7 ms·

Maybe it's not a bad idea to keep a cellar of canned, non-perishable food and water stored in containers that do not leech. You would want to replace the stock

Maybe it's not a bad idea to keep a cellar of canned, non-perishable food and water stored in containers that do not leech. You would want to replace the stockpile every few years so it doesn't spoil.

jefftk 4y ago
Instead of a stockpile you replace every so often, it's a lot cheaper to just buy extra of the long shelf life things you use. Instead of keeping one jar of peanut butter, you have ten (or however many you'll reliably use before they go bad).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Regular rotation of shelf-stable products is the way to go. Water is often the under-appreciated stock --- people use a lot of it for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (espeically with dried / reconstituted foods). Here a supply, and means of producing more potable supply (a quality filtration system, backpacker and marine filtering systems are useful) and purification (chlorine or iodine in liquid or tablet form) help. It's possible to store grains (whole or ground, flour, wheat, rice, maize) for years, though you need to get rid of moths / worms first. That usually means freezing in smaller portions (2.5 -- 5 kg / 5--10 lb), and then transferring to airtight storage. Rodents can and will chew through both plastic and metal, isnpect frequently. Invest in a cat (or snakes). A chest freezer won't survive a long-duration power-outage, but is useful so long as juice flows, and can make this pest-proofing much more viable. These consume very little power.
  - eru 4y ago
    How much water you'd need to store depends a lot on where you are. I'd say you have more of a need for a water stock pile in Arizona than in Singapore. We get more than two metres of rain a year here. (Of course, even in Singapore you can get unlucky and hit a dry spell for a few weeks. But they are rather rare. The city has dedicated a lot of its land to water reservoirs.)
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      For water, quality has a quantity all its own. The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated. And water is far more essential to life. A person can survive only a few minutes without air, or a few days without water. It's possible to live without (or with sharply limited) food for weeks or months. A single closet shelf might provide a very rudimentary sufficient food supply for weeks. Average per-person household water usage in the US is 80--100 gallons/day (300--380 liter). About 1 gallon (4 liter) is for drinking, roughly twice that for food prep / cooking, and the remainder for cleaning and sanitation. A 1m x 1m x 2m closet (2 m^3) could hold a bit over 500 gallons (2,000 liter), or about a week's worth of average daily water use for one person. Under emergency conditions that could be stretched considerably, but even at 5 gallon/day (~20 liter), a week's supply of water for a household of four would be over 0.5 m^3. My point: You need a lot of water, and will suffer quickly without it.
      - eru 4y ago
        Mostly agreed. > The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated. If you collect it directly as rainwater, should be fine? How clean your water has to be and how much you need depends also on your energy budget. If you have limitless energy, you can distill almost basically source of water, and get something potable out. (If you have large but not infinite amounts of energy, you can eg condense water from the air. Our dew point in Singapore is typically roughly around 24C almost all the time. Singapore as a country has also heavily invested in recycling of water, see eg https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/newater https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/newater and we also have some desalination going. And the reservoirs I already talked about.
        dredmorbius 4y ago
        There's no one approach which works for all locations and scenarios. There is a relatively fixed set of requirements for survival: air, shelter, water, food. Tools, equipment, and infrastructure. The scenario initially proposed was a supply-chain disruption long enough to plan for at least one, and perhaps a substantial number of planting / cultivation / harvesting scenarios. In any significantly urbanised location (and Singapore is very highly urbansied), there's simply not enough arable land to provide food for the local population. As a rough estimate, one person requires about 0.5 hectare of land to support them. Singapore has a population of 5.4 million on an area of 733 km^2 (73,000 ha). Given the per-capita requirement, the area could support a population of about 146,000, or the population of 5.4 million would require an agricultural area of 27,000 km^2 (2.7 million ha). Considering other possible scenarios (hurricane / typhoon, major flooding event, tsunami, earthquake, wildfire, etc.) it's quite possible that structures or containers for large-volume storage would be destroyed, damaged, and/or contaminated. Again my point with water being that large quantities are required even in reduced-usage emergency scenarios and that quality and not merely quantity matters. In most of these scenarios, your energy budget to a substantial extent is your body's own muscle power. That might be supplemented by fire (do you have fuel), animal power, or (do you have fuel) engines or generators. Many regions have official or unofficial groups which provide training and coordination for disaster planning and contingencies. Participating in one locally might help in moving understanding from a theoretical to practical basis.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > Invest in a cat or snakes Hm, i will ask my wife whoch one she wants
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Snakes don't shed fur, don't tear upholstory or curtains, and don't meow incessantly. They also don't purr.
_eht 4y ago
Something to also consider is how you would protect your supply (and children) from your less prepared neighbor and former friend, Alex Jones.
- phyzome 4y ago
  The way I've prepared is to have extra on hand for my less-prepared neighbors. And the way I hear it, a lot of "preppers" do the same. Strength in community.
- nightfly 4y ago
  People over-prepare for that aspect and under-prepare for the food part
phyzome 4y ago
Rather than canned goods, prefer dry goods. In our basement we have 5-gallon buckets of lentils, chickpeas, millet, sunflower seeds, pepitas, and various other things. (Also cases of peanut butter, jarred tomatoes, various flours and such.) This isn't hoarding -- these are things we use! But we always make sure to reorder before a container runs out, which usually takes 6 months to a year. When the pandemic hit, we just bought another 25 lb bag each of lentils and millet and called it good.

