Planning for keto or high protein during Winter 2021 with the concern economy, availability, etc. will make my normal foods gone or unaffordable

survival-prep

(PJ) #41

Hello again,

Fortunately I don’t have one, nor would I require one in that circumstance. But since most prep goods are either pure carbs (I’m willing to suffer that, just looking for the best of the worst) or rice/wheat based (I can’t eat grain proteins they make me sick), I figured other people prepare for winter also so they might have ideas.

I would starve with the cats and dog before eating them, but that doesn’t keep the neighbor’s roosters safe, heh. Actually I’m kidding. The nice thing about Oklahoma is everybody is armed. Nobody’s going to be stealing each other’s food or there’ll be only half as many people to feed before long.

I love Oklahoma, did I mention that. I’m from California originally. I loved Texas too but when I became a single mom my dad lived here so I moved. This is the NE corner so it’s green country, rivers and lakes, it’s the flat edge of the Ozarks, not the dust bowl of the rest of the state.

Yes I spend a stunning amount of money I can’t much afford on feeding my pets (+ some cat litter) and vet and so on. It costs to take care of animals decently. Every pet I have is a rescue, often from years of severe malnourishment or mistreatment, so I am more concerned about them than me most the time. Well not to the extreme of course since we do get to the ‘put the oxygen mask on yourself first’ level at some point, they’d starve without me…

LOL. I don’t know how I manage to inspire such inference in you, I only used the term country because you had and I was thinking more along the lines of ‘not on the coast.’ I am not rural. :slight_smile: I live in a city of about 15,000 pop, I live on a frontage road off our Main Street (the old Route 66, now Hwy 69), we are a small city but the county seat. Within <1 block from me are 5 fast food places, 2 small restaurants, 1 tiny grocer (the only one walmart didn’t kill), a gas station and its convenience store, and a fire station. I live on a 2-lot plot close between other houses the same, all ~1951 badly designed small boxes. I lack a basement, storm shelter, pantry, any kind of hall/front/back closet, or decent fencing. I do have a covered screened front porch and a 1-car attached garage. I wish I had a lot more property so I could have more long-term food-related things, but I admit keeping up even the property I have is a real pain in the ass so I’m not complaining.

Well my neighbors and I help each other all the time. A high tornado hit my property couple years ago, did a variety of damage, my neighbors (two men) showed up with chainsaws and unburied my van from the massive tree rubbish, got the gigantic limb out that was thrown through my (brand new, gah!) porch door, cleaned up the backyard everything back there was pretzel’d. They mow for me sometimes out of kindness. If I wasn’t a spice freak, and this region didn’t have the culinary palate of kindergarten paste, I’d be taking them food regularly. Any emergency that happens to anyone we all pitch in, so if it were to be a really unusually bad situation, we’d be sharing whatever food we had. I’m certainly hoping nothing gets THAT bad.

It’s more like just affording food will suck and/or the shelves will be nearly bare. Now that I’ve seen that happen, and watching the world (nearly with my hands over my eyes at this point), I just feel like I’d be an idiot not to be decently prepared. Especially since I have a daughter, SIL and grandson about six blocks away and parents five blocks away and who knows what their situation would be in that case also.

No worries, it’s kinda funny, I’m sure I’ve just presented it all poorly! I appreciate the advice, from you and everyone, this has been great.

Best,
PJ


#42

Not for me! All my macros should be minimized and I typically eat too much fat and twice as much protein than my need this way… And more carbs than I should but that varies a lot, I have very cute carnivore-ish days.

Eating organs is a very common, popular and traditonal thing in my country and I like some of them but pork on sale isn’t much more expensive than chicken liver bought at the butcher (where everything is more expensive)… Chicken thighs on sale (and they are on sale all the time…) are way cheaper than chicken liver but they are tasteless while liver is tasty, I just can’t eat much of it. I imagine very few people can use it as an important staple but it still can help a lot and nothing stop us to mix liver or some other organ and muscle meat, I play with that lately when I am bored of both, they are more interesting together.

