Posts Tagged ‘food supply’

A Last Run To Buy Grocery Store Food Items

What will be the first grocery store items to disappear during a SHTF scenario when all of your neighbors are rushing out to the grocery store down the street? Will the items they purchase be the items they really should be purchasing? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.

For the purpose of this scenario, let’s say that the SHTF event is a major magnitude 8.0 earthquake on the New Madrid fault zone where Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri come together along the Mississippi river. The earthquake is so severe that almost all of the bridges along the Mississippi river are knocked out. Since much of the foods and supplies criss-cross the country from source to destination, there will be major disruptions in inventory when nearly all the east-west trucking has slowed to a trickle due to the major bridges being out. In this example, you don’t actually live in the devastation zone (where the power will be out and stores closed anyway), but you know that there will be serious supply shortages soon. The news media has been talking about the supply distribution breakdown and the fact that bridge repairs may take months or much longer. You are worried that food may become in short supply.

Most people won’t know how bad it might get, but there will be people beginning to panic and rushing out to the grocery store to buy supplies.

Many people won’t be smart, and won’t think it through. What will they buy first?

Maybe they will rush to get things like,

- fresh milk, bread, and eggs
- more of their ‘regular’ stuff (processed/boxed foods, frozen foods, etc.)
- cigarettes and booze

Why did they buy these items? What was their ‘thinking’ or logic behind it?

It’s a natural instinct to go out and buy the foods that are consumed on a regular basis, especially those that will ‘go bad’ the soonest, foods that don’t last that long like fresh bread and milk. We have been trained to think short-term. We have short attention spans and tend not to think ahead (or plan ahead).

Buying milk and bread and other ‘regular’ items are Okay, but, for those who realize the serious magnitude of the situation, knowing that supplies may run out quickly and that they may be without supplies for some time afterward, what might be some better (or additional) items to buy first?

Maybe some of these items will be a better choice during that last minute grocery store run before things run out completely.

- 10 lb. bags (or larger) of rice & beans
- flour/sugar/salt/yeast
- high calorie foods, like the following few random examples,
mac-n-cheese (600 calories/box)
peanut butter (100 calories/tablespoon)
canned stews (200 calories/cup)
canned brown, red, or black beans (350 calories/can)
canned meats
you get the idea…
- powdered milk, powdered potatoes
- coffee/tea, or similar items that you use, or could be used for trade

I’m not intending to make a list of things to get, but to point out that for a last-minute, one time last run to the grocery store while facing upcoming food shortages, you should think about it differently.

By thinking in terms of getting food items that will be better for longer term shortages, you will fill your basket with other things than most people around you who are stocking up with bread and milk. The things in your basket may not be what you normally buy, but the idea is to buy the foods that will last longer, and provide more calories for you money.

Remember, calories keep you alive.

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Pink Slime: Reality and Survival

I know that this pink slime in the food supply is all over the news, but there were several topics in this one article I read this morning that I felt warranted more discussion. I believe these topics focus on the reasons why you, as a survivalist/prepper, must use common-sense, be skeptical and aware of what is going on (or not going on) in the world around you. The reality that this article brings forward, is a reason why your survival is dependent on you. I think that most people, by default, trust everything that is being fed to them by our government, as well as our media. People assume everything is ‘up and up’ and we go on with our lives.

Well folks, we all know what happens when you assume. You make an ass-(out of) u-(and) -me! If you are listening to the news or reading a news article and something just doesn’t sound ‘right’ to you, then investigate. Is what you heard/read true or partially true? Or is it all just a big piece of sugar coated candy put out there for you to enjoy? Let’s take a look at some of the pink slime finds.

When recently asked why they agreed to feed “pink slime” to our children, school lunch officials said it was to drop the price of ground beef — by 3 cents per pound.

3 cents per pound. SERIOUSLY??? How about feeding the kids some meat? I know times are tough and everyone is looking to cut costs, but purchasing ground beef injected with toxins to save 3 cents a pound?!?!

In a study titled “Fast food hamburgers: what are we really eating?” pathologists at the Cleveland Clinic dissected burgers from eight different fast food chains to find out what was, or wasn’t, inside. Published in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology, the paper begins with “Most consumers presume that the hamburger they eat is composed primarily of meat.” But what did they find?

