Welcome to season three of Inside My Canoe Head, a podcast about individual emergency preparedness. When we talk about topical issues of the day, we interview people who are dealing with it on a regular basis. We ask the tough, difficult, and controversial question, sit back, relax, let's get to it. Alright, welcome back to the AutoA Studios of Inside My Canoe Head.
This week, we are gonna talk about food. We love food. We need food. Food seems to be a little bit disruptive, so sit back, grab your favorite snack, let's get to it.
So the first question you might say, well, why is this important? Like, why in the middle of everything else that's going on in the world in the preparedness community is food important. Because it's one of those staples. Sometimes it's just important that we all return to what we refer to as first principles.
On this podcast, I refer to them as your animalistic requirements for life. That's water, food, shelter, health, and security. So let's talk about food. Why is food important?
Well, you kind of need it to live. It's kind of delicious. It's one of our most favorite things to do. And it's always a bit controversial because when you look at the state of the information that is out there on YouTube, whether you're on Parlor or Clubhouse or whatever other platform, there's some other great foodie podcasts on Spotify and Amazon and Google.
When you think about food, there is a massive amount of information about all the different things that you could do with food. But in the preparedness side, there is a whole slew of people who are providing what they believe to be really honest, heartfelt, great information for you. But the problem is a lot of it is conflicting. A lot of it is giving you direction that has you heading off in different avenues from each other.
So it might be a bit, you know, why we here? Why is this guy saying that? Why is this lady saying that? You know, I'm not understanding.
This is a bit conflicting. I'm kind of confused. So today, our aim is to go through what I think is an awesome food strategy. Well, I'm not sure where you're consuming, catch the pun, your food information from, whether you're getting it from standard preparedness, YouTube type channels, where they're always seem to be showing one of two things.
We're either always being educated on how to process game and cook in the wild back country. As if, again, I keep saying on this podcast, how many of you are actually planning on running back and living off the land in the woods? You know, if we have an emergency preparedness type disruption that happens in our lives, very, very few of us, exceptionally few, I would argue, a minuscule percentage are actually going to find themselves in the bush on the land. You might find yourself stuck in a car.
You might find yourself in a hotel, at a friend's place. You might find yourself in a FEMA shelter or something. But the odds of you finding yourself in the back 40, as we used to say, having the process game is really, really small. But that seems to be a preponderance of information.
And on the other hand, we're seeing all of this super dehydrated freeze dried food that's packed away in your basement buckets that's going to last longer than you are. So the point is, it just seems to be a really confusing set of information that doesn't make any sense to the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast, who live in urban or suburban environments. They want to carry out a normal, happy, joyful life, but wrap themselves in a little bit of preparedness. And the world seems to be having a few disruptions right now.
So it seems a good time to talk about this. The number one thing when we talk about food disruption is your supply chain. Now I've said time and time again, supply chains are not collapsing and they're not and they won't. I'm saying this because I did it for over 20 years.
I got a bunch of certifications, including supply chain risk. The supply chain is not collapsing. It is having significant disruption. Yes, it's undergoing in some industries, a systemic almost paradigm like in Thomas Coon language change.
Yes, but not collapsing. What that means is the supply chains are reorientating themselves to either reshoring, which means bringing large scale elements of the supply chain into a home country or a type of reshoring, which brings them into friendlier countries. Putting a more robust confidence level in the dependability of the nodes and elements within your supply chain by putting them in places that have far less political and economic uncertainty because we all know in the business world, the number one thing the business world hates is uncertainty. So, but understanding that the food supply system is an integrated supply chain that has multiple nodes that like any node, it has a level of risk exposure at each node that needs to be understood by the supply chain management folks, but it's industrialized food in the modern 21st century is industrialized.
We bring in large scale inputs to factories that produce our food. And I'll give you an example. A good friend of mine used to work in the procurement side of the food system. And I, you know, I would joke with them.
