We think we can adjust to eating beans and rice or wheat gruel everyday for weeks or months – that we can tough it out – some can others can’t, and why make things harder than they need to be?
We crave variety and having a supply of familiar comfort foods can go along way toward retaining our sanity and self-worth after the balloon goes up.
You can only deny yourself for so long before desperation and depression set in. Life will be difficult enough – give yourself a treat. You deserve it.
It is a proven fact that if we are forced to eat foods we don’t want or the same things for extended periods – just to stay alive – dissociation begins to set in.
We begin to float away as an escape – we still eat to stay alive, but suffer a lack of focus and become disorientated to our surroundings.
This is dangerous in a survival setting. Don’t think it can happen? Try eating nothing but beans and rice for three months and you’ll see what I mean. Store a variety and eat what you store.
Older folks and children will have the hardest time adjusting to new or unfamiliar foods, with many refusing to eat altogether, especially if the food is unnecessarily bland or unappetizing.
During the 1845 the Irish potato famine thousands starved even though they had barns full of corn, oats, rye and barley that they people refused to eat, considering the food only fit for cattle.
In Belgium and France, millions starved after WW I, despite America sending hundreds of thousands of pounds of corn. They turned their noses considering the food only fit for livestock. So they starved.
Everyone in the survival community has heard the phase “eat what you store – store what you eat” yet many fail to do so, thinking they will adjust when the time comes. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see being made. Don’t do it!
Those of you that have been with me for awhile know I am a big proponent of storing basic foods – wheat, beans, rice, salt, sugar and powdered milk. I also have a number of things like spices, coffee, hot chocolate and tea to alleviate boredom and food fatigue.
Most of this stuff is cheap enough that a years supply would cost less than $100. Why go through unnecessary suffering and hard-ship just to “save” a hundred bucks? Doesn’t make sense to me – yet I’ve seen this suggested a number of times on another survival blog. Foolish.
Have suggestions for comfort foods or ideas that will spice up our food storage, please let us know in the comments below.
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Don’t forget to stock spices as well. I’ve got several dozen quart-sized mason jars of various spices in my preps, and I buy a few pounds of bulk spices at Sam’s Club every payday. Here’s a blog entry I posted recently about stocking up on spices:
http://survivalprep.net/2010/08/21/stocking-up-on-spices-to-keep-food-preps-lively/
Oregano and basil are easy to maintain in pots in the house. I have one of each and they are thriving, though it is 30 degrees outside! I have picked and dried leaves of each, but with a little TLC they have come back each time – and I do not have a green thumb! In our long growing season here in Central Texas, hot peppers are easy to grow. A harvest of one small plant has lasted a very long time – picked, dried, and kept in a shaker bottle that once held the store-bought version. That’ll perk up your rice and beans!
Am enjoying this blog site very much, especially in light of not being able to engage our friends in the effort to prepare for whatever. Hope we never need it; hope we are not the ants and they are not the grasshoppers of the fable!
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