I don’t fully disagree but I wouldn’t say that though it’s complex and hard to say… No one can live on the cheapest carbs alone for very long… Chicken and some kinds of fat is cheaper than beans here - okay, beans are expensive, we almost never eat them (okay, we could afford it but why when it’s easier and cheaper to use some other food? we do like to spare money if we can as we are quite poor even in this not rich country), split peas are, that price is just impossible to beat. About $1/kg here for an easy, protein rich food! The cheapest chicken I can buy is $0.5/kg (on sale, at least) and it’s half bone though that’s useful to make soups… But the chicken has lots of water and way less calories and protein. The former can be helped with some coconut oil or lard though…
But people obviously buy way more expensive carbs and many other things even if they are poor and eat high-carb. And if those items are mostly carbs, I can’t just compare them with some good protein saying they are cheaper because it’s only calorie wise (that’s where split peas are shining, they are cheap and has lots of protein, not complete but that can be helped if someone wants to eat only plants. not needed as much if we simply add animal protein too but need excess protein for satiation). We need various nutrients, satiation, even variety unless we reach the state where we don’t care just need food. I only had that once in my life but I had no food anyway… If I add carbs, I must add a ton of extra protein, more fats and more protein as well to feel balanced, yeah, carbs don’t really worth it for me - but I probably would eat cheapest using legumes and gluten and my beloved animal protein sources. Keeping my woe okay-ish is basic so I don’t care how cheap a bad woe can be (zero cost, obviously, total starvation, nothing beats that price wise but we need more than that).
It’s individual anyway, it’s important how well we can function with carbs, whether they induce hunger or make us nicely satiated… My SO would spend way more time on a keto woe while for me keto is the cheapest by far - especially carnivore. If I eat bread, that makes my woe more expensive while it makes his cheaper…

I wonder if it got chaotic, I rewrote parts and it’s late. But I thought a lot about these things.

Not silly for the ones who need keto but yep, the others should do what they can.
My plan B is keto with plants.
My plan C is low-carb.
High-carb would be a shock to my system, carb poisoning and whatnot (I can handle carbs way better than many ketoers, it seems but I have my limits) so first I would try to fast as much as possible (I would even slim down and my new, smaller body wouldn’t even need as many food… though that’s not a nice thought for me now, even being poor. I already have a small energy need) and if I don’t have the fat to continue and my situation is still so bad, then I would go back to… moderate carb. I can’t imagine high carb could be cheaper for me than that, proibably the opposite but it’s me (and many others who overeat carbs. I do it with the cheapest simplest ones if I am hungry. legumes are okay but rice would be worthless to me. I would eat gluten but others would have problems with that, each to their own. I would get my cheap protein with some carbs in the mix and would use fat for calories).

I have a small garden and it produces an insane amount of wood to burn… It piled up as we use it very occasionally but it would last for a long while. But beans take forever, I wouldn’t use that, expensive too (or tasteless). I don’t have THAT much wood and patience if I need to cook that way, after all. Alas, I couldn’t even just cook a lot of legumes as my SO can’t eat more than a little a day and I surely would eat less… At least after the first day…
But it’s a moot point as I don’t survive lack of electricity. The lack of water would be annoying enough (we had that for weeks last year, it wasn’t fun - or cheap to make water again) but no internet? I would cease to exist. I was already extremely addicted to it 26 years ago and it got way worse since then.
And cooking outside every day…
Well I would freeze to death in the house anyway… As we only can heat with electricity… (Actually I would survive that. Less so the knowledge that we heat the garden but not the house but what could we do? And no internet and water… Ouch. It’s too much together.)

Erm sorry I got carried away but now I so appreciate what I have.

I really wish the best for everyone here, keep electricity and have money for food and food availability too… Life is hard enough without these extreme hardships.

I never canned meat… But plants are super easy (I have a quite serious fruit garden and sometimes find a lot of mushroom…). I just put them into jars and pressure can them :smiley: Why people water down their stuff I don’t know. I really should try canning meat but only a little as it’s so extreme to me, almost no one does it here but it IS a thing… I just always can buy meat and my tiny freezer is enough so I never felt the pressure to do it…

Stews are good to freeze :slight_smile: At least ours, I imagine lots of vegetables change this but the meat and onions? Those don’t mind. And even if you must eat carbs at some point, some stew with it should help. My body always handle carbs loads better if there is some fatty protein present… But of course, it’s more enjoyable that way too.
Good luck with this winter!!! Hopefully you will be super ready for the worst and it won’t come? I really hope that will happen!

Nice? I am glad I live super far from there…
I am very selfish but yep, I wouldn’t eat our cats either, so tiny meat, not fatty either… It wouldn’t be worth it, I couldn’t win a day with all cats while they are so lovely and comforting alive and when starving, I would need that. If I had a huge pet pig, well that would cause some serious thinking at least. Such a beast would eat much too so…

It’s always so odd to me what tiny places Americans call a city… I lived in a bigger village (okay, it was a big, important village)! :smiley: It is a town now. But I moved and this side of the country (where there are more but smaller settlements) has super tiny new towns. Like 5000 people. It should be a village with this tiny population but nope, it is a town now. A very tiny one. Villages below 2000 don’t even have local goverments. 15000 sounds a cute sized town to me. But I may not fully know when to call something a city. It’s a big town to me so I call the centers of the counties cities. Ours is close and has a population over 100,000. That’s big to me.
So the centers are called county seats? I looked it up. “The term is used in Canada, China, Hungary, Romania, and the United States.” Wow, so we have them too but most countries don’t…? Oh well. We have tinier areas too with their own center town. We are 20km from the city (county seat) but we belong to a way smaller town (at the same distance) for some reason.

