidge of fat.  Shortening is all fat.  Which you need, especially after the apocalypse.

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The one thing the freeze dried menu doesn’t have is wheat.  If you are not gluten intolerant, it is a good thing to have.  Not to the extent I recommend, perhaps,  but enough to give you plenty of energy ( carbs alone, nor protein alone, doesn’t necessarily work for most people, but a combination is wonderful ).  One pound of wheat a day, plus a pound of meat, with fat, is going to get you through most days unless you are actually digging ditches ( my wheat only diet is a core calorie, emergency only, better than nothing diet.  It requires you to sprout some kernels, and forage and trap if possible, with a minimum amount of fat from shortening.  $20 in fat could make the difference in you surviving the winter.  Another $10 in vitamins would also make a huge difference.  In theory.  I’m not sure how many people have been forced to rely on mostly just vitamins to actually test their performance.  For all we know, they could be placebos ).  The freeze dried menu is 1500 calories a day ( actually, something like 1460, but I’m being extra generous ).  I’m suggesting a 2500 calorie diet.  For the same price.  Full of meat.

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For $275 you can buy feed store wheat kernels and put them into buckets, for 400 pounds ( a pound a day with extra for sprouts ).  If you are forced to buy through Wal-Mart, the Aguson Farms buckets at $36 for 25 pounds, the cost goes way up to $575.  Some of you have no choice, given the lack of feed stores in your urban areas ( heck, even in Podunk Texas I had to drive thirty miles to find one, pre-Y2K.  But once there, damn!, $5 for a fifty pound sack.  The good old days ).  Now, for meat, as per previous discussions, you are going to need to Mason jar pressure can.  Sorry.  No convenience there.  But REAL meat.  Every night!  I’d rather have meat every night than soup and TVP nuggets.  Once you buy your jars, a one time purchase with just occasional replacements due to damage, then you merely need new lids every year.  What I would suggest is buying the years worth of jars and rotate.  Use a weeks worth of meat, can another batch every weekend.  You rotate and hence always have a years worth of meat.  No, it won’t last thirty years, but you aren’t paying the inflation tax since you are eating as you are buying.

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I’m not sure if you can buy a pallet and get a discount, but most times you can get a case at the grocery store for $11.  Less than a buck a jar with lid and ring.  $365 for a years worth of jars.  It will take up a lot of room.  But you double duty here.  You don’t need a freezer of meat ( just enough to buy sales and can as needed ).  You don’t have to worry about a power outage ( saving on buying a generator ), nor power to cook your meat that night, nor stocking freeze dried meat.  Two bucks a pound the average price ( at least for now, buying family packs on sale ) gets you a years worth of meat for $550.  Now add your fat.  Twelve cans of shortening, one a month, is only $40.  Go hog wild canning butter with $160 ( three pounds a month, the extra jars included in the price ).  I would, personally, feel safe enough pressure canning my butter.  But that is a call you have to make as it is not recommended.  There is the issue of fat corroding the sealing ring, but other than that I think you’d kill all nasties.  Let me tell you a short story.  True story.  I was just at my B-POD and ran across a stick of salted butter.  At the end of summer, the temperature down there is around seventy degrees at most.  The stick has been down there a year and a half.  I wouldn’t try eating it, but it had no mold and no smell.  You tell me that isn’t some storage hardy food!  I thought I had to eat up room temperature butter in two or three weeks.  I guess I was pessimistic.  Now, if you are boiling that bitch under vacuum for a half hour or whatever, do you really think it won’t store long ( as long as the seal lasts )?

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If you are really paranoid about canned butter ( to be clear, the old discounted for safety reasons method was a bath canning.  I’m saying, go with pressure canning ), you can buy that in freeze dried form.  $24 buys you four pounds of reconstituted butter, so $6 a pound.  Under this budget, you can get seven cans, a half pound every other week.  Not bad.  You can it yourself, three pounds a month.  Freeze dried, a pound a month.  Not great, but you have plenty of other fat either plan.  So, our totals are $575 for the expensive wheat.  $365 Mason jars.  $550 meat and $200 fat and butter.  That is $1700.  Sorry, slightly over the $1500 for the freeze dried, unless you live near a feed store, then your total is $1400 ( I would NOT recommend Tattler re-useable lids to save money, as it seems a 10-20% seal failure rate is common ).  If you average the two, the one Wal-Mart wheat the other home canned wheat, you average about what the freeze dried costs.  I call it close enough.  And remember, many more critical calories and the right kind of calories, no processed foods other than shortening.  Granted, very little variety.  No comfort foods like fruit out of season.  But the one thing preppers are supposed to be wonderful at is gardening.  And gardening, with spouting and drying getting you through the winter, should be how you get your produce.  Fresh, not out of a can.  You might claim you need the cans in case your garden fails, but ask yourself what you are eating.

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Commercial produce is grown with artificial fertilizers in dead soil, heavily sprayed with chemicals.  Then, you don’t know how much of any marginal nutrients ( remember, USDA nutritional recordings were from decades ago when the soil was much better than now ) survived the freeze drying process.  Really, how much worse off are you just taking a vitamin pill?  Add sprouts to that for the unknown micro-nutrients and the needed enzymes, and you are no worse off nutritionally.  So you rely on fresh produce grown in your healthy soil and just use vitamins and sprouts as your emergency source and you are still better off.  And the price is much better-like close to free.  For fruit, just dry your own and consume it like the meat, replacing it as you go so shelf life isn’t an issue.  And all this isn’t even touching on the “store what you eat, eat what you store”.  My plan is your actually diet.  Their plan, being freeze dried, means you CAN’T eat it daily.  My plan is for a meat fueled worker, their plan is for a bunny food, processed food fueled couch potato.  Same price.  Your choice.

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