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Under Construction

Food is an essential Part of Preparedness. In Prepping/homesteading Food Falls into these main categories:

• Fresh food: for consumption immediately
• Fresh Food Surplus: for preservation and storage: Drying, Bottling, Salting, fermenting, pickling or chutney
• Stored Foods: Rice and other Grains; Processed Grains: Flour; Alcoholic Beverages: Beer & Wine; Pasteurised Fresh Juices; Dried Fruits; Fruits Preserved in Alcohol; Frozen foods. Dried foods, Homer Bottled, Salted, fermented, pickled, and chutney.
• Cooked foods for consumption within Days, Weeks, Months: Rich Fruit cakes and puddings, such as Christmas Pudding; Sweet Biscuits and savoury biscuits like oatcakes and hard tack; Lunch or Dinner, & leftovers.
• Highly processed ready-to-eat boil-in-the-bag or instant food & MRE’s: An MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) is a self-contained, individual field ration developed by the United States Armed Forces for service members in combat or remote areas where regular food service is not available. They may come with a chemical-based heater.
• Instant low-nutrition foods and snack foods
• Cooked food: For consumption within 24- 48 hours. (Be careful with Rice

Crisis Cooking Off Grid

• Wood-fired cooker: Indoors and outdoors
• Pizza oven: Outdoors
• Small woodstove like a Biolite
• Solar Cooker
• Gas Cooker: Make your own Methane (I have done this)
• Alcohol Stove: Trangia
• Pressure Cooker: In many countries in the Global South, pressure cookers are subsidised
• Straw Box: an insulated box into which you put your cooking pot, and it will continue cooking all day
  

Should we store food for hard times?

Of course we should.

Middle-Eastern alternatives to baked beans and homegrown Aztec Maize

Homegrown Skirrets roots and skip scavenged food

Home-picked vegetables in sweet vinegar brine and acres of Cowslips (secret location)

Pumpkin and green tomato chutney (At the Back) and bottled French beans (food surplus). The dark green bottle at the back (left) contains pasturised grape Juice from our grapevines

Foraging:

Is It Ethical To Forage During An Ecological Crisis?

Coming Soon..

I have been blogging this one for some time. Many UK wildlife and conservation Trusts have abolished foraging and fungi forays because of over-extraction. There is no nationally agreed code for foragers yet, and I’ve seen some toxic interactions online from authors writing foraging books with photos of baskets overflowing with fungi. They are selling them to local restaurants. Is this ethical in an Ecological Crisis?

Prof. Jem Bendell and XReadiness both suggest using foraged food, but that is it; it is not qualified, theres no dilema about whether it is appropriate during an ecological crisis.

Foraging: Why “know local edibles” & “learn 5–10 safe, local edible plants and fungi” is a Darwin Award Lottery Ticket.

Jem Bendell’s Rainbow Prepping and XReadiness both talk about foraging during an ecological crisis. Both, I am sure, suggest simple foraging in good faith without realising how easy it is to poison yourself in nature when you are hungry, under pressure and inexperienced.

Global Food & Agricultural Crisis:

Now India: Climate Change is Driving Global Water Bankruptcy, Falling Crop Yields, Rising Food Prices, Climateflation, Shrinkflation & Rioting

The current civil unrest in India is driven by rising food prices. Tomatoes are so expensive that student protesters made garlands of dried tomatoes, exclaiming that they were more valuable than gems. Climateflation & climate-shrink-flation are new permanent drivers of increasing food prices and food scarcity.

Climateflation: How Climate Change Is Now The Primary Influence on Food Prices

If you ask an economist why everything is so expensive these days, you will likely get an answer about oil — the lifeblood of the global economy — facing supply bottlenecks in the Strait of Hormuz. But this is only part of the answer. As Jeremy Clarkson is finding out as a farmer, you need rain and a favourable climate to grow grain. Britain is facing one of the worst harvests on record, driven by record emissions and heatwaves.

Food Crisis – Doomers didn’t want to be right. First Published June 2024.

“The 1795 food riots are known as the revolt of the housewives, a term coined by John Lawrence Hammond and Barbara Hammond for a series of food riots and disturbances in England in 1795. They arose from severe food scarcity. Women played conspicuous roles in the riots.” “Beginning in late 2010, citizens of the Arab world rose up in protest to express their long-held dissatisfactions with their governments. Unstable food security and recent international food price spikes were certainly among their many grievances and likely sparked the initial unrest. 1.5°C and rising is the loss of the “Goldilocks climate niche” for agriculture. Britain’s food system is in crisis.

Climate Emergency Forum: Europe’s Heatwave-Driven Food Security Emergency

June heatwave may have killed around 20,000 people in Europe
It will be some months before the true toll of Europe’s worst-ever heatwave is confirmed, but researchers can estimate a death count based on how many people died in Europe during previous hot periods. We now know that more than 20,000 people died in Europe in summer 2026, and European countries have recorded the worst potato and grain harvests of the 20th & 21st centuries.

Storing Food For Lean Times:

Every Culture Plans for Hard Times:

“The Guardian has seen part of the report and has spoken to a large number of people familiar with its contents, which warn of food shortages, conflicts, mass migration and other threats to the UK’s national security, including going as far as the risk of nuclear war or the breakdown of society. These threats are not regarded as some far-off or remote contingency: disastrous impacts, for instance on the UK’s food supply, could be expected as soon as 2030, it warns.“

Resilience & Mutual Aid Require: Planning, Calories, Water & Cooperation

Some Climate “Thought Leaders” clearly have nothing to teach us about collapse and climate-driven agricultural collapse beyond 1.5C. Some tell people that stocking up on food isn’t helpful in hard times, while promoting resilience by establishing local food-growing projects and mutual aid networks. Some thought leaders argue that teaching skills achieves more than stockpiling food. These arguments use the false equivalence fallacy: they compare two completely different situations and claim they are equal, often to minimise a flaw in an argument. While people can use it to sound clever or intellectually superior, they also use it out of genuine cognitive bias, defensive habits, or lazy thinking.