- Joined
- Mar 25, 2010
- Messages
- 30,373
- Reaction score
- 81,347
I'll add to that. After living through 9/11 in DC where your ATM card wasn't going to do you any good, I've learned to keep cash on hand. It's great to have food stored up, but should our digital infrastructure go down, you're going to need to buy things you hadn't anticipated on; cards won't be of any use...
That is why you try to think of items other than rice and beans, canned foods, and fruits etc, and keep in mind you're going to want salt, pepper and spices - you can get dried chopped onions and garlic and herbs there. Sugar, brown sugar, flour, cornmeal and grits, oil and honey, canned milk; you can get complete pancake mix so you don't have to worry about eggs, and if you use the cornbread kits it just need one egg and 2/3 cup of milk. Instant mash potatoes, rice a roni and the knorr sides of pasta or rice, a can of chicken soup can be the liquid, Hamburger Helper already has pasta and spices. Pasta and boxes of mac and cheese and gravy mixes. A few tins of tuna fish and chicken, peanut butter and jelly. Pickles and relishes, ketchup, mustard, Helmans, baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice drink mixes. And water. Keep a 24 pack, cost two dollars and cents fifty here, you'll have some to cook with and drink.
I just realized that I can take the ingredients above and make a very good gnocchi and sauce. And chicken and dressing.
Anyway, we did our prepping way back late 1970's to 1983 and we moved and moved two hundred pounds of beans and rice, and cases of canned good, along with Spellbounds most wanted item - cases of toilet papers, you name it we had it - and I had a shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste and brushes, disposable razors, bars of soap, and there was this one big box that dh cracked up about, I had forty five boxes of tampons, and I told dh I think we're done prepping for now. We gave the beans and rice and can good to the Salvation Army food kitchen, the shampoo and things to the new women's shelter along with the "mass quantities" as dh called it, of tampons.
We did have charts of the jet stream and where and how the nuclear fallout would be and settle. We knew that Dallas Ft. Worth would be gone. We had Carswell a SAC base with nuclear warheads and the Navel Base in Grand Prairie and they would be taken out , and San Antonio that has several military bases and they would be also. Jimmy Carter's idea as nuclear shelters was for the citizen of North Texas go to the Dairy Queens up in OKlahoma and they would mound dirt up over it.
When I was twenty one I worked for company that did a lot of work for oil companies and nuclear reactors warning systems, and I worked in drafting and did some of the work on the intercontinental ballistic missile systems (ICBM) here in the states in case of an attack by Russia. I never thought I'd be planning on or wanting to survive a nuclear war. What will there be? What would life be like? The air and soil will be polluted, the water poisoned, the animals you want for food would suffer and die, you'd be alone with nothing to do, but wait to die.