#scifi thrillers dystopian survival novels bookseries stockpiling

[brendamariesmith]

What TO Stock for An APOCALYPSE, PART THREE (Updated)

Right up there next to water, a top-priority post-apocalypse need will be FOOD.

  5.      THE FOOD you will need:

  Since most of us will be short on water, dried beans and other foods that require a lot of water for cooking may not work out too well. Dry beans also need a lot of cooking time, meaning more firewood or other fuel. Canned goods are a practical way to go (and most come with some liquid inside), though it would be hard to stock enough to last years. Plus, canned goods can get mighty unappetizing over time, and will eventually spoil.

  To survive well without getting malnourished, you’ll need protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and a little fat – the basic food groups, though meat and dairy aren’t essential. Unless you have your own well-guarded farm or hunting preserve, you can’t count on being able to eat meat. And if you’re growing your own food, in most cases you will get much more protein per acre by growing beans instead of animals. But chickens and milk goats can be very useful and will take up less space than other critters (though you’ll need to learn animal husbandry between now and the end of the modern world).

 Whole proteins are made up of eight essential amino acids. Most beans and nuts have seven of those acids, while most grains have only one. To get whole protein from beans or nuts, you need a companion grain to eat with them to make the protein complete. Think beans and rice, beans with tortillas, beans with cornbread, hummus with chips, peanut butter sandwiches (made with pancakes or biscuits cooked over an open fire).

  Soybeans have the full eight essential amino acids, but they take a lot of time and water to cook. My personal experience with them (which is extensive) is that they aren’t digestible unless they’ve been pressure-cooked for at least an hour, and pressure cookers can be dangerous and hard to come by. Soybean skins tend to plug up the vent holes. If the cooker isn’t removed from the fire immediately and the skin isn’t removed from the vent, the cooker could explode. People can get burned by the buildup of steam inside the cooker.

 Soybeans are a pain, BUT, if you need whole protein, they will provide it. The flavor is not the best, the texture can be off-putting, but they’re not bad in tortillas with salsa and fresh veggies. Once the beans are cooked, you can make decent patties out of them if you have anything to flavor them with. Some women, like me for instance, can’t eat soybeans when they’re pregnant, and soy allergies are serious issues for many. If you have a lot of water, you can make soybeans into soy milk and tofu. There’s also tempeh, the making of which is an artform.

   You can make milk out of lots of things these days: almonds, oats, rice, hemp (my fave). I don’t have a clue how to make these things, but I’m sure you can figure it out—if you get to googling while the internet still works.

In my novel, prepper Grandma Bea stocks barrels and bags of many kinds of beans, flours, oatmeal, rice, sugar, cooking oil, peanut butter, sugar, salt and pepper. She has cases of canned goods—mostly soup, chili, and stew—and cases of powdered milk and eggs.

 6.      GROWING FOOD

If you want to get serious about providing for long-term survival (or if you just want to live more sustainably), you will need to do more than stockpile food. You need to set yourself up with ways to grow it. Think garden beds full of rich soil, compost piles, bee hives for honey and pollination, fruit trees and vines, and ways to scare off the birds. And you need to stockpile seeds that suit your soil, drainage, and growing season, along with plenty of organic fertilizer and the tools and equipment to help it all grow. You’ll need to get creative about where and how to grow this food: in your suburban yard, inside in front of your windows, in pots and buckets and barrels, on rooftops and ledges, along fences, etc., etc.

     My main character, Bea, has fresh tomatoes, peppers, squash, greens, purple hull peas, and herbs growing in pots and in her garden. She has a second garden full of root veggies, and she has a bee hive installed in an exterior wall. A few neighbors have chickens. One family has some rabbits. When the neighbors finally get organized, Bea has plans for urban farming that involve building gardens and compost piles in yards and vacant lots, and later plowing up front yards for cornfields, and the neighborhood park to try growing winter wheat and other grains in the scorching Texas heat.

 7.      STORING & PRESERVIING FOOD

 In my novel, Bea has a root cellar full of root veggies: russet and sweet potatoes, carrots, garlic, and onions. Beets don’t grow so well in Texas as far as I know (meaning, I don’t actually know). Turnips are, well, turnips, but they last a long time in cool, dry storage. Parsnips, rutabagas, and Jerusalem artichokes are other good root veggies to grow and store.

Root cellars are awesome if you can keep them from filling with ground water. Being under the earth tends to keep the temperatures nice for storage of food with a long shelf-life, like root veggies and—for a lesser length of time—compact cabbages, pumpkins, and winter squash (butternut, acorn, etc.)

Though impractical when water is scarce, home canning is also a good way to store food. Many foods can be dried, which only requires water for cleaning before and after drying. Of course, you’ll need water to reconstitute most dried foods before you eat them, with dried fruit and jerky being the primary exception to this, and field corn, which can be ground into cornmeal.

On top of growing and preserving food, you also need to know how to preserve seed, since there will be no seed catalogues, no seed companies. The Seed Savers Exchange is one of many good resources for this: https://www.seedsavers.org/how-to-save-seeds.

Remember that you will also need biodiversity (more than one kind of seed for each veggie) to give you better odds that some types will survive a blight, fungus, or insect attack. And you need to protect your pollinators: bees, wasps, butterflies, etc. Know your bugs and learn to distinguish the helpful ones from the harmful ones. Crickets can be eaten (sorry, but you may need to know this someday).

  I could go on about food forever (I already have, lol), but going further would be beyond the scope of this blog. My advice is to get busy studying up.

If all else fails, you can follow the example of Mad Max in ROAD WARRIOR and chow down on yummy dog food.

   We may find ourselves eating this poor guy out of our backyard someday:

 To see how my unlikely apocalyptic hero, seventy-year-old Bea Crenshaw, shepherds her grandkids and neighbors through the aftermath of a solar pulse, check out IF DARKNESS TAKES US on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Takes-Brenda-Marie-Smith-ebook/dp/B07WK9BQHN or order it from your favorite indie bookstore:

The sequel, IF THE LIGHT SHOULD COME, will be out June 2021 from SFK Press.

 STAY TUNED FOR FUTURE INSTALLMENTS OF “WHAT TO STOCK FOR AN APOCALYPSE.”

NEXT UP: SOLAR & WIND POWER