Okay, everyone, here comes some shocking percentages…

…the researchers discovered waste and by-products including connective tissue, nerve tissue, cartilage, bone, and in a quarter of the samples, Sarcocystis parasites. But surely these “fillers” were the minority, right? Unfortunately not. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the amount of actual meat (muscle flesh) in the burgers ranged from 2.1 percent to 14.8 percent. Instead of fries, perhaps fast food cashiers should be asking, “Do you want meat with that?”

The amount of actual meat in the burgers ranges from 2.1 to 14.8 percent??? I’m thinking the rest probably isn’t so good for you?!?!

In addition to reducing quality, cutting corners also tends to reduce safety, which is why the pink slime in question is injected with ammonia hydroxide: to kill the Salmonella and E. coli (fecal matter) that it’s often contaminated with. Instead of addressing the contamination issue itself, the meat industry employs a cheap “technofix” to turn what was once considered waste into slimy profits.

Why isn’t the contamination issue being addressed at the source? Cost too much money? I guess it’s okay to try and fix it by injecting pink slime. La, la, la, my life goes on…

So what do the meat pushers do when cheap chemicals won’t do the trick, and their products leave the processing plant contaminated with fecal bacteria? Do they shut down the plant? Order a recall? No. They shift responsibility onto the consumer. “Raw meats are not idiot-proof,” a USDA poultry microbiologist said. “They can be mishandled and when they are, it’s like handling a hand grenade. If you pull the pin, somebody’s going to get hurt.” In other words, if you get sick from contaminated meat, it’s your fault.

Oh, I get it…YOU must not have cleaned the meat properly. YOU must not have cooked it to the correct temperature. YOU must have stored it at the wrong temperature.
I think this next one will make you ill…

But just how often is meat contaminated? This month the CDC released their latest national meat survey in response to this question. They tested more than 5,000 samples of retail meat products straight off the shelves in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. What they found could hardly have been more disturbing: 90 percent of pork chops, ground beef and ground turkey, and 95 percent of chicken breasts, were contaminated with fecal bacteria.

YUM!!! (I’m being facetious.) So now you have some percentages on the quality of your supermarket meat.

Now that you have learned something about your meat, what will you do?

Source quotes: Huffington Post

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Just-in-Time Technology, Food Disaster Looming

Guest Post: by Jim Presley

…a fear I have had for some time: We have little or no warehousing backup in the event of a supply shortage. Our concentrated supermarket supply system uses JIT (Just-in-Time) technology efficiencies allowed by computers and the Internet.

But my fears have centered upon a massive increase of unsatisfiable demand. This is a far more likely scenario than an immediate shutdown of food production at the source.

My business is catastrophe insurance. We know how quickly supermarket shelves go completely bare when people fear a blizzard or hurricane. This same thing could happen here in the US but it would be a permanent shortage. Here is how it would happen:

First understand that almost all the US population buys food for a week or just a few days. They make trips to the market once or twice a week. They have little or no food reserves. In econ-speak, their ‘preferences’ are to have reserve of one or two weeks. But this preference is founded upon the public belief in the certainty and integrity of the food supply system. We have no worry that when we go to the market it will be chock full of everything we want.

But imagine that something happened to change those preferences for reserves. Suppose the typical American wanted a two-month or six month reserve? This could happen when they see food prices escalating beyond reach and they wish to buy reserve food while it is still within their price range. Imagine what would happen:

The demand for food would quintuple or more within a short time and so shoppers would see empty shelves in the market, further stimulating panic buying, just as in a hurricane or blizzard. This would mark the end of our reliable food supply system. The stores would be picked clean almost instantly and people’s preferences would change even more toward having a year of reserve food or more to protect themselves from outages. Given that we have no warehousing and a near-fixed resupply capability, we would be looking at a PERMANENT condition of no food on the shelves. Armed men would meet the resupply trucks when they arrive at the market.

Martial law, price controls, and food rationing with the then current President as Commander, would follow, as well as a suspension of our many rights (to bear arms, prohibitions against search and seizure, property rights). This would be with the blessing of the many hungry people.

We have a precarious situation indeed. And the only way to protect oneself and family is to PREPARE.

The author graduated from Harvard in Economics, and Stanford with an MBA.

Ken adds: I couldn’t agree more. I have witnessed the just-in-time strategy while working for a previous employer, and know for a fact that most businesses now operate this way. The methodology, although profitable in that it optimizes throughput, it presents very real risks. JIT techniques that are used in food supply and distribution chains are very worrisome if one considers the possibilities and scenarios of major disruption.

