quest for food-scenario

[wareagle69]

well i wonder how many who have ever been in a shtf scenario ever thought it would happen to them

[crashdive123]

well i wonder how many who have ever been in a shtf scenario ever thought it would happen to them

Very true. That's why we all prepare as best we can for what is most probable.

[wareagle69]

can't argue with that logic
what else ya got?

[Batch]

Has anybody lived through a real long term SHTF scenario. I've been through hurricanes. But, honestly a week or two with out power is far from a SHTF. Even folks who had everything taken from them had folks that would help.

I have always had good times and bad. Sometimes the good times are a result of what initially looked like a bad thing.

I was fighting a decent size gator that had just dug in and a thunder storm hit us hard. We are in a metal boat and I finally pushed the issue and the gator got away cause the hook straightened. We are riding back in this freezing rain with thunder in lightning reminding us very frequently that we are in a metal boat in the middle of gosh darned no where. LOL

I said golly gee this is BS! My buddy says, "You know what they do when its raining like this in Russia?"

I said, "No, what?"

He says, "They let it rain. That's all they can do."

When the storm your preparing for comes. You may or may not be prepared for what it brings. But, each of us will live our lives. The other option sucks.

[SARKY]

well i wonder how many who have ever been in a shtf scenario ever thought it would happen to them

As an instructor, the first thing I teach my students is "I wish it wasn't like this" . I then tell them, now that you've gotten that out of the way, let's get down to the business of survival.

[SARKY]

Iwould say that the important part of this scenario is the preperation. Check out what game is available, what wild edibles are around and where you can get water.
For me, I am butted up to the Oakland hills, so there are deer and other game. Many of the weeds that people are always wacking down are edible and I have enough land to grow a fairly large garden as do the neighbors on either side of me. Heck I was up at the range and the deer and turkeys were comming down on the range as we were shooting. As for water, I have storage barrels and a rain catchment system. If need be there is a college campus just up the street and they have a pool, large green house and other amenities for a nice survival retreat (except that they are right next to a freeway and still in an urban enviroment). Once the population is trimmed down the campus would make a good place to settle for about 100 or so people.

[Rick]

I think the urban environment offers a lot that most folks overlook. Once you get away from the obvious stuff like stores and warehouses there are an unbelievable number of places you can acquire both food and water. Just sit down and start making a list of all the places you can think of. Restaurants, cafeterias, vending machine companies, trucking companies, railroad yards, homes of those that bug out, hospitals, nursing homes, salvation army, food pantries, and on and on. Those are just some quick examples. While everyone is arm wrestling over the last Hershey bar at their neighborhood Safeway, you can be packing your car with cases of food from the semi left parked down the street. Improvise and adapt is the message.

[coldlightning]

lol, reminds me of my teenage semi-homeless days. the donut shop hangout always provided food, in the way of free donut holes. the staff said they weren't allowed to give us any food, but ,hint hint, when they threw it away in the dumpster at the end of the night, well.... so we opened the trash bags full of donuts and trash, and took the sealed, unopened, still fresh-but-unsellable-by-law, bags of donut holes. like i said, lol!

[kyratshooter]

They call it prepping don't they?

That means that one does not wait until the last minute for anything. That year of food (don't tell me you only have the BOB!) gives you one year to prepare for the second year. If you wait until you are out of food and start roaming around you blew it.

If you do not know how to dehydrate food without power now is the time to learn. If you do not know how to wrangle a heard of goats, trap rats or skin and cook a dog now is the time to learn. If you have not figured out how to cook in severe situations now is the time to learn.

What will they do in the cities? Check out some history. We have modern precident. The Battle of Linengrad, Stalingrad, Hurricane Katrina. In the 1880s Memphis was quarinteened for Yellow Fever, sorrounded by troops with orders to shoot anyone leaving. Everyone will be ordered to leave or ordered to stay.

