FoodSecurityAndCooking

Allowing a weaker creature to have power over you feels wrong. Women are beautiful, lovable, soft, and an indispensable part of life. While a man needs the love of a woman, he cannot stand to be controlled and manipulated by a weaker creature. That is male nature. In comparison to women, men are rougher in their character and are not as sophisticated socially. Women are urban creatures and men are more like workers in the field.

Women were made for the domestic space. Men were made to wander the Savannah. Men always come home to women because we need their touch, but there is something wrong about always staying in a woman’s space where she has nominal control. Men are masters of their own ship while they are out in the field earning their living, but then come home to women who expect to be masters over the homes that they made.

It might seem selfish that a man does not want to grant total equality to a woman, but men by nature are hierarchical creatures. Weaker men are usually dominated by more powerful men, and women in turn derive power and status by clinging to the more dominant men. The weaker men cannot stand being down forever, and they especially despise being forced to prostrate towards creatures that are weaker and cannot hunt in the field the same as they.

Most people do not know how to make salad dress let alone how to can it, but this is where being creative can be a real boon to someone with access to basic canning equipment. Vinegar is a crucial ingredient to Italian Salad Dressing, and it can be used by itself to flavor salads for someone who desires a calorie-free salad dressing. It also happens to have a high acidity, which means that any ingredients suspended in vinegar can be preserved by hot water bath canning and do not need to use a pressure canner.

There are advantages to preferring a water bath to a pressure caner. The biggest is that there is less deterioration of the ingredients. Tomatoes and pickles are water bath canned so that the ingredients stay crisp and are not broken down by pressurized steam. In comparison, anything cooked under pressure tends to get soft and may disintegrate if overcooked.

Salad dressings in particular have delicate flavors and contain a lot of ingredients with volatile oils such as mint-based plants like oregano and basil. Some ingredients such as garlic and onion are at a concern for botulism and so the added security of them being chopped finely and suspended in vinegar helps to prevent the growth of botulinum spores. Pressure canning also tends to destroy the fine proteins of any milk products.

For better or worse, it is best to water bath can salad dressings. It preserves the flavor, and anything suspended in oil or vinegar, especially as a dry ingredient, is less likely to grow anything. From a culinary perspective, that is the secret of oil and vinegar. They can both absorb flavors and nutrients from dry ingredients. That means that oil can be flavored like basil and pepper and garlic, and so can vinegar because it is a mild solvent that gives an extra kick to water.

Not everyone has noticed, but North America seems to be going through a canning lid shortage. A commodity that was worth a few dollars for a pack of  twelve a few years ago is now worth six dollars a pack on amazon and it currently being sold on primary sites for a much greater sum of money. What is going on when people need supplies?

Supply and demand are very much the deal. On one hand, restaurants and small businesses need fewer lids if they have suspended their operations. The people who want canning supplies the most appear to be prepers and online merchants who continue to have stashes of canning supplies they bought ahead of an anticipated surge of interest in canning. 

It is now a universal meme of people hoarding toilet paper. Toilet paper purchases in bulk haven’t really stopped and might pick up steam again in winter of 2020. It is a lesser known fact that people are buying lids in bulk. Why lids? The entire point of mason jars is that the jars are reusable while lids are not unless they use a rubber gasket. Some jars still use the older method of using washable and replaceable rubber seal while mason jars are meant to use a disposable metal lid.

More people are interested in canning than ever before while canning used to be a niche market. More people want lids while middlemen smell an opportunity to scalp prices. The end result is that lids might sell for twelve dollars and this should be normal by next year. Prices will eventually go down, but probably not soon enough to satisfy a sudden public itch to can.

What can be done? Surprisingly, new jars with lids and tops can still be bought for a relatively economical price. The lids are expensive. People are hoarding the lids, and the companies selling these once-only lids are also elevating prices. It is an economic windfall for a usually neglected industry. People out of the price range ought to be content with not reusing their mason jars for the time being.

There are alternatives to canning and there are alternative cans. Many foods can be dried and stored in bags or in jars without a canning. There are also European manufacturers of canning supplies who use the rubber gasket system. Their gaskets are not in outstripped demand because they are reusable. The jars themselves can still be bought for a reasonable price from the manufacturer.