I said, you know, I read on these ingredient labels all the time food, you know, sunflower and or canola oil. I'm like, can't these folks figure out like what they're putting into the food as a joke? And he said, he said, dude, like seriously, the reason being is they're buying the oil by the super tanker load. And he said, we buy oil in the tens of millions of leaders at a time.
So yes, a penny per kilogram or a penny per thousand leaders difference in the price of some canola or sunflower can make a massive difference on what's included. So you have these complex systems where all of this is part of an industrialized process. And then all of these inputs. So if you think, you know, massive amounts, 100 million, you know, a million kilograms of grain, a million kilograms of corn, a couple million liters of oil come together with, you know, three to four thousand pounds of berries or something.
So if you think of an industrialized scale, this all gets brought to a whole bunch of plants that are on the, usually the US East Coast or the US West Coast. And the reason the plants are generally located there is because that's where the point of entry for the inputs are. And then so basically what happens is they take all of these inputs that are moved all around the country from their source to a centralized place. They produce the food and then the food has to be made.
It has to be packaged. It then has to be set out along the supply chain distribution system through the warehousing distribution center down to the retail outlet. This is incredibly complex. I can talk about it for days, but it's an incredibly complex process.
So you have to understand that the majority, not all of it, but the majority of the food system that we use now is an industrialized commodity. So it's kind of like why I refer to everything that's in the middle of your grocery store on those middle aisles. It's not really food. It's a manufactured good.
It's treated like handled like and moved around and stock taking and everything else is done on it just like it is a manufactured good. So if you understand the complexities of the food supply chain that exists in your standard North American or Western style system, now the next thing to ask yourself if we want to talk about food is what is your supply chain look like? What does your food distribution system look like? And this is what I talk a lot about on this podcast is that when you really want to understand your own vulnerabilities and your own risk and sometimes a lot of times what happens is people are assuming a level of risk that they're just, they're not concerned with.
They're not aware of. They really haven't sat down and understood. But if you sit down and you look at your principal food stuff that you eat and I say this because there is a myriad of diets out there, a myriad of religious tolerances and there's a myriad of other things that contribute to the decisions you make on what foods you're going to consume. So when you think about what food do I eat?
What food does my family, the people I'm responsible for? What do they consume? This is not a judgment. I mean, you're not, you're on your podcast.
You're listening to a podcast. It's not a judgment. So sit down and do an honest assessment. What food do I eat now?
Ask yourself, where does that food come from? You probably are not aware. You probably might not even care. But the point I'm saying is is understanding what percentage of your daily calorie intake have you offloaded the responsibility to the industrialized food system.
So it's understanding that I get 75% of my calorie intake comes from a manufactured good. I'm not talking about the stuff that you get. A lot of stuff you got at the grocery store is not a manufactured good, right? It's actual food.
It has, I define food as something that has one ingredient, something that has two ingredients as a manufactured good. So if you have bread, it's a manufactured good, right? If you have meat, it's, it's food. If you have chicken, it's food.
If you have bacon, it's food. If you have lettuce, it's food. If you have beets, it's food. If you have bananas, it's food, etc.
So if you understand your exposure to the industrialized side of the process. So first of all, how much of my food is manufactured by human beings and robots? Okay, that's number one. Number two is understand the distribution.
Where does my food come from? So bananas are food, but they're not grown in North America. So depending where you live in the world, there is a distance. A road that this banana.
Now, I'm not talking about the greenhouse gas and the carbon footprint of your food because that's a concern for a lot of people in a very valid one. I'm referring to the distance because that distance that banana has to travel presents a risk that you are assuming if it's a requirement for you. So now you're armed. Right now, you have an understanding of how much the food you consumed as part of the manufactured goods process that comes out of the Eastern and Western seaboard of North America.
You've now had a look at what are my distances? How far does my food have to travel? So now you're kind of looking in the mirror and understanding, you know what, there's a little bit more risk here than I was aware of. There's more risk than I was thinking of before.
This is a little different. So with that understanding your risk, we always talk about preparedness. One of the key things is mitigating your risk. So how do you mitigate the risk?