When Huricane Ike hit Cincinnati the power was out for 5 days. Even though the temperature was mild people were on the verge of panic as the ice supplies ran out and the beer trucks could not deliver. They never thought about the water supply. The entire city was 12 hours away from being out of water when the pumping stations regained power. 1,000,000 have a 5 day water supply, then the riots start. Then the disease starts. Within 2 weeks 25% will be dead. Within 2 months 30-50%.

Did they learn? NO! This is the same bunch that whines and expects the city to supply them with firewood when the show storms knock out the power every year.

We are the preparers. No matter what anyone thinks of us and our ideas. We are simply doing now what everyone that went through the Great Depression and survived did. The reminants of that generation do not belittle us.

[Rick]

Now wait a minute. Don't anyone go off whacking dogs just to get in practice. And don't be herdin' anyone else's goats either. You gotta be careful, Rat. Some of these yoyo's already had their guns out. Didn't you 2D?

[KhonHd]

I live on the Ottawa river. Across the river is Quebec, where there are no homes for... well util you go over the top and come back down at Russia. Lots of bush and Algonquin park to the south.

While there would be a lot of people hunting the land, I don't think there would be a lot willing to go the distance and hunt for a couple days. There are a lot of road hunters these days that are too lazy to get off their ATV. Overweight out of shape hunters with no ATV equals less competition. Also, I don't think a lot would hunt across the river. If they did, there is lots of land.

I'm not a Davy Crockett but I do hunt (walking, not on an ATV), fish and look for wild eatables. If push came to shove I wouldn't think twice of eating bugs and worms to keep me going while I hunted (but I do prefer apples and granola bars as a snack).

As far as the food lines and been seen out. I am 6" 192 lbs which is an ok weight but I would intensionally drop 10-15 lbs so I looked thiner in order not to raise suspicion about my food reserves and harvested food.

Probably wouldn't look good if I was putting on weight... while everyone was loosing.

Having said all this I really need to get my reserves built up more... a lot more

[Rick]

The flip side of that is if you look healthy folks might be afraid to tackle you since they are on the puny side.

[kyratshooter]

I did not intend anyone to start boiling water to poach the neighbors poodle. I am simply a historian that has studied many things other people have little interest in. I also remember things others seem to have forgotten.

Due to the records kept by physicians during the Warsaw Rising during WW2 and the receint medical work done combating and treating anorexia, we have a great store of information about just how long one can stay alive on minimal caloric intake.

More people will be killed doing stupid things to get food than will die from actual starvation. That includes wasting more energy to obtain the food than the food provides.

Think about it from a "weight loss program" attitude. How hard is it to lose weight on purpose? How long would it take us to reach "ideal weight"? If I had to drop down to 1000 calories a day it would take me 6 months to "lose down to what I never should have been up to", as long as I was sitting around doing nothing.

This is one positive aspect of bugging in. If you have a "months worth" of food at 3,000 calories a day, and strech it out to three months at 1,000 you will probably not be more than 10 pounds underweight if you started at normal. If you are running around like a wild man carrying a 50 pound BOB and trying to scrounge food you will be dead from starvation in a month. Or probably killed by some farmer protecting his chickenhouse. SHTF you are stealing food and food means life. Protecting the food is protecting your life.

[Rick]

Anyone seen my dog?

[Sourdough]

The flip side of that is if you look healthy folks might be afraid to tackle you since they are on the puny side.

I Figure to eat as well as possible, and if I get any Bull'snot, I'll say, "I am sorry you don't know how to subsist, what you got to trade, maybe I could teach you".

[crashdive123]

I Figure to eat as well as possible, and if I get any Bull'snot, I'll say, "I am sorry you don't know how to subsist, what you got to trade, maybe I could teach you".

Just leave a few skeletal remains strewn aroung the property - it'll do two things.

1) People won't question why you are putting on weight.
2) People won't bother you.

[randyt]

I curious have anybody seeded or developed wild foods?
the reason I ask is within a couple miles of me there are a few backwaters and I have thought about seeding some wild rice. not sure how this would work out but if I could get it going it would be a good source of food. I should drag a canoe back to some of those places and may find out there is wild rice there after all.

