this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Bushcrafting content has a fine line when it pushes over into doomsday prepper. I can get the ideas of having a bit of food/water stocked up for a normal emergency. But if you are preparing industrial quantities of things to survive for years in a bunker you should seek help.
"prepper" vs "Prepper" with a capital "P".
The first learns and practices actual useful skills -- gardening, food preservation, repairing their own things, etc. The later are dorks buying a ton of unnecessary shit shilled by right-wing influencers cosplaying as "entirely self-sufficient".
Gardening, sewing, soldering, and communication are the most important doomsday skills
Well if you just get a commercial freeze dryer, generator and alcohol fuel distillation setup you can be completely self sufficient!
Freeze drying on a large scale takes a LOT of time. You need to be ready to treat food prep like a full time job for it to make serious financial sense.
I would think other preservation methods are easier to go with really. Salt, dehydrate, smoke, pickle, fermemt.
For many things, yes. Canning can be done for some things (although you want to be really sure about what you're doing; you can kill yourself pretty fast with botulism if you do it wrong), freezing is good for other things (although not great if you have power outages). If you're trying to live off the land, you do need to be aware that certain parasites are not adequately dealt with by salt curing, smoking, dehydration, or even freezing; feral pigs and bear both have trichinosis, and must be thoroughly cooked to be safe. In wild populations, the parasite has been demonstrated to be highly resistant to freezing, etc.
Dried, etc. things should be vacuum sealed with desiccants and oxygen absorbers for maximum preservation. I test the e.g. apples that I've dried every so often (I live in an area with a lot of orchards; apples can be very cheap when you buy them by the bushel directly from the orchard), and as of this year, the apples I dried six years ago are still good.
One thing that freeze drying can be very good for is complete meals. E.g., if you make a stock pot full of jambalaya, you can freeze dry it in individual portion sizes, vacuum seal it in 9mil mylar, and you've got a meal that should be good for 10+ years.
For anyone that's seriously considering a freeze dryer, check this video out. Yeah, I still want one, but seriously, it can take a lot to make it practical. I'm not enamored of the control system that they use; a blended automatic and manual control system would probably work better than something that supposedly takes the guesswork out of it for you.
I think I would preserve apples in the form of cider. Perhaps fortified with some apple brandy to help it last longer.
But really isn't it kinda unnecessary to preserve most things for multiple years?
Well, I hope it's not necessary. But you don't know until you actually do need to, and once you need enough for multiple years it's too late to start stockpiling.
I will point out that we're right now entering a time when basic foodstuffs are going to become very expensive, and a lot of day to day items are likely going to rise sharply in price, or become unavailable. Having industrial amounts of these day-to-day things is a hedge against that.
Then buy grains, they already come in a form you can store long term. Honey, jam and tinned goods too.
'Course, the good news about the reciprocal tariffs is that soybeans are gonna be very cheap domestically. You can make a very functional flour out of soybeans with a good grain mill/stone grinder, although you'll want to add gluten to it if you're going to try to make bread. And soy is very high in proteins (compared to most grain flour), so you can live off it when other protein sources are too expensive.
California's lost their water reserves for the year and potash is being tariffed.
Water is the hard one; the amount of water that people go through in a day, even in desert communities where people are very aware of the amount of water they consume--drinking, cooking, cleaning--is quite high. Storing enough for a full year for a household of four is functionally impossible. If I lived in California, I'd be looking for high-volume desalination systems.