Part 4 - Food

My wife recently pointed out the obvious to me; preparing for a zombie outbreak is just like preparing for a natural disaster. So, the added benefit of being ready for the day the dead walk the earth also means we are prepared for anything from earthquakes to simple power outages from windstorms.

All the power and water (previous post) in the world won't do you any good if you don't have food. Luckily, this is easy; it's only as difficult as you make it.

Most store bought canned goods are good for anywhere between 12-24 months, safely. Some items could last longer... but you must ask whether it's worth the risk. Remember, there won't be any hospitals to visit if you get botulism or salmonella... or anything of the sort.

If you don't want to go to the store, you have the option of canning or drying. I remember drying pasta sauce (among other things) before going on a week-long hiking trip when I was much younger. The dehydrator was nothing more than a cardboard box with some tinfoil in it and a lightbulb. That pasta sauce was fantastic once it was rehydrated on the trail. And who doesn't like canned peaches?

There are tons of resources on the internet regarding either drying or canning; I won't go into details on that. The one thing I will point out, because I haven't really said anything about it, yet, is the home defense plan is really based on a short-to-medium-length stay; Anything more than a year, and there will be other plans made (and more on that later).

So, without getting into how, the biggest questions are what and how much?

Space is an issue, so the type of foods I'll be looking to prepare and store should be very high in nutritional value and calories, but without being bulky. If we can maintain defense of the entire house's envelope, then storage in the cool basement would alleviate many concerns regarding heat. So, what kind of food would I store? WHFoods.com is a fantastic source of information. They even have a list of foods that make the grade and each has a complete breakdown of what's good about the food and also any concerns one might have regarding it. Once I've determined which foods I'll be wanting to store, it's just a matter of finding the right way to store it.

So, after that comes the question of how much do I store? Well, currently I'd want enough for two adults, 1 toddler, and an infant. Granted, if an outbreak doesn't occur in the next 15 years, then I'd make sure our provisions reflect the caloric intake of 2 adults and 2 teenagers. To keep this very simple, we're looking at about 2,000 calories a day for each adult, and 1,000 calories for each child. (Again, keeping it very simple.)

So, not only do I need to have about 6,000 calories of food stored for each day, but we also have to take into account special dietary needs (for the infant). As everybody ages, their needs change, too. So, I will have to keep an inventory of stored provisions and rotate out old or "obsolete" foods.

So, what does 6,000 calories a day look like? Over 10 kg of apples, or about 6.5 kg of bananas, or about 14 kg of carrots, over 3 kg of chicken, over 1 kg of peanuts, 5.5 kg of potatoes or corn, under 3 kg of beef, over 4.5kg of kidney beans, 21 kg of broccoli, almost 5.5 kg of brown rice, over 2.5 kg of salmon, almost 2 kg of honey, or just over 2 kg of maple syrup. Etc, etc, etc. The point is, in a non-fast-food, non-processed world, it's not very easy to overeat as far as the recommended daily intake for calories go, but, in this situation, it means having to store massive quantities of food.

A fantastic alternative would be to grow your own food, but that would require either lots of electricity for indoor hydroponics or exposure to the outdoors. Remember, I'm not fortifying and stockpiling for an extended seige. No, I'm doing all this in the hopes of avoiding detection, so gardening is out of the question, even if it was possible to rig something up on the roof.

I'm going to have to go through the list of foods, find out which ones are the easiest to store, supply the most, and most important, nutrients, and also find out how (and where) I'm going to store them all. Right now, the basement and the attic spaces seem the likely candidates (where it doesn't conflict with heat requirements and water storage, of course.

Next up: Weapons, entertainment, and exercise.