#I was like what if chickens were 75 lbs and started wanting to eat humans

[fox-bright]

Watching the H5N1 stuff get worse and worse--I'm hoping we have until late next year before it goes reliably human-human, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was this winter--and not being able to do much makes me anxious, so I've been composing lists of stuff to do. I keep thinking, if this were August, 2019, and I knew covid was coming, what would I prepare? If this one goes off like the scientists think it might, it'll be much worse than covid.

Right now, I'm concentrating on food. My plan is to have enough hunker down supplies by mid-September that if things go bad in the normally-scheduled October-February flu season, we'll be okay simply not leaving the house at all. There are only two of us here now, and if things go bad there may be as many as four (as I have two separate friends I'd push hard to come stay here with us), so I need to make sure we have 4 meals x howevermany days I choose. I'm building up to six months, but I'm beginning the plan at three. While a lot of Serious Prepper lists have pretty generous caloric allowances, the MFH and I eat pretty light, and we're both smaller than the average adult human, which does give us even more squeak room here.

We started out with dry staples--bread flour, AP flour, semolina, rice, beans, pasta, lentils, powdered milk--though I have still to get powdered eggs (I'll dehydrate those myself), more dry beans (I'm going to use up a lot of what we have when I do my canning run for the winter, and so far I haven't been able to get my hands on kidney beans in any decent amounts), quinoa, and one more kind of pasta. Right now we have about 2/3 of what I'd want; we'll be holding things at this level, replacing staples as we use them, and if things look more serious we'll do another big shop and give ourselves additional stock of the AP flour, the bread flour, the rice (which we already buy in 40-50 lb bags anyway, we're Asian), the dry milk.

Then there's the perishable stuff; yesterday, the MFH and I took advantage of some very nice sales and got seventy pounds of meat for two hundred and twelve dollars. Beef brisket for stew, pork butt for sweet molasses chili, ground beef for hotter chili, pork loin for white bean soup. Still have to get chicken (which was pretty much sold out at our bulk place) for chicken soup (to be pressure canned), chicken and mushroom cream soup (to be vacuum-packed and frozen).

Very very soon it'll be time to harvest my leeks and my butternut squashes, for leek and potato soup (either finished with cream, blended to a smooth-ish consistency and frozen, or *not* blended down, and just socked away in pressure-canned Ball jars without the cream added; will it take me longer to thaw it, or to take my immersion blender to the hot individual meals later on?) and canned butternut for baking with or making soup or chili or making pasta sauce.

I might can a bunch of just potatoes, too, to keep 'em shelf stable (plus that front-loads a lot of the work of producing a meal later).

So I need to buy onions and carrots and potatoes and celery and garlic and mushrooms and corn, cream, red wine, tomato paste (because my vines got blight this year, sigh--I've managed to can one single run of tomato sauce and that's IT), ten dozen fresh eggs to dehydrate and powder and store in the fridge in case of egg shortages, several pounds of beans to be thrown into the chilis and...hm...fifteen pounds more, twenty pounds more, to have on hand? And then for non-canning purposes we'll need butter, oil, white vinegar (I've used a lot of it for pickles this year), various Asian food staples like black and rice vinegars, oyster sauce, black mushrooms and so on. As for pre-made, mass-produced foods, I'll probably make another post about them later.

While this is more than I'd generally stock in a single season, I do generally put about 100 quarts of home-canned food by a year, and I never keep less than 75-100lb of flour on hand anyway because of how frequently I make bread. So though it sounds like a lot up front, it's not hoarder level; everything I stock will be eaten, some of it pretty much immediately (the beef stew is so good). And putting it all by now means that we'll be less of a burden on our community safety net, if push comes to shove. When the covid pandemic hit I had dozens of jars of food on the shelf already, which gave me a little peace when things were looking scary. We were able to share some of our stores with people who hadn't had the great privilege of long afternoons spent seeing to the personal stores. That's a better option, to my mind, than needing to panic-shop right as things start getting a little wild.

Basically, if things go bad, we'll have food for a while. And if things don't go bad, we'll have food for a while. It's win-win. And it keeps the floor under my feet when I'm feeling unsteady, to be able to sneak down into the cool, still basement and look at row on row of gently gleaming jars of food security.