Because I'm not about telling you to eat everything out of your own garden and forget supply chain risk. No, but it's understanding what's your tolerance level. And each individual person is going to have a different measurable risk tolerance and risk perception. Those things are individual.
They're not right. They're not wrong. They're you, which means they're always absolutely right. Correct.
So you're going to have a risk tolerance. But if you look at this picture as I've painted it between your industrialized exposure and your transportation exposure, you now decide, Hey, listen, how do I mitigate this? How do I lessen my reliance on food that has a long distance to travel and has a manufacturing requirement to it? How do I mitigate that?
The first number one thing is start looking for food that is close. Now, there are things called a 100 mile diet, 100 kilometer diet. But the premise behind that is is that if there is less people and less distance between you and the production of your food, you are far better off. And I'll give you an example.
I live in the nation's capital of Canada in Ottawa. I'm a member of a CSA, a community supported agriculture from a place called Foster Family Farm. They're absolutely fantastic humans and wonderful individuals. And so I buy a half share every year.
And so I get these huge boxes every week for 14 weeks, starting at the first of July and running until, you know, mid October that are full of wonderfully grown vegetables from a farm that is less than 30 kilometers from my home. Now, you can see they touch it and they give it to me. There is no intermediary. There is no warehousing distribution and retail aspect to it.
It is picked and I get it the next day or it's two days afterwards. A lot of the times I get the food and it still has the dirt on it and you can smell the dirt and that is something wonderful. So I mitigate it. It's not all the vegetables.
I eat absolutely. It's not all the strawberries. I eat. It's not all the berries.
I eat. But it it provides a mitigating portion to what I'm doing. So I know that a sustenance level of vegetables for 14 weeks are going to be provided to me and my family by this. So I buy it in February.
I buy it in January. I gave them their money in January. And the farmer and I both take the risk. Neither one of us know whether this is going to be a bountiful season or whether it's going to be a difficult season.
And we both assume that risk. So I pay the same amount of money. If it's a bountiful season, I get massive amounts of vegetables. If it is a less than bountiful season, I get a restricted amount of vegetables.
And this is a risk that we assume as well. When it comes to meat production, there is a great place called the Ottawa Valley Meats in my area and you can order a part of a cow or a pig or a chicken. And you know, as long as you're not a vegan, it works really well. And if you're a vegan, you're probably going to go to the CSA and order a full share and get even more food.
But the point being is two of my principal inputs to my diet, which is my carnivore style. I love meat, chicken and eggs and my vegetables. I'm sourcing them from something very close. Now, Ottawa Valley Meats is probably like 100 kilometers away from my house.
But the point is, is that it's them and me. There's nobody in the middle. It's delivered. It's it's blue-fastile.
It's very, very simple. So I take away a lot of risk. I help out the local economy, right? Because if I help a firm do really well, if I help a rancher do really well, that rancher is going to make some money.
That rancher is going to put that money back in the local economy and that rancher and that farmers are going to hire a bunch of seasonable people that all help the greater good, right? So don't get me wrong. I love my sauces, my additives, my chippies, my snackies and all this other stuff that I really, really enjoy that I get from everywhere else. But I've taken the mitigating measure of knowing that the core requirement for living, get back to the animalistic principles, I get that locally.
So if the entire food supply chain crashes on the east and west coast of the United States of America, I'm going to eat. I think that's pretty cool. That's why I make the decision that I did. I'm going to eat if it all comes down.
I don't think it's going to come down. There are no signs it's going to come down. But if it does or there's significant price hikes in the manufactured product process, or we have a bunch of truckers that may be blocking access to the bridges to bring the stuff over from the states, anything like that. I'm insulated from that.
Hey, my cereal's not here. Life goes on. So once you've mitigated, the big talk about food, we move it on to stockpiling. Holy smokes.
This is where YouTube goes pear-shaped. You can have everything under the sun on YouTube from, let's take it, you know, 72-hour bug out bag food. Get your date, text, SOS, rations and stuff. I'm in there all the way to come on downstairs and have a look at my five-year proper pantry.