Thanks for all the details (is storm shelter a thing there? I don’t even know what that is), I like to read about such things :slight_smile: I lack a pantry too and it’s a little pain, pantries are cool…


(Jane) #43

A storm shelter is a safe place to go when a tornado hits. And Oklahoma gets its fair share of them!

The town I live near has a population of less than 500 and I don’t live in town. There is a bank branch, gas station, Dollar General and post office. Doesn’t even have a stop light LOL. The next town over has one stop light and a population of just over 2000. They have a grocery store and a few restaurants!


(Laurie) #44

If you’re worried about power outages, have some canned or packaged food on hand so you won’t have to open the freezer door.


#45

I know you are trying to stay keto, but if you have to, some lower carb foods may stretch out what you can afford.

When my freezer isn’t full, I fill it with containers of water. A full freezer won’t defrost as quickly when the power goes out. We have had some years when we have had a lot of bad storms and the power was out a couple of days at a time on many occasions. Our food was still frozen when it finally came back on. Also, this way I knew we would have fresh water to drink if we got desperate since our drinking water comes from a well and we need power to pump the water to the house.

I have a small gas camp stove I have taken out for those times when we don’t have power and we have used our fireplace for heat. When we have no power, I reach for canned food, sausage, eggs or hot dogs (without buns for me.)

Ever since this COVID thing hit I have tried to store some extra things that won’t perish easily in case of emergency. I don’t eat many carbs, but my family does. I do stock canned meat and soups for emergencies as well. It’s not that I live in fear of sickness, but more that I am concerned because so many companies can’t find workers and places keep closing down or are on the verge of closing down. Everyone is trying to hire people and are managing with half the employees they need around here. Shipments to stores are still running late. Trucks don’t deliver all the things ordered. That sort of thing.

Walmart puts things on sale sometimes. Do they still take coupons? It’s a shame you don’t have more grocery stores in your area. Competition is good for prices.


#46

Morning, @RightNOW PJ –

I was so with you on eyeing the neighbor’s birds … until that last part! No thanks, but glad you think it’s a plus!

Yeah, well, this was my point. And since I’m not a cat person, it would be an easy decision to just do without them. But we do have a dog, and he was a rescue, and I love him to bits. So while I do still balk at buying his food, and can’t honestly simply wish he’d go away, it’s a bit of an issue …

So … I went up to find OUT where I’d gotten that idea, and it was the reference to “Nowhere, Oklahoma” followed by mention of everyone having gone out of business, and there remaining only a tiny grocer and a gas mart. Evidently Nowhere is the name of a real city, but you hadn’t capitalized it, for one (that wouldn’t have put me off, mind you :-)) and of course it’s one of a group of unfortunate city names that don’t exactly give people the image of a bustling metropolis. My husband has a cousin who lives in Hicksville on Long Island. Dunno, guys, but if I could, I’d move, just because of that name!

So back to what I was saying about Nowhere (which the post from @rustyk61 triggered me to look up) all those details in the beginning of your post are what gave me a mental image that included tumbleweed and a creaking sign swinging as the dust devils dance. And that image colored the remainder of my impressions. Mention need for extensive food storage, nearest proper store being hours away, fear of loss of electricity … and me? I’ve got you in the outback somewhere!

So, where you live is actually 15,000? Gotcha, not nowhere even if it is Nowhere. Mind you, relatively speaking? I live in a 5,000,000+ city so my perspective’s kinda skewed :wink:

So sorry about the tornado which would terrify me and the damage which would break my heart. The good stuff, indeed, is the help from the neighbors.

You and me both, kid! Our family consumes a kilo or so of whole, black peppercorns in a year (as well as myriad other spices) so it never fails to take me aback when someone feels our normal food is “hot” just from the black pepper (that’s our baseline, onto which we often enough add various hot sauces, gochujang, that sort of thing). Clearly we have built up a tolerance above the average for here, and that’s a challenge when wishing to feed others.

Not necessarily. Some sloppy reading happened in the mix too!