The scenario that Jim describes above is very real, to the extent that simply enough people (a critical threshold) deciding to store up extra food could set off a chain reaction that would be difficult to recover from. With food price inflation already well underway, and given the disastrous condition of the US economic outlook, price inflation (dollar devaluation) is assuredly part of our future. The time to stock up is now. Think about it.

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Buy your Canned Tuna, Now?

Long term radiation effects, in Tuna?

With many of the long term effects from the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster still ahead of us, a serious consideration should be made regarding the food chain and the possible radioactive contamination thereof. In this example, let’s look at Tuna fish. Is it safer to buy canned tuna now, before possible contamination into its food chain? Or, won’t it really matter.

People in Japan consume a tremendous amount of seafood. Japan is the worlds largest consumer and importer of fish. Tuna not only is fished and consumed by the Japanese, but tuna is widely consumed around the globe.

Many of us are most familiar with tuna in its canned form. Apart from those that enjoy their tuna sashimi style (raw fresh fish served in thin slices), most people will get their tuna pre-cooked and packaged in a small can.

The question is, will tuna that has swum off the coast of Japan, become contaminated with enough radioactive contamination such that we as humans will be affected negatively?

Lets look at a few facts first, like, which types of tuna will swim off the coast of Japan, and what is it that these tuna fish eat themselves?

Tuna that is caught near Japan

Pacific Bluefin tuna are caught in the seas off Kochi (Shikoku Island), Miyagi, and Hokkaido Prefectures in Japan.

They spawn in the Western Pacific between Okinawa and the Philippines and the Sea of Japan and they migrate over 6,000 nautical miles to the Eastern Pacific, eventually returning back to their birth waters to spawn again.

Southern Bluefin tuna can be caught off the coasts of Shizuoka, Kochi, Kagoshima, and Miyagi Prefectures in Japan.

Albacore tuna is caught off the coasts of Miyagi, Kochi, Mie, and Miyazaki Prefectures in Japan.

Yellowfin tuna is caught off the coasts of Shizuoka, Miyagi, and Kochi Prefectures in Japan.

Big-eyed tuna is caught off the shores of Miyagi, Kagoshima, Kochi, Shizuoka, Kanagawa, and Hokkaido Prefectures in Japan.

What do Tuna eat?
Tuna mostly eat small fish ranging from 1.5 inches up to 6 inches. Tuna will also eat squid, and very occasionally will consume crustaceans.

The small fish that tuna will eat include skipjack herring, flying fish, lancetfish, puffer fish, triggerfish and rabbitfish.

60% fish
20% squid
15% crustaceans

If tuna eat smaller fish like Herring, then what do the Herring eat?
Herring (a.k.a. trash fish) eat mostly plankton, as well as algae and some kelp.

If tuna eat squid, then what do squid eat?
Squids are carnivorous. The smaller species of squid mostly eat shrimp, and other small fish.

How could radiation enter the fish food-chain?

So now that we have an idea of what type of tuna is caught off Japan, and what it is that the tuna eat, lets hypothesize how radioactive particles could be ingested into this food chain.

We know that they have been dumping tremendous amounts of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean. This is the water that they have been spraying onto the reactors, fuel rods, and fuel pools while trying to keep them from entirely melting down. The problem is, there has been partial meltdown and the radiation is traveling with the water runoff, which is currently being dumped into the ocean (some water is being diverted into storage tanks).

Of the types of radiation involved, Iodine-131 is of least concern (in the context of this post subject) because it’s half-life is only 8 days. After 80 days, its affect is considered entirely gone.

Of much higher concern is Cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years (considered gone after 300 years). Of even higher concern is Plutonium-239 which has an unimaginable half-life of 24,000 years (considered gone after 240,000 years).

We know that both of these radioactive substances are present at the Fukushima plant, and have been found in the soil all over the region around Fukushima – in high quantities. We don’t know how much has been flowing into the Pacific ocean – we’ve heard a lot of numbers regarding Iodine-131, but scarcely a mention of Cesium or Plutonium. Perhaps this is because in the same sentence the reports can say, “but Iodine-131 only has a half-life of 8 days”. Most of the Sheeple may forget about the words, Cesium and Plutonium, since the main-stream-media rarely mentions them.

The radiation in the seawater is surely getting diluted, however fish are swimming in the water, and the diluted particles of Cesium and Plutonium will remain somewhere in the oceans for 300 to 240,000 years. Do you know how fish stay alive? They constantly are passing water through their mouths into their gills – never ending. Some of the radiation will ‘stick’ and enter their little fish bodies.