[LowKey]

You keep coming back to cities being full of food, restaurants, schools, business cafeterias...

Assuming you can get past the roaming gangs, most of that stuff will be spoiled by the time you would be able to get to it. It's a really sad fact that a lot of restaurants re-heat prepared food. Most of the chain restaurants and most of the schools re-heat packaged pre-prepared food that comes in from a supplier. The power goes, all that becomes so much garbage. Gone are the days where things are made from scratch, except maybe the high-end restaurants.

I once worked in a 24 hour grocery store as an overnight baker while in college. There was a threat of a bad snowstorm and I had one gentleman come in behind the counter and demand I sell him eggs from the bakeshop fridge. All of the eggs were gone out on the shelves and he wanted those bakeshop eggs and he knew they were in there. Goddam glad security was on the ball and took him away. But there are no eggs. All that bakeshop stuff is either frozen dough or par-baked and frozen. All we did was proof it and bake it, or thaw it and finish it. No scratch ingredients.

I cannot even begin to fathom why New Englanders go out and buy Milk, Eggs, and Bread in preparation for a snowstorm. What do they do, make French toast?

Anyway, as far as preps, you aren't likely to run out of food in 2 years. But if the government says 2 years they mean at least 4. Plan beyond what they are telling you.

Grym brings up a point I had missed. I do a lot of canning. I have a backstash of lids and have been trying to figure out how to afford some of those European canning jars that have the old-style reusable rubber gaskets. @#$@-ing expensive! But, unless I learn how to make vinegar and/or have a huge sugar source, I darn well better invest in a pressure canner and figure out an outdoor kitchen that'll burn hot for the amount of time you need for pressure-canning. You can't boiling-water-bath-can non-acidic stuff like meats and most vegetables. I do have a book on making vinegar. Haven't tried it yet. And Honey works for sugar, if you can get it.

It all depends on where you live whether folks are going to band together and help each other, or eat you for dinner. When we were without power here for 12 days during an ice storm (the authorities kept telling us it would be 4 or 5 days, then always 'maybe tomorrow' for 12 days), there were reports up and down the valley that generators were being stolen. The thieves would listen for them then wait for the people to go to work (?!) or leave to get supplies and just walk off with them. People were stealing gas, as no stations had power to run the pumps and no backup generators (!?!). People were stealing firewood... And this is rural. I have no doubt that people would come with guns looking to steal food if it came to down to it.

I have a lake for fish. It would be fished out quickly if people stayed. There are several wildlife preserves around but there are also a lot more people with guns out here than in the nanny-state cities. And more apt to protect their hunting grounds with them.
Squirrels. Chipmunks. Rabbits. Even the pretty birds at the birdfeeder are all fair game. Wild edibles, a little more difficult. The patches I've developed of wild edibles in the yard aren't nearly big enough yet to sustain any length of time. Most of where I live is overgrown hardwood forest. Not a lot of understory. Lots of acorns. Every other year. Best bet is walking the power lines for berries and such and avoid the roads.
I'd go down swinging, that's for sure.

[welderguy]

I think the urban environment offers a lot that most folks overlook. Once you get away from the obvious stuff like stores and warehouses there are an unbelievable number of places you can acquire both food and water. Just sit down and start making a list of all the places you can think of. Restaurants, cafeterias, vending machine companies, trucking companies, railroad yards, homes of those that bug out, hospitals, nursing homes, salvation army, food pantries, and on and on. Those are just some quick examples. While everyone is arm wrestling over the last Hershey bar at their neighborhood Safeway, you can be packing your car with cases of food from the semi left parked down the street. Improvise and adapt is the message.

maybe I miss read this , but wouldnt this be concidered looting?

[welderguy]

[QUOTE=kyratshooter;234804]I did not intend anyone to start boiling water to poach the neighbors poodle. [QUOTE]

My neighbors yapping little retarded bark at dirt crossedeyed crap on my porch steps chihuahua is the first to go if I run out of food, as a matter of fact it may be first to go in the stew pot so I dont run out of food.