I mean, there's everything in between. If you're thinking about preparedness, storage and stuff like that, I'm just going to give a shout out to one of my very good friends. I interviewed her on this podcast, Lingatar. She is the owner, runner, and proprietor of Bucket List Homestead on YouTube.
You will be hard-pressed to find a more honest, straightforward, kind-hearted human being on the face of this earth. She's just a normal person, several-time cancer survivor who's simply trying to make her family a little bit more resilient and a little bit more self-sufficient by running a bit of a homestead. It's kind of small. It's kind of near the city.
It's just an example of wonderful stuff in this world. But if you're thinking about what you put up for food, sincerely thinking about what you should have for food, and go back to a lot of what I talk about on this podcast is, a lot of it gets back to your risk tolerance. And I ask the question to a lot of people, and food is a predominant part of this, how long do you want to be able to stay in your house when all the utilities are shut off? So, if I terminate all of your utilities in your household and cut off access to it, how long do you want to be able to stay in your household before you need to go somewhere, access services, et cetera?
Now, so for everybody that's going to be different, again, it's based upon risk tolerance, it's based upon your perception of risk, it's based upon how you define a family, it's based upon people you're responsible for, and it's based upon a plan you may have to evacuate to Uncle Bob's farm three days after stuff goes pear-shaped, right? So the whole system that you've created for preparedness around your family will help you answer this question. But if you think about it, what's your dose in military terminology? What's your days of supply?
What is that for you? So for me, for a longest time, it was 60. So keeping 60 days of food, of normal consumption, of 2,000 around calories per day, for all the members of my family for which I'm responsible, I'm in the process of moving that out to 90 days right now. I think with the world, the way it is that 90 days for me, in my situation, where I live and the risk that I'm exposed to, 90 days is probably a better figure.
But the considerations when you talk about your days of supplies, number one, make sure we're talking about food that you actually enjoy eating. Rice and beans are cool, and they're awesome survival food, and they can pretty much keep you going forever. The point is, is your family's going to revolt on day three and strangle you in your sleep. Probably not, but you get what I mean.
Happiness comes from food. Great tasting, wonderful meals are a great way to bring up morale. 28 years in the army, as a quartermaster of an infantry battalion, I'll tell you, I own the cooks. And the cooks were one of my number one tools at keeping morale high in the infantry battalion, because as they were wackin' bad guys, it was very, very important to have good food downrange, so they could fill their bellies and prepare to go wack some more bad guys.
So there you go, you gotta figure out that day of supply. It's gonna be each individual. So what I'm saying is, make sure you understand who you're responsible for, make sure how long you know you're comfortable, make sure it's food that you enjoy. And then you basically, if you don't have it right now, so a lot of people probably, they say, you know, 27 meals to anarchy, 9 days to anarchy is usually the general standard.
If we were to consume at our normal rate of consumption of food, the average North American house has 27 meals or 9 days. Now, that data is a 1987 or 88 survey, so it's a lot out of date. I'm not sure what it is now, but if you think about Costco, it's probably, or Sam's Club in the United States, it's probably a lot more when you actually think about it. You really probably have a lot more food than you would realize.
Well, the point is also, it's important just to understand that part of preparedness is it's not a money game, it's not about spending money, it's about knowledge, right? It's about knowledge and skills, but knowledge most importantly, how much food do I have in my house? And all this takes is, you know, pour yourself a cup of coffee some morning and just stand and open your cupboards in your fridge or your pantry and have a look at it and just do some mental math. If I had to turn this all into meals, one of my thinking, you know, one of my how long could I feed the fruit that I'm responsible for until as such time as I started to run out or actually permanently ran out of calories for them?
That gives you a start point. And then you progressively add food, you buy three cans of soup every time you need soup instead of two, and you slowly be surely over time build up. That's why I say I'm going from 60 to 90. I mean, I have the money to go from 60 to 90 in one Costco trip.
