Being prepared is the strength you need to overcome uncertainty in troubling times
There is a lot going on right now.
While it may seem overwhelming, we need to be calm and execute our plan. Our plan is simple: be resilient and self-reliant by being prepared. What is being prepared?
Preparedness is a mindset that encompasses a set of precautionary actions that mitigates disruptive high risk scenarios.
The term ‘preparedness’ refers to the ability of governments, professional response organisations, communities and individuals to anticipate and respond effectively to the impact of likely, imminent or current hazards, events or conditions.
By improving the speed and quality of assistance provided, preparedness can make a major difference in saving lives and reducing suffering.
— Humanitarian Response, OCHA Services
There are various degrees of preparedness, which range from individual preparedness to organizational / industry-based preparedness. For critical industries, preparedness is a licensing requirement for staff and business operations.
Example:
Nuclear operators are required to undergo extensive initial and continuing training for safety related events to acquire and maintain their license.
These events are rehearsed and monitored by trained personnel who measure the effectiveness of procedural adherence and execution of abnormal incident manuals (AIMs).
There are four generic strategies for managing risks:
Accept.
Accepting loss, benefit or gain when incident occurs.Transfer.
Sharing with another party to reduce burden of loss or benefit of gain.Avoid.
Do not perform activity that incurs risk / danger.Mitigate.
Optimize reduces the severity of loss or likelihood of loss.
The purpose of preparing is to mitigate risk during abnormal events.
For individuals, families and small communities, risk management must address weakness within the foundational layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
This simplifies into the prioritized categories below:
Security.
By failing to secure your property, you are a resource for so-called “wolf preppers.”Shelter.
Without a roof there is no resource that can be secured effectively.Water.
We cannot survive without potable water after several days.Food.
Our bodies require vitamins and nutrients to function and grow efficiently.Energy.
Heating and cooling is required for meal preparation, health, proper sleep, etc.Community.
There is protection, safety and support in numbers.Barter.
Goods or services that can be exchanged for other goods or services within a community.
Wealth Preservation.
Store your labour in a form that can be used at a later date.
In light of recent shortages, food processing plant disasters and crop failures, this article will focus on item 4 — food.
Food
Whether it is for a car, a house, employment or health, most people pay insurance.
Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury.
It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent or uncertain loss.
— Insurance, Wikipedia
Ask yourself a few questions:
Is there a grocery store insurance?
Is there an insurance covering extreme food scarcity?
Could collective ‘food insurance’ pay out in the event of a systemic incident?
Some may claim this responsibility is the role of government.
Let me remind you of 262 million reasons why that is not a good idea.
However, there is a simple solution:
INSURE YOURSELF!
We can start by storing extra shelf stable food and developing the skills necessary to produce our own food. An entire community doing this is de facto insurance.
I use a prepping heuristic called the HVT Method.
At steady-state conditions, total energy is comprised of V — potential energy, H — transferred energy, and T — kinetic energy (inertia).
The HVT Method approximates any complex energy system as:
Storage (V).
Earning - Consumption (H).
Production (T).
For more information regarding the HVT Method, please see my previous article:
Below are food preparedness resources you can begin investigating, organized by:
Stored food (V).
Harvested - Consumed food (H).
Produced food (T).
Stored food (V)
Patara from Appalachia’s Homestead provides the context and rationale of why we should immediately move our attention to food and water reserves.
In her video, she describes why we should:
Recognize how current events:
Impact the food supply chain.
Increase the probability and potential of future events.
Put back a minimum of 5 cans of food per week.
Consider greenhouses to minimize external environmental impacts.
Avoid tuning out negative news, and recommends:
Take a deep breath.
Say a prayer.
Ask, “what am I supposed to do?”
Listen to that.
And get up and do it!
Below are some videos to help you put away more food.
Dry storage
Dry storage is the storage of dried shelf stable food.
Alaska Prepper demonstrates 3 simple dry storage methods:
Mason Jar + Oxygen Absorber.
Mason Jar + Vacuum Seal.
Mason Jar + Oven.
Please see Oxygen Absorber Recommended Amounts to determine how many are needed for each type of product in various container sizes.
Because of its ease and speed, I personally use method 1.
It works and I have been using it for years.