#47

Thank you! There are no tornados here. Not even earthquakes except very tiny ones extremely rarely. We don’t have volcanos either. I am happy about all of these.

Our tiny village has 2000 people, they were happy we moved in and they could kept their local government! No traffic lights, 1-2 restaurants, a proper grocery store and a tiny one, 1 greengrocery’s (there was 2 but the guy became our mayor and anyway, 2 is too many for this tiny place), a gas station (oh we love that, we can receive some food orders in a box there), hardware store, obviously the basics too like doctor, apothecary and post office. We have volunteer firemen. No bank but we have school and nursery school. So everything really needed except an ATM but we can shop with a bank card and we don’t miss it. We are used to have cash, it’s quite needed at some places.
3 temples, IDK the term for what we call culture house, for events, exhibitions (just paintings but quite often) and it has a small library as well…
A flower shop and a lottery with little knick-knacks, toys and whatnots. We had 2 flower shops but one retired.
We have a lot of things.

The neighbor village has nothing. NOT EVEN A BAR! Every places have a bar… (We have one I think, and the restaurants.) It only has a temple. It has absolutely nothing, it must be super tiny.
(I looked it up, population was 101 20 years ago but people obviously still living in every house or almost. I live between 2 small villages with a population of ~100 and ~2000 then. But there are people even here. 5 in this “street” in total! And there are other “streets” like this nearby.
I lived in the capital city, this is better.)

Our tiny towns have a population of 5000 or something. They are glorified villages… But our tiny town has things, 2 butchers and lots of shops. Still no proper supermarket, just small grocery stores with high prices and tiny variety. I can’t even buy some proper cheese and I am not very choosy. So I usually shop in a bigger town or in the city where there are supermarket chains, I only pop in into these to buy carbonated water or sour cream in a pinch… But the vegetable prices are often good and I can buy good enough eggs.

I always get carried away with this topic… It’s very interesting to me. At some places fast food places are a thing, even tiny settlements have them galore while we don’t have them in a small town of 5000. I think our tiny town has a place with pizza, it’s a family thing, I mean, a tiny eating place in a normal house made into such a place. But the fast food chains are in bigger places. I don’t even remember one in the bigger towns. The city (100,000 people) has many of such places, of course.

You probably could endure traditional Hungarian cuisine then :smiley: It’s not particularly spicy (unless the chef is into that… some people use hot pepper galore and traditional fish soup requires hotness for some reason, I had problems with that in my life. I am not used to hot stuff) but Mom said Germans had problems even with the decent amount of black pepper and paprika…
I use way less spice since I started to eat meat (my roasts don’t need anything but salt) but no one can take away my precious paprika. I barely use my old love, black pepper though…
But we are just Hungarians. Modern ones. Traditionally we used more hot stuff. But now, we are mild, not some folks with insanely spicy curry even now. It seems your family is hardcore too.
Our normal capsicum has no hotness at all. But we have sweet and hot paprika. The hot one still isn’t very hot… And in the shops, all the “hot” ketchup or sausage is so not hot even I barely feel anything and I am quite sensitive to it! I don’t get it.


(Jane) #48

Everyone is armed here also and it is definitely a plus. We have no police. I have no sightline neighbors, so no neighbors to call anyone if someone decided to come up on the hill and rob or mess with us. I have no idea who long it would take a sheriff to get here because he has the entire county to cover.

There are two kinds of people living here. Those you could hand your wallet to and in two weeks when they gave it back all the money would still be in it. And the meth heads who will rob you blind to pay for their fix. There is a drug house not too far from us. THEY keep a low profile because they don’t want any police attention, but those stopping by to buy drugs are desperate.

Much different than living in a city. I lived in Houston over 50 years and never worried about being armed. We also need guns for predators as we have coyotes and bobcat and a neighbor in the town over had a mountain lion living in the woods and picked off his small dog that was running around in the yard.

We have a 100-lb guard dog that is better than a gun, but we have both for our own safety.


#49

It pains me, but you make some valid points. Guess I’d better walk a mile in your shoes before I judge.


(Jane) #50

Thank-you. Ironically there is very little crime here. I only lock my doors at night whereas in Houston - even though I lived in nice neighborhoods - locked myself in and NEVER answered the door to a stranger


(PJ) #51

When I moved here (from TX, by way of WA, by way of OR, by way of mid-southern coastal CA where I grew up) I never even locked my door. My dad would come over for various stuff and do it but I shrugged. Or my car. Not worried about it. Not that CA (I lived in some bigger cities) was safe mind you, it was more a security by obscurity then I felt.