Not only do little fish stay alive this way, but also big fish. So, not only will big fish get their own radiation through water injection through their gills, etc… but the big fish also eat the small fish. Effectively then, they are getting a double-whammy. More radiation.

The big fish are then caught for processing, distribution and consumption by humans. Logical thinking suggests that the closer these fish are caught to Japan, the more likely they will have some amount of contamination.

Where does the ‘canned’ tuna come from?
About 68 percent are caught from the Pacific Ocean, 22 percent from the Indian Ocean, and the remaining 10 percent from the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

Regarding the U.S. tuna market,
“Solid White Tuna” as stated on the can is ‘Albacore only’ and is regulated by the FDA.

“Chunk Light Tuna” is mostly from the species, Skipjack, but it can include others such as Bigeye and Yellowfin, in any combination.

When you open a can of tuna, you don’t know where the actual tuna was caught. The canned tuna supply chain surely varies depending on deals made, the companies involved, etc…

Odds are of course, that the tuna in that particular can may not have been caught off the shore of Japan – it could have been caught in any other number of places in the Pacific. Lots of these tuna migrate their way to the west coast U.S., but it takes awhile – years in some cases.

No doubt the food supply chain will be examined further as time goes on, particularly if the situation continues to worsen at the Fukushima nuclear plant (It’s already a level-7, the highest on the nuke disaster scale). True results may not be measured for many years to come while looking back at cancer rates.

No amount of radiation ingestion is ‘OK’ though. A single Cesium-137 particle stuck in your body could start the chain reaction that leads to cancer – it’s all about ‘odds’. Some people get it, and some people don’t.

After all, during the 1950′s they were blowing up atomic bombs in the ocean… We’re still here – except one wonders how many more would still be here…

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Grocery Food Supply Chain, Risks and Survival

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I read a very good article today touching on the food supply chain and its fragility due to over-active efficiencies, much of which rings true with me.

Among other things, the article promotes the idea of growing ones own survival garden to augment ones own food supply, namely using the square-foot-gardening technique (something I will be trying in the Spring, rather than my traditional type garden).

More striking however, and something that I have been keenly aware of for some time, is the underlying excessive demand for efficiency which places undue risks on the systems that supply and distribute our food.

Rather than repeating words that I’ve posted before, it is refreshing to read the words of others who realize the same risks.

Here is an excerpt from the article, written by Giordano Bruno at Neithercorp Press,

Survive Anything! Chapter 2: Food Crisis

The problem of storage and backstock is widespread in the U.S. and the culprit is actually one which we have been trained to admire; efficiency. It is because of the over-application of efficiency in grocery models and in the freight sector that most outlets carry little to no backstock in goods. Instead, they order goods as quickly as they sell out, refilling shelves on a product by product basis. This means that in most grocers, what you see on the shelf, is all that they have. The speed of trucking deliveries makes this business model possible, but its operation suffers from a seriously fatal flaw…

Grocery stores may seem like a bounty of goods at first glance, but if freight shipments shut down, or even slowed, those aisles would empty within the span of a few days. Many households in America operate on the same faulty “efficiency”. They rely on the weekly trip to the grocer to maintain the pantry while also attempting to save money by reducing backstock. It’s a frayed rope holding up too much weight, a completely inflexible system that cannot withstand any deviation from the set routine. One unexpected disaster could render the entire food and agriculture distribution network immobile.

Many grocery chains also function on a line of credit from banks while operating at a loss. Profits are poured directly into the liabilities the companies incur from loans and then more money is borrowed to continue ordering goods. Some stores in the chain (flagship stores) usually bring in enough money to cover the red ink of the other branches, however, what if banks were to cut off credit completely to a grocery chain? Or maybe ALL grocery chains? The cycle of debt, to sales, to profit, to debt, becomes disrupted. Any stores that rely solely on credit to stay open for business would immediately lose the ability to bring in new stock. Again, we are faced with empty shelves in less than a week.

This scenario is entirely possible in the U.S. today, especially in the event that big banks institute capital retention in order to protect themselves from a further collapse of investment markets. Banks have already restricted loans to consumers down to the bare minimum. A restriction of loans to the business sector in the near future is not that far fetched.

Read the article in its entirety here, Survive Anything! Chapter 2: Food Crisis

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