Purchasing affordable dry food in bulk ensures you always have ingredients on hand. Start learning to make meals from scratch using dried ingredients.
Do not purchase larges amounts of food you do not already eat.
(Nothing is worse than opening canned meat and trying to choke down “wet cat food”).
Examples of long term food you can repackage (except cans) and store.
Rice / pasta.
Beans.
Dried veggies.
Soup broth.
Canned meat.
Buy small amounts first and practice cooking with it. Dried bean prep takes 24 - 48 hours unless you use baking soda properly. It is more challenging than you think.
Purchase extras in increments and begin stocking up your pantry. Rotate older items and replace when used. You do not need to buy it all at once.
Quick meals
You do not have to purchase expensive emergency meal kits.
Most of the cost in emergency meal kits is a packaging and convenience cost. Instead, you can prepare healthy meals that are just as good, or better, than any kit you can buy.
Below is a video by Tina Golik to give you 6 emergency meal ideas.
There are a lot more creative recipes. Give it a try!
Harvest and consumption (H)
Harvest (H{in})
Harvesting from your garden (or family’s) can be a timely and exhausting task if done all at once. Three Rivers Homestead demonstrates an incremental and practical strategy for harvest and preservation, while balancing home life.
This series takes place over a period of 5 weeks.
What I enjoyed about this series was the variety of preservation methods and simplified demonstrations. When learning a new preservation method, it can be challenging to view its practicality in the larger scope.
This series demonstrates the smooth integration of common preservation methods with pragmatic narration. A must watch before planning gardens this year.
Week 2 — A Week of Preserving Food
Week 3 — Six Days of Food Preservation
Consumption (H{out})
We live in a period of surplus and without want.
(I’m not complaining).
However, most of what we enjoy now was discovered to make efficient use of limited resources. With inflationary pressure and escalating crises, making effective use of limited resources will be worth its weight in gold.
Most common food waste can be composted or given to livestock. This is particularly true for vegetables and grain. However, meat can be a tad trickier to manage.
Here are some ideas to re-imagine fresh “meat waste” as “meat by-products,” which have a potential to be used in other food or household items.
Leftover bones:
Leftover grease:
It is a little strange, but good to know.
Production (T)
Gardening
“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.”
— Gertrude Jekyll1
There are multiple gardening methods, but Charles Dowding’s No Dig method is possibly the simplest.
The method involves:
Placing 4 inches of compost on top of soil.
Planting transplants directly into compost.
Adding 2 inches of surface compost annually.
The method is most effective with transplants.
Charles Dowding offers some advice to start a No Dig bed for your garden.
Homesteading
Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency.
It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craft work for household use or sale.
— Homesteading, Wikipedia
There are many aspects to homesteading too enumerable for this article. Most homesteaders raise their own meat in the form of small animals — such as chickens.
Given recent impacts to the poultry industry, it may be worth raising your own poultry for eggs or meat. Kevin from Epic Homesteading, better known from Epic Gardening, offers introductory information to get you started with chickens.
Concluding remarks
While preparedness spans multiple fields and disciplines, food management is the easiest and most effective way to get started as an individual.
The HVT Method helps categorize your efforts into:
Stored food (V).
Harvested - Consumed food (H).
Produced food (T).
We cannot prepare for every scenario — that is impossible.
However, we can make our standard of living more resilient in the face of change. Adverse scenarios will have less impact the more people build true sustainability in a community. That is real insurance, not a mandatory gimmick.
If you have not started yet, do not fret. It is impossible to achieve high resilience over night. Rather, it is the incremental persistent effort that accumulates over a long period of time. Identify the small everyday things that will achieve your goal.
Carefully consider these questions:
What are you planning to grow this year?
How are you going to effectively use what you have?
What is your favourite preservation method that works for you?
Start thinking about how you can change your lifestyle for the better.
What's one actionable step you can take toward being prepared?
Leave your ideas below!
Gertrude Jekyll was a British garden designer who was one of the most influential figures of the Arts and Crafts movement known for her beautiful landscape designs.
This is a wonderful article, Theodore! I am especially intrigued by the links for making bacon grease soap and candles. I already save bacon grease and use it for cooking, but these other uses are fascinating! I’m planning to watch a couple of the videos this afternoon!
Handy and practical. I'll have to study your community insurance formula too.