If you are familiar with the plants that grow in your area, you can probably survive. In the Pacific Northwest you can get by eating dandelions, nettles, and blackberries. In Hawaii you can live on coconuts, guavas, mangoes, and taro. In other places you can go to the library or a bookstore (you don’t have to buy the book!) and usually find books on what grows wild and is edible. It’s amazing how many ‘weeds’ are actually nutritious and delicious.
Shopping smart is the best way to make sure you have enough to eat. There are some simple things you can do to save lots of money wherever you are.
1) Pick the store that has the lowest prices for what you want to buy. In these times of fancy yuppie grocery stores you can pay double or triple the price for the same item at grocery stores a few miles apart. Sometimes Safeway has better prices on meat, Foodland has better prices on potatoes, and The Grocery Outlet has the best prices on canned goods. Know your grocery stores.
2) Asian markets. Most major cities have a Chinatown or Asian Grocery store. Check them out. I can buy a pineapple for $6 at Foodland or $1.50 in Chinatown. I can pay $3 for a can of sweetened condensed milk or $.75 Asian immigrants generally eat well on a low income. Follow their lead, learn to eat the cheap foods you can get in Chinatown and Asian Groceries.
3) Food choices. It’s been said plenty, but obviously, if you eat a pound of meat, three times a day, you are not only spending a lot, you’re probably pretty unhealthy. Rice, noodles, and potatoes are cheap, nutritious, and filling. I don’t care what Dr. Atkins said.
4) Bakery Thrift Shop. This is the leftover and damaged bread from local bakeries. I can pay $2 for a loaf at the grocery store or $.20 for a loaf at the bakery thrift shop. If I want to get day old good bread, I can get that at a bakery for half price or less.
5) Reduced meat section. Most grocery stores have a reduced price meat section. The meat that doesn’t sell while it still looks pretty gets the price cut drastically. Don’t be scared, they won’t sell you diseased or spoiled meat.
I spend a lot of time talking about food and cooking in this book. The reason is food is one of the great pleasures in life. You don’t have to have a gourmet kitchen to make a meal that satisfies your soul. Hell, you don’t even have to have a kitchen. In this section, I’ll give some of the options available to people that don’t have stoves, ovens, refrigerators, or cooking pots.
Refrigerators. I lived without a refrigerator for three years. There are people all over the world that have never had one. There are folks that have lived on sailboats for years on end without having a reefer. It seems impossible to most people in the US that have never been without one.
The refrigerator is part of a massive conspiracy by General Electric to enslave us all by making us need electricity. The labels of far too many things say “Refrigerate after Opening”. Is it really necessary?
People existed on this planet without refrigerators until about 100 years ago. At that point some whiz kid came up with a pretty cool way to extend the shelf life of perishables without having a cool well, root cellar, or ice room. Pretty cool. I’m not knocking refrigeration as a concept. I think it’s good.
The thing that bothers me is when the big production companies didn’t have anything to produce following the Second World War, they decided that everyone in America should have a refrigerator. They took a page form the car companies and began making new models, having showrooms, and lobbying the government to require ‘safe food handling’. They lobbied the food companies to put those ‘refrigerate after opening’ tags on the food.
Most fruits and vegetables don’t need to be refrigerated. Refrigeration can extend the shelf life of them, but it’s not necessary.
Eggs can be cracked open and put in a plastic container. If you use one with a spout the eggs will generally pour out one at a time. This is usually good for about four days barring too much heat. Eggs in the shell can last anywhere from a week to six months without spoiling. To test them, drop the egg in a cup of water. If it floats, it is no good. To extend the life of eggs in the shell coat them with Vaseline or shortening. This seals the porous shells and prevents air from getting inside. Store them in a box on soft material.
Meat lasts for quite a while without spoiling. When I was a kid and lived on a farm, anytime we butchered something we hung the carcass up in the barn for several days with bag over it to keep the flys out to ‘season’ . If I buy a steak, I feel fine waiting twenty four hours to cook it with no refrigeration.
Cheese has a long life. Wrap hard cheeses in vinegar soaked cheesecloth or rags to keep them from molding. Soft cheese should be thrown out once it begins to mold.
Dairy products like butter are fine left out of refrigeration. Milk has a shorter shelf life. I’m not sure why this is. On the farm we would put milk in those big canisters and let it sit for a day or two and it would be just fine. I’m told that it’s the fat that keeps milk good longer. That’s why half and half or whole cream lasts longer than skim milk. Sometimes I’ll buy a quart of half and half and it’s good for a couple of days. I thin it with water when I use it on my cereal.
I’m not recommending that anyone test the limits of how far you can let something go before it spoils. For goodness sake, don’t poison yourself. What I do is buy perishables as I need them. I visit the grocery store every day or two. I enjoy it.
If you want to have refrigeration or an icebox, there are options even if you are house-less. There are 12-volt DC ice chest/reefers available for fairly cheap. You can also get a standard ice chest and put block ice in the bottom, with perishables on top. In the Sahara, they put a small clay pot inside a large clay pot and pack sand between the two. Pour water on the sand and put a wet cloth over the top and it creates a natural refrigerator in the smaller pot. Pretty cool, huh?
Stoves. There are a lot of options available if you want to use a stove. You can find Coleman two-burner camp-stoves that run on propane or white gas at any outdoor stores, most box stores, some thrift stores, and garage sales. You can get them for anywhere from $5 to $100 and they work every bit as good as a kitchen stove. They are legal in most parks and easy to use.
I prefer the single burner propane stove. One canister of propane is usually about $3 and the burner itself usually runs anywhere from $5 to $20.The canister lasts me a month or more cooking twice a day.
A simple home-made stove can be made by putting corrugated cardboard in a roll inside a tuna can and melting wax over it. This is the same as Sterno which will cost you about $1 a can. Not a very efficient way to cook, but it works.
For backpackers there are a variety of lightweight stoves that burn anything. They burn kerosene, propane, gasoline, or white gas. They cost from $60 and up and they aren’t very practical for car or boat living. I have one, but only use it for backpack camping and hiking.
Convenience Foods. As far as rough living goes, convenience foods aren’t’ very convenient. Microwavable foods are a pain in the ass and usually don’t’ taste very good. Of course, things like chips, crackers, and easy cheese can make a nice treat.
Thermos Cooking. There are a number of people out there that cook most of their meals in a thermos. What they do is bring water to a boil and pour it in a thermos with their noodles, rice, cereal, or what have you. Seal it up and let the boiling water cook whatever you have. Put a piece of fish in a plastic bag, put it in the thermos, pour hot water around it, seal up the bag with no air in it, seal up the thermos, wait a fifteen minutes and presto. Experiment with this or find some Youtube videos.