Preparedness for when

Frugalsod

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Non electric scales, got them already.
Manual mincer ditto
Manual Moule julienne and Mouli Legumes ditto
Good Knives ditto
woodstoves inside and out ditto
Non electric hoover......BROOM and DUSTPAN and BRUSH ditto!!!

Plus a decent sized cooking pot in which to cook my vegetarian should the need arise!!!!!!

Uses for politicians.....GLUE!!!

I do need to get a good manual mincer.

Frugalsod

It looks like Malaysia is on the road to chaos for a while at least.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-30/malaysia-bans-color-yellow-protests-swell-hundreds-thousands

Imagine if $600 million magically appeared in David Cameron's bank account what we would think?

greenbee

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Uses for politicians.....GLUE!!!

Looks like they're more use dead than alive then... at least with your solution they've got some hope of bringing people together

Blue_Doggy

GreyQueen wrote: »

But what are the ethics of cannibalism in a crisis? Is it more or less ethical to eat a vegetarian than an omnivore? As one of the latter, I would suggest that the vegetabliarians are much more nutritious and should be the first on the menu.

:rotfl::rotfl:

Do they count as one of your 5 a day?

Butterfly_Brain

Recipes using long pork ('uman beans)

https://buffalohair.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/101-ways-to-prepare-long-pork/

BigMummaF

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

...Uses for politicians.....GLUE!!!

Not sure about this...they can't stick to anything while they're alive :rotfl: My suggestion for them would be as central heating in hospitals, care homes etc to put all that hot air to good use

thriftwizard

Bringing the tone down slightly, I think that diet-wise in a long-term SHTF situation you'd need to look at what medieval people ate on a day-to-day basis. That's the last time we were really limited to what grows easily here. There would be differences; our rivers & estuaries are too polluted for oysters to be a staple dish, or trout & salmon to feature very much as they did back then, and that would take many years for Nature to overcome. We also now have potatoes, tomatoes, squashes and runner beans, which aren't too hard to grow, although they won't survive over winter. However the produce (and seeds) can, kept cool, dark & dry or preserved. But the main protein input of ordinary people back then was dried peas and beans, and they ate more oats & barley than wheat, which is quite a high-input crop.

It's worth spending a bit of time finding out what our ancestors ate & trying out a few dishes; some are pretty grim but most of the ones we've tried out are rather good, if distinctly on the healthy side. They ate a lot less sugar than we do, and spices were very expensive, but they also ate a lot more widely.

A couple of my friends are re-enactors and do this kind of thing almost every weekend. The "how" is quite interesting too; it highlights that social organisation was very different to what we expect now. Ordinary individual households in towns rarely cooked their own bread daily, for example; if you had to grind your own grains & gather your own fuel, and walk quite some way to do so, you wouldn't want to heat an oven daily (which takes a lot of fuel) though you might keep a small fire going with a pot-au-feu of scraps bubbling away. Hence bakers, and millers too, were important people.

We do have various simple technologies which would make our lives much easier than theirs; rocket stoves in preference to open fires, for example. But we might also have to re-learn how to live in communities, so that we could "afford" specialists like bakers.

mardatha

A mix of medieval and wartime eating would be easier thriftwizard, or at least a starting point.

Frugalsod

That all presumes that we are all willing to accept a medieval lifestyle. That would entail giving up the right to vote; becoming the chattels of land owners; restoration of the death penalty for commoners alone for the most trivial offences as a means to control us. I suspect that it will never get there. There will be significant upheavals before that. There are already signs of that in mass migration. How long before things deteriorate here for people to migrate from the UK?

ALIBOBSY

Yay water finally back to normal here, although there are still a few people still having to boil in other areas in lancashire.

Also in the local news today electricity north west have said they will postpone some mass outages across the area (for supposed system improvements) because of the boil water issues.

TBH didn't even have an idea there were going to be these outages lol.

We do tend to prep for outages anyway as we pretty much get a power cut at least once every winter, we are semi rural and have alot of those overhead cables supplying the area.

I think its interesting to look back at how people used to live, but the reality is we won't go back to a medieval lifestyle. What we will end up with is a new reality where we have to be more self sufficient, more of the stuff we need will have to be produced locally and our power usage will have to drastically fall. There was in fact a whole period between the end of the medieval period and the start of the industrial revolution the so called early modern period, where things weren't as bleak for the average person as during earlier periods.

I do think out lives will be harder work than currently, much less leisure time. But we will have to be more community minded and ultimately it will probably be more rewarding in many ways.

Ali x