Well preserved, high nutrient density stuff. You want the most bang for your buck.
Imo, MRE type supplies are going to be a good backstop, with the usual beans, rice, and canned veggies being your foundation. Keep multivitamins on hand, along with water purification/filtration/purification options.
Lentils. Definetly lentils.
Anything with a long shelf life that you’re already eating anyway. No point in buying food just for the apocalypse for the apocalypse to then never happen.
Also, keep in mind that water is the priority number one,
Exactly. If you buy something you eat you can build a stock where you track expiration date by batch. Eat from the batch closest to expiration. Refill when a batch is eaten up (or thrown out).
If you wanna go overkill, solar powered hydroponics (if you don’t want to settle for potatoes)
Settle for potatoes?! Potatoes would be extremely difficult to grow in an apocalyptic scenario, no? Potatoes stocks have a good shelf life and might turn into gold depending on the situation causing the food shortage.
By settle I mean hydroponics can be a ton of continous work
Not to mention that some sumbitch will just break in and steal all your stock. You’re just saving up shit for the next biggest bully.
That should be part of your plans. Which neighbors are you helping. Who knows about your stash in case you die in the disaster - hopefully they survive.
Who knows about your stash
Rule 1 of prepper club is we don’t talk about our preps IRL
People downvoting gunna get robbed
These people are still living in their nice little worlds when the apocalypse comes with their nest eggs of food thinking about how they’re gonna help their neighbors. Your whole world has been upended and you’re playing Mr Rodger’s neighborhood. Yea right!
There’s more than one apocalypse scenario to plan for. Nuclear winter is different than Balkanization is different from super-virus is different from the boot of fascism. When shit hits the fan people get tribal. We’re not building Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, we’re aware there’s going to be thieves and predators who didn’t plan and seek to steal. That’s why we built alliances with the folks already living around us, so we know who belongs, who to trust, and who to shoot when they enter our territory. We also know that worst case we will start running low. That squad of raiders coming for your stash? That’s us. One paranoid cowboy sitting on a bunker’s worth of food versus a neighborhood of mutual aid who’d been planning for this years before it happened? Thanks for the supplies, loner.
Multivitamin tablets. Not much of a meal on their own but if food availability and variety become an issue, they’ll help replace some of what you’re missing.
Vitamins degrade over time. You’ll want to make sure that what you get will actually last for the period of time when you intend to use them.
Knowledge of how to produce your own food. Unless you plan on having years worth of MREs, you’re going to run out eventually. Learn to garden so that you can just make more food.
Producing food, year round, to feed yourself/family is actually insanely difficult. Small scale farming that provides year round is no small task and generally not considered “good” advice for prepping. Do that if you want to supplement sure but you’re going to die if your only source of food is the garden in your yard. Farming is a very labor intensive and resource consuming, highly contextual skill that requires highly specific knowledge with a huge variety of variables that can also just flat out fail through no fault of your own, it’s not a safe plan for survival.
Long term shelf stable foods like rice, beans, grains, pastas, canned goods, canned protein, dried goods, dried spices/seasoning and salt all need to be stocked before you consider growing fresh food as part of the equation. Also canning/preserving food will be a huge task if you plan to rely on your own grown food, which is in and of itself a time consuming skill that requires the correct tools and knowledge to do well and safely.
If the time comes that your only food option is home grown food you’re as good as starved in basically the entirety of the US and I’m sure most other developed nations. If you happen to live in an agricultural valley that has actual real, dedicated farms with farmers who actually know how to produce food at scale you will survive longer but it will still be very difficult and social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul, go spend that time doing what the farmer needs so you can barter.
social connections would likely serve you better than wasting all your time and energy working a yard garden that produces a measly haul
Join a community garden. You get both social connections and the yard garden experience - and as a bonus, your social connections are with people who know how to grow food and can give you advice 😆
That being said, don’t be too dismissive of “supplementing” your diet. If you know what you’re doing you can grow all the fresh veggies a person needs on a few hundred square feet per person. Fresh veggies are the kind of food most vulnerable to supply chain disruptions - like if, “hypothetically”, some toddler dictator decided to throw a tantrum for no apparent reason and start a war right on top of the shipping lane that the majority of the world’s fertilizer passes through - and they’re also the most beneficial kind of food to grow yourself, because you can grow varieties optimized for taste and nutrition instead of varieties optimized for shipping and appearance on grocery store shelves.
(Book recommendation: Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World. Read the chapter on how fresh Florida tomatoes are grown and you’ll never buy anything but canned tomatoes again 😆 )
Yeah, it takes knowledge and experience. Which is why you should start gardening now, so that you’ll have those skills when they become necessary.
I knew my hundreds of hours in Rimworld would pay off eventually
Always have a psychpath in case you need to butcher people?
MREs tend to sell online for about $4 a meal.
That would mean you would spend a little over $5,000 plus tax to get a year’s supply.
Technically, you can survive off of beans and rice and a few vitamin supplements.
You could also learn how to bow hunt to supplement your food with birds and wild animals.