jefftk 4y ago

Instead of a stockpile you replace every so often, it's a lot cheaper to just buy extra of the long shelf life things you use. Instead of keeping one jar of peanut butter, you have ten (or however many you'll reliably use before they go bad).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 4y ago
Regular rotation of shelf-stable products is the way to go. Water is often the under-appreciated stock --- people use a lot of it for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (espeically with dried / reconstituted foods). Here a supply, and means of producing more potable supply (a quality filtration system, backpacker and marine filtering systems are useful) and purification (chlorine or iodine in liquid or tablet form) help. It's possible to store grains (whole or ground, flour, wheat, rice, maize) for years, though you need to get rid of moths / worms first. That usually means freezing in smaller portions (2.5 -- 5 kg / 5--10 lb), and then transferring to airtight storage. Rodents can and will chew through both plastic and metal, isnpect frequently. Invest in a cat (or snakes). A chest freezer won't survive a long-duration power-outage, but is useful so long as juice flows, and can make this pest-proofing much more viable. These consume very little power.
- eru 4y ago
  How much water you'd need to store depends a lot on where you are. I'd say you have more of a need for a water stock pile in Arizona than in Singapore. We get more than two metres of rain a year here. (Of course, even in Singapore you can get unlucky and hit a dry spell for a few weeks. But they are rather rare. The city has dedicated a lot of its land to water reservoirs.)
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    For water, quality has a quantity all its own. The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated. And water is far more essential to life. A person can survive only a few minutes without air, or a few days without water. It's possible to live without (or with sharply limited) food for weeks or months. A single closet shelf might provide a very rudimentary sufficient food supply for weeks. Average per-person household water usage in the US is 80--100 gallons/day (300--380 liter). About 1 gallon (4 liter) is for drinking, roughly twice that for food prep / cooking, and the remainder for cleaning and sanitation. A 1m x 1m x 2m closet (2 m^3) could hold a bit over 500 gallons (2,000 liter), or about a week's worth of average daily water use for one person. Under emergency conditions that could be stretched considerably, but even at 5 gallon/day (~20 liter), a week's supply of water for a household of four would be over 0.5 m^3. My point: You need a lot of water, and will suffer quickly without it.
    - eru 4y ago
      Mostly agreed. > The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated. If you collect it directly as rainwater, should be fine? How clean your water has to be and how much you need depends also on your energy budget. If you have limitless energy, you can distill almost basically source of water, and get something potable out. (If you have large but not infinite amounts of energy, you can eg condense water from the air. Our dew point in Singapore is typically roughly around 24C almost all the time. Singapore as a country has also heavily invested in recycling of water, see eg https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/newater https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/newater and we also have some desalination going. And the reservoirs I already talked about.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        There's no one approach which works for all locations and scenarios. There is a relatively fixed set of requirements for survival: air, shelter, water, food. Tools, equipment, and infrastructure. The scenario initially proposed was a supply-chain disruption long enough to plan for at least one, and perhaps a substantial number of planting / cultivation / harvesting scenarios. In any significantly urbanised location (and Singapore is very highly urbansied), there's simply not enough arable land to provide food for the local population. As a rough estimate, one person requires about 0.5 hectare of land to support them. Singapore has a population of 5.4 million on an area of 733 km^2 (73,000 ha). Given the per-capita requirement, the area could support a population of about 146,000, or the population of 5.4 million would require an agricultural area of 27,000 km^2 (2.7 million ha). Considering other possible scenarios (hurricane / typhoon, major flooding event, tsunami, earthquake, wildfire, etc.) it's quite possible that structures or containers for large-volume storage would be destroyed, damaged, and/or contaminated. Again my point with water being that large quantities are required even in reduced-usage emergency scenarios and that quality and not merely quantity matters. In most of these scenarios, your energy budget to a substantial extent is your body's own muscle power. That might be supplemented by fire (do you have fuel), animal power, or (do you have fuel) engines or generators. Many regions have official or unofficial groups which provide training and coordination for disaster planning and contingencies. Participating in one locally might help in moving understanding from a theoretical to practical basis.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Invest in a cat or snakes Hm, i will ask my wife whoch one she wants
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Snakes don't shed fur, don't tear upholstory or curtains, and don't meow incessantly. They also don't purr.

_eht 4y ago

Something to also consider is how you would protect your supply (and children) from your less prepared neighbor and former friend, Alex Jones.

phyzome 4y ago
The way I've prepared is to have extra on hand for my less-prepared neighbors. And the way I hear it, a lot of "preppers" do the same. Strength in community.
nightfly 4y ago
People over-prepare for that aspect and under-prepare for the food part

phyzome 4y ago

Rather than canned goods, prefer dry goods. In our basement we have 5-gallon buckets of lentils, chickpeas, millet, sunflower seeds, pepitas, and various other things. (Also cases of peanut butter, jarred tomatoes, various flours and such.) This isn't hoarding -- these are things we use! But we always make sure to reorder before a container runs out, which usually takes 6 months to a year. When the pandemic hit, we just bought another 25 lb bag each of lentils and millet and called it good.