The upright freezer in my garage has more 1/2 gallon and gallon jugs of clean water frozen in them than it does food stuffs. Since I have a septic tank for household effluence, old trashcans can serve as water for flushing and bathing by merely stopping up the downspouts of the back gutters so the rain water spills over and down into properly placed of cans on the back deck. When a milk jugs is emptied of milk, it gets washed out with cold then hot water, then a splash of 10 to 1 Clorox water, a cold rinse, and filled with filtered water and into the freezer, or dried then collapsed and lid tightly on and into a black trash bag for future filling.
There are lots of little ideas that one can come up with, if a little thought is applied to the things we now waste and things we can do to save and prepare for scare days ahead. I pity the freaks caught in the death zones called 'big cities'. I practice to meet the eventual scurrying survivors who will range out from the death zones to pillage and destroy. THIS is what democrip rule comes down to ...
SHTF constantly in North Korea
In the mid-90’s the North Korean prison state, which has very bad infrastructure and agricultural systems - they’re commies so what do you expect - was cut off from Soviet aid and the Chinese took over for a period.
wiki”: “By 1993, China was supplying North Korea with 77 percent of its fuel imports and 68 percent of its food imports”
Dependence on the Soviets became dependence on the Chinese.
Famine struck.
Famine that killed somewhere between 250,000 to 3.5 million, and you know the North Korean won’t ever admit the real numbers. The NK government has mandated the famine/mass death be officially called the “March of Suffering”.
Most North Koreans were nutritionally deprived long before the famine struck. It is a “country” run for the benefit of the regime and little else. They always practiced what they now admit is a “military-first” economic policy.
The bad economic system and terrible policies were the main drivers but the floods that hit were the kick in the pants. Not only was at least 1.2 million tons were lost in the harvest but another 1.5 million tons of grain reserves, underground, were destroyed.
North Korea literally has nothing worth selling to the world to trade for food.
The government was the main distributor of food, through the Public Distribution System. They were supposed to thank the regime for their daily bowl of rice, I guess. But the famine/floods destroyed the PDS.
wiki: “However, the extended period of food shortage put a strain on the system and spread the amount of food allocation thinly across the groups, affecting 62% of the population who were entirely reliant on the PDS. The system was feeding only 6% of the state by 1997.”
The people who suffered the most were those who continued to believe and trust the government to feed them. The people who were more likely to survive are those who turned to the black market and other underground means.
wiki: “The average official salary in 2011 was equivalent to $2 per month while the actual monthly income seems to be around $15 because most North Koreans earn money in illegal small businesses: trade, subsistence farming, and handicrafts. The illegal economy is dominated by women because men have to attend their places of official work even though most of the factories are non-functioning.”
You have to show up at your assigned workplace even if it is shut down. Often you will be ordered to go out and find other work and bring back the money to give to the factory/workplce.
Escapees in 2011 began reporting that starvation had returned to North Korea. Even a shill like Jimmy Carter noted that at least a third of the children he saw were stunted by malnutrition and that daily food intake had been decreased from 1,400 to 700 calories per day.
“A study in 2011 by South Korean anthropologists of North Korean children who had defected to China found that 18-year-old males were 5 inches shorter than South Koreans their age”
The number of people wandering the countryside with no help from the NK government, officially non-persons, or Kotjebi has grown. Their main diet is grass soup. Conditions in the detention camps are even worse of course, even in the Children’s Detention Camps there are people starving to death.
This is the Utopia, the Workers Paradise, this is the end stage of the dream of every leftist.
The crap hit the fan a long time ago in North Korea and it continues to hit the fan. Yet their government remains in power and their grip has not loosened as far as one could tell. The majority of people no longer believes their government can or will feed them, they no longer believe that all of the propaganda they are told is true, even though it still remains in them and effects them years after they escape NK. Enough people in NK have seen SK programs smuggled in to know that the rest of the world is not worse off than them, but much much better off.
Yet the grip on power remains.
North Korea is now a model for other governments who know that the S is about to HTF.
Yes, the US and other countries are probably taking lessons on how to stay in control from North Korea.
I also have stocked up a bit on the hot chocolate packets, but they won’t taste that great after the best by date, due to the milk.
For longer term storage I buy the unsweetened powdered baking cocoa. That can be used to make chocolate candy, hot chocolate, fudge, chocolate cake, frosting etc.
I have a number of recipes for homemade granola bars, and the ingredients to make them. I like these for prepping for the electric outages. Just open up and eat the peanut butter, granola bar and a little hot chocolate is kinda heavenly when the weather is cold, and you can’t cook for whatever reason.
I bought a coffee grinder on sale a few years back, and I use it to grind wheat from my garden to add to regular flour that I purchase in #10 cans by the case. I also have a hand mill that grinds even finer in case I want to increase the amount of whole wheat.
I save the clear plastic soda jugs for water. I use the milk jugs for disposable planters in the summer, and take what I can’t use to the recycling center. They will deteriorate fairly quickly if they are outdoors, so I only use them for stuff for about 6 months or so.
I am really bad about wanting to save stuff just in case I think of something I can do to repurpose it or something. Of course I even recycle my garbage-it goes into the compost pile to use next spring when the gardening season is about to start in earnest.LOL