Survival Cooking 101: A bit of advice on storable food

The other day, I was reading a certain blog. Okay, I love the guy. His snarky style of writing attracted me years ago. However, in this particular blog, he stated that all he was purchasing was wheat, beans, and rice.

(Tires screeching on pavement).

In one sense, this is okay. These are the very basic things you need to survive. Unfortunately, if this is ALL you are getting, there are three main problems I can think of where it concerns this type of diet. The first is scurvey. The second I've heard called "winter sickness". The third was called "pioneer starvation".

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Scurvy is a condition caused by not getting enough vitamin C. From wikipedia, "Scurvy leads to the formation of spots on the skin, spongy gums, and bleeding from the mucous membrains. The spots are most abundant on the thighs and legs, and a person with the ailment looks pale, feels depressed, and is partially immobilized."

Not good. If you are partially imobilized, you cannot survive.

If you cannot afford to stock up on vitamins, or on canned or dried fruits, then do this simple trick. Purchase oranges for your regular every day diet. Before you cut into an orange to eat it or squeeze it for juice, rub the skin of the orange on a cheese shreeder (the smallest holes work best). This is, in essence, orange rind, or "zest". Now take the rind, put it on a pan, and dry it in the oven...setting "warm" with the door open. You can do this with lemons and limes, too. Orange and lemon rind are both often used in baking recipes. But best of all, the contain that all-important vitamin C. You can add the powder to water and drink it (no, it won't taste like tang). You see, most often, we'll eat the orange, lemon, or lime and simply throw the rind out. This way, you can have a natural source of vitamin C without the extra cost.

Other suggestions, if you can, is to stock up on powder drinks that contain vitamin C, such as Tang or Kool-Aide (or their generic variants).

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Winter sickness is something I haven't heard about nearly as much, but I have still heard about it. Today, the term applies to those virus' you get in the winter time because of a lack of vitamin D. Traditional winter sickness is caused by a lack of eating vegetables....most people had to go out to cut or gather wood, or to hunt, so they still got sunlight (and thus vitamin D). In the past, vegetables didn't store very well, and of course, most don't grow during the winter...thus, it was called winter sickness. I'm not sure why, but dried veggies just don't work as well to keep it away.

While I had never heard of what Winter Sickness causes, I imagine it similar to a lack of vitamin C or vitamin D. But I did hear the remedy...sprouts. I don't know if beans you purchase from the grocery store will sprout or not...you might want to try it at home...but you might also want to stock up on beans or other seeds (like broccoli or alfalfa seeds) for sprouting. I've heard they can be purchased at certain organic health food stores, but it might be less expensive overall to purchase them in bulk from a feed and seed. I can't guarantee that they will be heirloom or organic, but there is nothing wrong with them otherwise. Your other choice is to purchase canned vegetables, or try some winter cold-frame gardening.

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If you are excellent at gathering, you may not need to worry about these first two nearly as much, unless your winter is a frozen one. But most people aren't. Just a couple of months ago, I heard about people in my own area getting malnutrition from eating the beans and rice type of diet...all while seeing wild carrot growing just about everywhere! (Wild carrot is a flower that is alledgedly the ancestor of the carrot...it doesn't look like a carrot, but it smells and tastes similar to one, and even the flower is edible.) Whether you can afford to stock up on fruits and veggies or not, I would still look into what wild "weeds" in your area are edible. Just remember, though...in colder areas, very little grows in winter. We have had cabbage, garlic, and onions survive the winter....but the cabbage leaves were kind of grosse, and the onions and garlic couldn't be pried out of the frozen ground.

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The final is pioneer starvation. When our pioneers moved out west, they brought seeds for their gardens, wheat, and beans. They figured that any meat they would need along the way, they would catch. And they did...the land was full of rabits, deer, ducks and geese. Fish were in the streams. Squirrels, rabbits, snakes, and even grubs can be eaten.

But there was a problem. This is "game food". Perhaps you've heard the term "gamey" applied to it. What does gamey mean? It means these animals have little or no fat. They are certainly full of protein, but they lack fat. This is why the buffalo was so essential to the native people of the plains.

The lack of fat caused what was known as pioneer starvation. Hunting a bear (bear grease is useful for more than just cooking) could alleviate that, but bears just aren't as plentiful or easy to find as deer and rabbits. Smarter pioneers of little means took as much salt pork as they could. A single slice of salt pork or bacon a day can stave off pioneer sickness for a whole family, and its why beans are traditionally cooked with a slice of bacon or salt pork "for flavor". Unfortunately, what we purchase in the grocery store today is not the durable bacon or salt pork that we used to be able to get our hands on those few decades ago...refrigeration kind of ruined that. Keep your bacon out on the counter top a few days and you'll see what I mean. I would learn the old-timer way of preserving these two, or purchase other types of oils, such as olive or corn oil. The nice thing about olive oil is that even when it goes bad, it can be used as lamp oil.

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All in all, in order to stave off serious malnutritional illnesses that would make survival impossible, it might be worth it to spend a couple of extra dollars a week on things other than beans, rice, and wheat.