Slingshot (or old-school sling but they’re much harder) is probably better for small game if we’re entertaining real dystopian collapse, unless you also learn how to make arrows.
I think if we’re talking about “real dystopian collapse”, as in a major population reduction, there are going to be more leftover bullets than you could shoot in a dozen lifetimes. If you’re thinking about hunting small game, get something that shoots .22 LR, take it to the range every weekend, and don’t waste your time with slings and arrows.
And with that being said, trapping small game is more efficient than hunting with any kind of weapon, so if you wanted to learn bushcraft for hunting for food after the end, that’s where I’d start.
[off topic?]
After 9/11 some New Yorkers were carrying gas masks with them everywhere in case there was another attack.
Someone pointed out that if you were on a subway during a gas attack and you had a gas mask, you wouldn’t be killed by the gas.
Same thing with food. If people are starving and you have food, you’re going to have to deal with that.
Can you stay awake 24/7?
Okay, but if OP is primarily worried about food costing more rather than food not being available stocking up on nonperishables is legit.
True
You need to define the design event before determining what the correct course of action is. If it is a natural disaster response, you should have enough food, potable water, and fuel for a few weeks. Anything beyond that and you really need to start questioning how the assumptions affect your prep.
If you’re expecting climate change/agricultural blight, not all crops are going to go at once. You need to select foodstuffs to keep where there aren’t any equivalents in the market.
If you’re expecting long term war creating embargos, there will be a calorie deficit over months or years. You are also going to have community members and government trying to redistribute any available foodstuffs from hoarders. Unless you are very wealthy, you likely run out of food within a year unless you can grow and keep your food. Even then, you’ll likely be caught as everyone is starving and you still have some fat on you.
If you’re expecting collapse of supply chains causing mass shortages, security is going to be a major concern. That’s why people are recommending being armed and organized.
It is the reason why a lot is people don’t take preppers seriously. A sustained food shortage beyond a natural disaster is likely going to result in an issue with a lack of security or the security apparatus has a vested interest in controlling scarce resources.
Dried beans. Rice. An established fruit/vegetable garden.
What’s a good way to store dried goods like rice, beans and pasta so you have a substantial supply that you routinely top off, while eating the oldest you have in stock?
Five gallon food-grade buckets with good, tight, food-grade lids.
If you’re really tight on cash, go to restaurants or bakeries and ask if they have any that they’ll give you for free. Pickle buckets are common but will need some deodorizing.
YMMV, especially since I live in an arid climate so don’t have to worry about things like mold. We just use bins to store things like rice. We keep pasta in the packaging it comes in. Haven’t had any issues with food going bad over the years.
Dried beans and lentils and shit
If you buy dried bean and Lentils you won’t have to pay for shit, its a byproduct.
10 kg mylar bags of rice.
That will last the average adult about 20 days, and you’ll probably be constantly feeling hungry during that time. Adding a sack of dry beans would make a huge difference.
Weapons
Can’t argue with that logic.
I can. A couple of years is plenty of time to plant a garden, learn how to cook a variety of vegetarian meals using things you can grow, and if you have the space to invest in chickens or other birds for eggs. It’s also enough time to learn other skills and meet your neighbors, build up a network of trust and mutual aid, and be actually prepared for a crisis in a way that is sustainable.
And then the other people with guns will come and jack your shit.
Really? I thought the was Lemmy?
/$
Get yourself a patch of soil, even if it’s just a couple of growbags, and grow potatoes. They’re like a magical self-replicating food. When you harvest them, keep some aside to plant later. One potato produces 5-10 potatoes easily, scale up for infinite potato glitch.
If you live in the UK or EU, you can even literally just plant ones you buy in the vegetable section in the supermarket. In the US, they often treat these with a growth inhibitor to extend the shelf-life, they won’t grow as easily.
Seed potatoes are guaranteed to produce healthy plants, but cost slightly more. You can buy them from garden centres or online.
Growing enough potatoes to sustain yourself much less multiple people, a plant that needs 90-120 days between planting and harvest, isn’t a reliable plan. It’s definitely one of the best options for supplementing fresh foods but it absolutely should not be the foundation of a persons survival prep.
Oh, yeah - I 100% agree. I was just trying to convey how ludicrously easy it is to grow your own. There’s no way you should base an entire survival strategy on just potatoes, despite how plausible Matt Damon made it seem.
Duckweed and algae are much easier to grow and grow a hell of a lot faster. They can also be used to clean your water.
OH!
Books on local flora that cover what is edible. Lots of shit that grows in the wild or green spaces is edible (often after some preparation like blanching or roasting.)
Canned goods. Beans in particular are pretty versatile.
Plus, anything with long shelf life, like pasta, dry noodles, flour, sugar, etc.
Guns
Can’t eat bullets. Enough people already have guns, so you’re more likely to be shot if you try anything.
You have more faith in humanity than I do if you think a stockpile of resources won’t need defense
There are two schools of thought when it comes to firearms. One is I am defending, the other is I am taking. Often times those who suggest guns are in the latter camp.
