Honey, the ultimate survival food

Honey is a great long-term storage food that can be collected from wild bee colonies or domesticated beehives. An average hive produces around 65 pounds of honey.

Ripe, freshly collected, high-quality honey at 68 °F should flow from a knife in a straight stream, without breaking into separate drops. When poured, it should form small, temporary layers that disappear quickly, indicating high viscosity. If it does not form temporary layers, it has high water content and will not be suitable for long-term storage. The amount of water absorbed by honey depends on the relative humidity.

The honey has to be stored in sealed containers to prevent fermentation, which usually begins if the honey’s water content rises much above 25%. The average moisture content of floral honey is around 17% and cannot have more than 18.6% water content to qualify for the U.S. Grade A standard.

When buying honey from a beekeeper, you will typically not get a jar with an expiration stamp. However, honey sold in supermarkets will have this stamp because of commercial requirements.

Honey jars stamped with the “best before date” suggests a shelf life of 2 to 5 years. This “best before date” on the jar helps in indicating “freshness” of the honey and in a way signals to the customers whether or not the honey jar has been sitting on the shelf for too long; nobody wants to buy honey that is already years old even if it lasts forever.

Down feathers, how birds keep you warm

A bird’s down is a layer of fine feathers located beneath the tough exterior feathers that help keep it warm.

Those down feathers can keep you warm, too, if you buy a sleeping bag or coat that uses them for insulation. The loose structure of the feathers traps air, which helps insulate against heat loss.

In the United States, any product labeled “100% Down” must contain only down feathers. In contrast, products labeled “Down” can contain a mixture of fiber and feathers. Also, products labeled as “Goose Down” must contain at least 90% goose down, 10% goose feathers.

Down insulation is rated by fill power, which is the number of cubic inches displaced by a given ounce of down (in3/oz). Eider-down has the highest fill power, at 1200. However, even down with a fill power as low as 550 still provides reasonably good insulation.

Higher fill-power downs insulate better than lower fill-power downs of the same weight.

Most sleeping bags and coats range from about 400 to 900 fill.

Down rated 500–650 fill is warm enough and light enough for most conditions.

Down rated 800–900 fill is very lightweight and suitable for frigid weather.

Cared for down will retain its loft up to three times longer than most synthetic fill; however, there are downsides:

1 – When down gets wet, the thermal properties are virtually eliminated.

2 – Down forms clumps when wet and will mildew if left damp.

3 – Down will absorb and retain odors.

4 – Most down is collected after the birds are killed for meat, but in a few countries like Poland, Hungary, and China, the live-plucking of birds still takes place. The cruelty of this method should not be tolerated, so buy from companies that do not support this or by a synthetic fill.

Surviving a catastrophic power outage

You may have read other articles about a December report put out by The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), which is composed of senior executives from industry, state, and local government who own and operate the critical infrastructure essential to our modern life. In those articles, you may feel they sensationalized the report, so I am going to write this article using only quoted material from the report. If, after reading them, you are still interested, you can read the full report here.

“We found that existing national plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by a catastrophic power outage.”

“Imagin an outage that stretches beyond days and weeks to months or years, and affects large swaths of the country.”

“The scale of the event—stretching across states and regions, affecting tens of millions of people—would exceed and exhaust mutual aid resources and capabilities.”

“A catastrophic power outage may occur with little or no notice and result from myriad types of scenarios: for example, a sophisticated cyber-physical attack resulting in severe physical infrastructure damage; attacks timed to follow and exacerbate a major natural disaster; a large-scale wildfire, earthquake, or geomagnetic event; or a series of attacks or events over a short period of time that compound to create significant physical damage to our nation’s infrastructure.”

“Ultimately, all events, from small to large disasters, are local. This means that those closest to impacted areas are the true first responders during an emergency or disaster—from individuals to families to neighbors and local communities.”

“There remains an ongoing myth that the federal government will be able to provide assistance and resources directly after an event to help with response, and that is not always the case.”

I will stop here, the quotes speak for themselves.

We should all be prepared to live without power, and we should also be ready to deal with those who are not, which, in my opinion, will be the more significant threat.

My wife wanted to know why I bought more salt

My wife asked, “why did you buy more salt?”

And I said smugly, “To cook and preserve food with if the grid goes down. What else would I be buying it for?”

And she said, “Oh, I thought you might be buying it to make industrial chemicals, you know they use salt for that.

It’s used cleaning as well.

De-icing sidewalks, maybe?

How about using it as a poison ivy remedy, or weed killer for that grass in the sidewalk?

You could use it to fix that hole in the laundry room sheetrock if you mix it with a little water and cornstarch.

It’s good for putting out grease fires too.

And since the grids going down, you might want to buy some to put in the water you’ll be using this winter to rinse your clothes with; just a little bit will keep them from freezing on the line,” she said smugly.

And I said… I said nothing because I wanted to live long enough to see doomsday.