Surviving WITHOUT a Long-Term Food Stockpile….. That’s Crazy Talk, by Garand69

Is it possible or is it crazy talk?

I am going with yes.. and yes.

For starters I have had the preparedness mindset for about half of my life. Funny how starting a family also starts a mindset re-calibration. My biggest issue was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. The second biggest issue was always a lack of cash to “do it right”. It is way too easy to get all caught up in “lists” and “must haves” especially for the newbie.

Being raised in the Gun Culture, that part was easy. I already had guns and ammo, and I started pulling the handles of my Grandfathers Star reloading presses and casting bullets when I was 9ish. For me the issue was food. I was never around anybody that preserved their own food so it never really popped into my head, I simply stocked up canned goods and dry goods.

A few years down the road we started a garden, far too small to provide a years worth of food, but a great learning experience as well. We saved nothing, no seeds no veggies, what we couldn’t eat was given away to friends. Silly, I know, but hey we were at least on the right track. A few years down the road I bought my first freezer and started saving excess veggies that way. Then finally, about a dozen years or so ago, we were introduced to the pressure canner.

Viola!!!!

20 years ago if a friend at level zero preparedness asked me where to start, it would be..

#1 get a gun and some ammo

#2 learn to shoot

#3 get a bigger gun and some more ammo

#4 stock up on rice and beans etc etc blah blah blah.

Today my mindset has totally changed. Yes you need that stuff, but if I was asked today, I would say get a pressure canner.

You all remember the good ole’ single or newlywed days when food was hardly ever home cooked because the recipe makes too much food? Pressure cooker solves that issue and you have 3 or four meals for the price of that one crappy fast food meal. Canning leftovers would have saved me a ton of money over the years. More money = Higher quality gear or more dry goods on the shelf. Pressure canning preserves virtually every thing that can grow, swim, crawl, fly, or slither.

OK tomorrow TSHTF…. How are you saving the meat from that deer you managed to bag? Of all of the survival books that I was into during the beginning of my journey, NONE of them mentioned pressure canning. They all mentioned drying the meat Indian style and other ancient ways. Don’t get me wrong, those are skill-sets worthy of learning, but it sure is doing things the hard way. Think about that for a second, how much time and effort is it going to take to preserve a 160lb animal?

How much help do you have? In the dead of winter if you don’t work fast enough the meat will freeze before its dry enough for preservation and as soon as it thaws you will have spoilage. In the warmer months, by the time you have a 160lb animal cut into thin strips and on the smoker you might also have spoilage, either way, unless you have one hell of a team with a well laid out plan, you will be wasting a lot of food.

Survival has always involved the ability to make it through the famine and get to the feast in the constant feast or famine cycle. With the ability to preserve your food for long term storage, you drastically lessen if not eliminate the famine portion of the cycle. A pressure cooker and the necessary canning jars will put stuff up fairly quickly compared to smoking, but there is also no reason you couldn’t be canning while another teammate/family member is smoking/drying some.

Canning jars are of course fragile by nature so running out into the woods with a

pressure canner and a bag full of glass jars could be a tad problematic… But a few years ago, I stumbled onto a great account of a Feller doing just that, and that is when I discovered the JarBox and when I ramped up my pressure canning adventures. Bruce “Buck” Nelson intentionally went into the Alaska Wilderness without food for a 70 day adventure. What did he bring along? A pressure canner. The link at the end will take you to his trip (as well as his list of gear.)

I often read the opinions of those who believe the planet will be void of any game within a ridiculously short amount of time in a Post SHTF event, I don’t think so, but doesn’t that make it even more important to be able to preserve your bounty? Is the pressure canner the be all end all piece of survival equipment? Of course not, you need to be proficient in many skill-sets and have the gear needed to protect you from bad things on earth. What I am advocating is that it should be far higher on the priority list than it is.

Is it crazy talk to think one could survive with just a pressure canner? Yep, but it’s a bit nutty not to have one in your pile of survival gear and high on the priority list of “If I can only take X”

It’s just food for thought… YMMV

“Buck” Nelson’s Alaska Survival Trip-    https://bucktrack.com/Alaska_Survival_Journal.html

Gear list- https://bucktrack.com/Alaska_Survival_Trip_Gear_List.html

JarBox- https://jarbox.com/

Tattler reusable canning lids – https://www.reusablecanninglids.com/