Weck is one of these manufacturers and mostly sell their products in Europe. Their jars are thicker and more expensive than mason jars, but they last longer and are beautiful compared to the universal mason jar. Aside from looking old fashioned, the rubber gaskets they use are still airtight and effective. They are really designed for water bath canning but can survive a couple used in pressure canning processes.

Some people think that redistributing wealth is the solution to all social ill, but then we are forced to ask why so many people fight socialism from both ends. Some people say that welfare does not do enough while others say it makes people lazy and discourages them from productive pursuits. The reality is that society has practiced charity for thousands of years, but modern politics has a way of complicating things.

All of this is very important because food is important to everyone. There is the question as to whether or not food security is more important than its contribution to national debt or whether or not the money should be spent on other programs. Since welfare spending is expensive and food spending a fair portion of that spending, it is an economic question as well as a moral one. 

From an economic point of view, the state has a horrible time raising revenue and this is a historic problem. Some people say that the government should raise more taxes while economists point out that people just change their habits to avoid the taxes. Rich people, for there part, have more options on how to make money and where to stash it and pay an effective lower tax.

This is the revenue side of the dilemma. The other side is that history has past down the idea that ordinary people should make their own living. There are two historic economic models, the first being the homestead or the township and the other method has been centralized economic planning. The general trend has been that central planning can govern a country for a while but eventually government spending breaks down during a time of crisis.

Socialism is nothing new. Central economic planning was a feature of ancient Egypt under the pharaohs, and medieval kings sometimes gave a considerable amount of leverage to guilds in order to achieve the productivity objectives of the king. The Russians in the 20th century did not invent economic planning; they were simply going against the trend that private entrepreneurship has an advantage over the government trying to create all the jobs.

Socialism is seen as the government controlling physical assets and giving them to people in exchange for their work or simply continued existence. Material resources are not the only thing that needs to be redistributed though. Lacking a king to force charity, many towns and more frontier-oriented countries substituted social rules instead. They put it into their culture and sometimes kept it for generations.

Charity is not based on force. It is about people believing in the common good because they have some sense of what happens when society gets too selfish or if society becomes too dependent on the dole of the emperor. Government handouts are a substitute for what people really need: the love and grace of other people.

Socialists also complain about a lack of education. That is another point. Governments give out resources on the grounds of pacifying the population. It is better if people be able to earn their own living if they can, and it is better for the government to make it easier to do so than to just give people free food permanently. The same institution handing out free stuff also ought to promote some sort of training that prepares people for society and a job.

What is morality? Morality is a substitute for coercive government. There is a compulsion to it, but it is for the common good and comes from a collective desire to promote the public well being. It might also come to strive towards the higher standard of a God. If things are for free, it is great for the beneficiary but does not solve the root of the problem. People need work because they solve their own problems better than the government, at least most of the time.

Doing good for other people reminds them that they are apart of a community and there is a choice between selfishness and love. Removing the choice removes the sense of community that it provides. It is not that selfishness is desirable or permissible, only that solutions are best made by the people who care most about the problem, and that is typically family and community. Charities are more efficient than the government, and communities are more efficient than business like charities.

Morality does not always redistribute wealth. It also redistributes opportunity, love, and grace. If anything, morality is the ultimate form of charity because all welfare is obtained from a concern for a higher standard and a sense of community well-being. If the redistribution of wealth is seen as a machine, it does not work so well because the human aspect is removed. In comparison, loving other people promotes charity. It also opens the doors of opportunity and mutual understanding.

If you buy a generic brand, a ten pound bag of rice might be four dollars or less. The cost might be greater depending on the store and the area where it is purchased, but it is remarkable to be able to buy enough calories for several days for only a few dollars. Most Americans see rice as a side dish, but in other cultures, it is a staple. Even today, most people in Asia eat rice and Westerners eat an unbelievable amount of calories in the form of bread dishes.

The secret is that we turn something inexpensive and bland into something a bit more expensive and palatable. Still the point, from a survival point of view, a person can obtain a source of calories and nutrients on the cheap if they know what they are doing. Modern people get more of their calories from meat, cooked vegetables, and processed dishes than from cooking raw staples into inexpensive meals. Not only is this habit expensive, it also reduces nutrition in the diet.