One day about 4am, I was writing code in the quiet dark except my screen – I was a programmer for a long time and mostly lived a reverse shift – and I hear sudden steps on the driveway in front of the house, coming fast toward the door, and then someone grabbed the knob with incredible force and slammed a large body’s shoulder into the door as hard as they could, apparently hoping to force it open suddenly. I nearly had a heart attack! They ran off. The only reason my door was locked was because my father had been over earlier. It happened again a few years later. Meth heads. Middle America was hollowed out economically and the new overlord is meth.

in 2018 when I left my 14 year job, I paid off the house, did some needed electric and plumbing updates, put a staircase to the garage loft and screened the front porch… rekeyed and added deadbolts to all doors in the house, bought a new firearm and safe and ammo. I figured it was about time I finally got my act together for same basic home defense. Later, I got a dog, who is not a dangerous dog but being half lab half beagle has a low full woof that makes him sound like something twice as big and mean LOL.

This area though, my city is the biggest by far, you have to drive for 45 minutes to get to anything larger. My friend lives in a town of about 200, most of which are widely dispersed farmers, she’s next-town-over in one direction. I call it ‘nowhere, Oklahoma’ because I’m from the coast of California, filled with much bigger (some very big) cities and lots of tourism and goods and activity… so to me this seems very, very low key here, very quiet, very “middle of nowhere.” (Not quite ‘flyover’ with the attitude some have, mind you. Just not ‘happening’ like Tulsa.)

So back to prep. I found my pinto beans last night, and a dozen cans of spam :rofl: and the masa flour. That is last-ditch emergency though and a PITA to cook.

So far my primary plan is “endless chicken veg stew.” Using rotisserie chickens as they are precooked so much easier but still pretty cheap, and some simple vegetables (carrots, potatoes, onions) and spices.

My other plan is a lot of premade burger patties and yes these do have to be cooked, but I’ll make them small and thin and I do have storm backups (propane 1# cylinders and camp stove and such, plus a decent BBQ with 20# propane tank).

If we lose power for more than 3 days we’ll be having the biggest city-wide Winter BBQ ever because everyone has meat in fridge and freezers.


(PJ) #52

This thread… it goes on, and on, and on, and on, with people reporting from every imaginable industry. I only just saw this now, but I sometimes lurk on supply chain type areas and have been seeing this issue get worse for a long time.

I was temp-ing for a corp early this year that is a mfr and sat next to an office where such things were discussed and the walls are stupidly thin, they have a major and I mean massive problem and it’s snowballing into the future worse all the time (this with plastic injection molding e.g. gas and water cans).

Trivia you may not know: years ago congress via lobbying made it ok for corps to send meat like chicken to china, which would then pluck and package it and send it back, and to NOT need to mention this on the packaging anywhere. In an ideal situation, that is average three month turnaround. In a bad situation for freight? delivery? China being hungry enough to not care what we need? It’s a stunning amount of our vital protein on the other side of the world.

Edited to add: I’m not suggesting impending doom. I’m just pointing out that we have some truly massive supply chain problem. Our just in time inventory situation planetwide suffers horribly even over a tiny irregularity and we’ve had half a dozen super massive issues in multiple critical parts of the world all within the last 18 months. Cost wise it’s not more obvious right now because of all the fake money the US government is throwing into the air. Product wise it’s not more obvious right now despite reductions and long delays and price increases, but most of this doesn’t hit the consumer, only people who do logistics tend to be aware of it.

But a lot of these issues are in the critical things – even though they are small things – on which vast arrays of things reside. For example if we magically fix covid issues, magically fix shutdown issues, magically fix port issues, magically fix trucker employment issues, if we don’t have the basic stuff for the constant repairs required on the big trucks all of that is moot.

Chemicals, metals, rare minerals, papers, a lot of this stuff is from China.

Already the big stores like costco and samsclub have put hard low limits on basic stuff like water and toilet paper. This is of course to prevent panic shopping, too late, I think enough people are concerned. But I’m more concerned about the parts required to repair city power systems in winter and things like that. I can’t fix that though, so I can only make sure I have food/water/heat and hope for the best.


(Jane) #53

That’s what everyone did in Houston when hurricane Ike knocked out all our power for 2 weeks. Everyone fired up their grills and cooked meat for days!

My ex-MIL lived in the country but just happened to be on the same power grid as an emergency shelter so she got her power back right away. I took all my meat to her and told her to keep it. I had a small generator but only used it to keep the fish alive in my fresh and salt-water tanks (priorities LOL). Obviously I wasn’t hurting for food or the fish would be history.