The point being is that I'm doing it over a period of time and buying the things as they come on sale that the family loves, you know, you have to be prudent with your funds. The last part we're going to throw in today is food is wonderful. I love food except you have to cook it. And this is a part of preparedness when it comes to the animalistic requirement of food that some people fall a little short on.
You've got all this great food. You've got it stored away in various different processes, but you forget the fact that how am I going to quote unquote off-grid cook it? If the power supply is no longer available and you only have an electric stove and an electric microwave, what is your intent? How do you intend to cook this food?
That's important. There are lots of options that are available out there. Each individual person can think differently. So you could have a barbecue.
A lot of people have, you know, barbecues in their backyard or on their deck of their apartment or condo. And so your food preparedness plan for cooking may be nothing more than buying two extra 20 pound propane tanks. And then you're done, right? I've got, that's my plan.
I've got a side burner. I've got a grill. I can cook everything in the world with those two. I want to be able to cook for 60 days, let's say, as your days of supply that you're concerned about.
So the answer to that question is I just need two more propane tanks and then I'm good to go, right? That could very well much be. Or we could turn around and say, I don't have the, I just want a Coleman stove, a good old fashioned Coleman fuel stove, or a portable propane stove, or one of those butane stoves or a jet ball. You see where I'm going, like, think through the process, understand how much fuel for that alternative cooking method you need.
It may be a wood stove, which is great because it doesn't cost you any extra money. But I tell you, listen, if you're going to cook over a wood stove and that wood stove is in your basement and it's July, your family is not going to be very happy when you take a home that's already stifling hot and you're going to fire it up several notches because you have to light a fire in the water. Because you have to light a fire in the wood stove to cook. So just think about that process, understand it, know how much fuel you need to have on hand so that your fuel supply for cooking matches your days of supply that you have in storage so that you know if you have to get into it, you're good to go and you've got everything you need.
So the last, even last part that I forgot to mention here is really, really important. It's your mobile. So having an evacuation plan is part of the necessities of living in an urban and suburban environment. You may not have a bug out plan in the sense when paintings go bad, you're not intending to leave.
This is in the unlikely event that there is an involuntary requirement to leave. And I don't mean the police telling you to leave because I'm a libertarian and you can figure out what that means. I'm talking about when there's a wildfire that's about to consume your house or I'm talking about the flood waters are into the waste deep in the kitchen and it's probably all good reason to go. So there's a very small probability that you could evacuate, but when you do evacuate, if you have to, food is a requirement.
For that, I always have a forever recommended that you take non-perishable food. Listen, and I don't mean cans of soup because there's nothing less delicious than opening a can of green beans and trying to eat it. I'm talking about prepared delicious food. I'm talking about cliff bars.
I'm talking about, you know, your favorite baggie of chippies, but M&M's are better. Reese's piece, you know, things that are calorie dense are very, very good peanuts and nuts. Bags of those thrown into your evacuation kit. That's all you really need, right?
Because you're just talking about sustainment calories. Now, winter car kits will require some type of heat source. You know, I've always told my wife that I define successor failure as to whether if we're stuck on the side of road, I can produce her a hot cup of delicious tea to warm her insides as we're waiting in a snowstorm stuck on a road. So anyhow, the point being is that you just got to consider that there are some feeding supporting requirements to food itself, pardon the pun intended.
But just take the time to think your way through and process and you'll be good to go. Listen, thank you very much for taking your time to listen to Inside My Canoe Head this week. I hope our little conversation about food is timely, is important, gave you some reflections, are made to realize that, you know what, I got this sucker squared away. And no, you can go for five years of food in your basement, but that's just not my thing.
Maybe it's your thing, you go for it if it is. Listen, if you've got any questions or comments, keep them coming. I've gotten a lot of wonderful responses at Jeff at Preparedness Labs.ca. Any suggestions that you have for future episodes, things that you'd love to hear me talk about.
If you don't want to hear me talk anymore, because you think I'm annoying, send me that email too. Love to hear it. Listen, take care, get your jabs and let's lift these mandates and get on with life.