Part of the secret of improving your diet is simply to understand the nutritive needs of the body and then fulfill them. It does not take an enormous amount of expertise, but a bit of diversity and including fruits, vegetables, some meat, and vegetable oil will generally supply all of the nutrients needed for a healthy body. Only someone who exercises a lot really needs a pill supplement unless they have a prescription. 

A good chef knows the nutritional content of food. So does a home cook and a preper. Obvious needs include calories, protein, essential amino acids, and the more common vitamins. Less common are needs for trace minerals such as boron. It is also less commonly known that it is a challenge to arrange for a good diet without animal products.

Meat is a convenient source of amino acids and trace minerals while wheat and rice often do not contain a lot of amino acids. Vegetarians usually substitute this with nuts and more than one variety of vegetable oil. Corn oil contains one while olive oil contains a different fat soluble oil. Nuts and seed have their own mix of amino acids. Vegetarians are compelled to carefully plan their diets and eat a considerable variety.

All this does raise the question as to why some products are expensive and some are cheap. A bag of flour, even if it cost $10, would still possibly be cheaper than the flour in a lot of processed foods. Pastas and the shells of ravioli are bade from cheaper base ingredients, but people would rather buy packaged meals for the convenience. It is way cheaper to cook.

As it turns out, a generic bag of flour typically costs far less than $5, sometimes less than $3. This is incredibly cheap, and cheap staple crops in the United States feed a lot of other industries, including manufacturing and animal husbandry businesses. The Farm Bill gives out billions of dollars in subsidies to farmers who produce everything from wheat, corn, and sunflowers; and these cheap products in turn prop up the entire American food industry.

People complain of food prices, but the truth is actually worse than than the compliant. Without these subsidies, either food prices would be sky high or else food would be imported extensively from places where labor was cheap. Factory farming also reduces the price of food because oil is cheap in the United States, comparatively speaking. If we reverted to more primitive means of producing food, the cost of food would likely be as high as rent. Meat would be obtained from pastured animals, and that is a bit more expensive too.

Some related reading:

https://www.nal.usda.gov/topics/agricultural-subsidies

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

A lot of people might be concerned with running out of food during periods of time whenever people are running out of work opportunities or else shelves might be going bare. It is true that hoarding is part of the problem, but this does not mean that a person cannot use their free time to stock up without being an affront to other shoppers. Understanding how to prep on a budget and how to make the most of ingredients can go a long way to staying stocked during periods of uncertainty.

There are three general considerations when shopping for an emergency stash. The first is the nutritive qualities, the second is personal taste, and the third is cost efficiency. It should not cost a lot of money to be prepared on a budget, but it is also true that packaged food made for backpacking or high energy sports can be expensive. 

The secret is to understand food and what goes into a good diet. It also pays to look in less obvious stores and to prepare ahead of the storm so that generic products can be bought.

From a survival point of view, calories are very important because they are scarce in nature. It is actually fairly easy to find vitamins and minerals in a green environment. Edible herbs and vegetables are all around you. It is harder to extract calories from a temperate meadow or woodland. 

If a family is pressed for nutrients, securing a source of calories is the most basic priority. A body can run off its own sugars for a few days and off of its fat supplies for a bit longer, but it will run out of vitamins and proteins before the average person exhausts their fat supply.

That is why it pays to stock up on sources of carbs that also store well such as whole wheat crackers and sacks of flour and rice. Oatmeal is a survival favorite because it is easy to cook and serve. It can also be mixed with flour to create a multigrain. White crackers contain calories but fewer nutrients.

If calories are secure, then the only remaining problems are cooking, water, and nutrients. Water should not be too hard to come by in most areas, although cooking means either electricity or fire. Whenever vegetables are cooked, the cell walls break down, destroying some nutrients but making others more available. It is hard for humans to survive without the power of cooking.

Securing nutrients usually means finding some sort of roughage. The world is full of edible materials that do not provide many calories but are nutritious and are made more palatable by cooking. Dandelions are infamous for being bitter but edible. They can be made more edible by chopping and seeping them in cold water. Dandelions have wild relatives such as varieties of lettuce and sow thistle. These are called bitter herbs and are normal for many ethnic groups.