Recently my work hosted a rather large public Bar B Q with a turn out of around 2,300 people. The event was very nice in the fact that everything from food, the venue, drinks, tables and chairs etc, were all donated.
At the conclusion of the event, the announcer informed everyone that the left over food, drinks, and snacks were available for the taking. There were crate loads of soda, tray fulls of chicken, potatoes, slaw, and hand sanitizer bottles on the tables.
It was almost mind boggling to see so many people swarm to the pavilion to take drinks, and food. The food was obviously already cooked, and the drinks were donated because they were a week away from expiration, not the this matters too much.
I immediately rushed to the eating area to collect as many bottles of hand sanitizer as I could. I collected arm full after arm full, thinking my idea would catch on and I would be fighting with the crowd to collect this, but I saw after my second trip to my truck, that not a single person cared for hand sanitizer. I slowed down a bit and finished collecting the bottles. I ended up giving away quite a few, but came home with 40 bottles each 18 ounces. That's 45 pounds of hand sanitizer.
The lesson I learned: While drinks are nice to have, ultimately soda is not what I want to be consuming when the SHTF. I will likely be eating lots of rice, oats, beans, and wheat, and not getting the right amount of certain vitamins every day. I am trying to remedy this by focusing on long term storage of more fruits and veggies, but to be a little realistic, I will not get 3-5 servings of fruits and veggies every day. The last thing I want is something so destructive to a diet, as a soda. However hand sanitizer after society has broken down, and a simple cut can get infected, will be worth a lot.
I learned, or relearned, how much people think about now, and not the future. I work with a friend who is pretty actively prepping, but he was one of the ones grabbing soda.
It takes more than just storing food, it takes the mind set. The thought process of turning everything around you into a way to better enable you to survive.
My last post was about canning pumpkin. I got over 400 pumpkins for free the day after halloween from the pumpkin patches that set up shop around town. I got scrutinized from a fellow prepper and friend for wasting my time and money canning these. I spend $0.76 on each can/lid/band. I have canned over 60 at this point for a total investment of $45.60. I have added lots of time, but this is time I would other wise be wasting watching tv, or being online. I would say that $50 for over 60 quarts of canned pumpkin is a great deal and even more so, when you figure I will reuse the jars and bands. I get lids for 8.3 cents each, and this is the only part that is going to be wasted for a total of $4.98. Again here, we see the mindset, the thought process that lead 60 quarts of canned pumpkin for less than $5.
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