Depression Cooking

I didn’t grow up during The Great Depression but I grew up dirt ass poor and we often ate “cheaply” because we didn’t have many choices. I was a very fussy eater and it was often a struggle. Thank god for peanut butter in the big tin tubs.

I could see in these videos, how variations of the meals could be easily made simply by substituting some things you might have on hand. For instance, the Poor Man’s Meal, one could replace the hot dogs, also known as tube steaks, with a variety of meats, venison, wild pig, squirrel, rabbit, turkey, coyote/wolf, etc.

Sunday nights for us was a ritual of eating saltine crackers and milk.

In a cataclysmic strike, resulting in the destruction of present life forms on the planet, these weapons would also obliterate the past and future, destroying both human memory and possibility. They would obliterate every sacred part of being, leaving vast ruin and emptiness where once life, love, friendship, decency, hope and beauty had existed.

Neat videos!

Beans and rice can get boring if that is all you have. We don’t often have access to fresh veggies and fruits, but when we do, what isn’t eaten fresh is put in the food dryer. Having your own dried veggies to add to the rice/beans adds variety and nutrition. Dried fruits are great in oatmeal (like eating oatmeal cookies.) Its very important to use food grade storage containers.

Try to imagine how our pioneer ancestors “shopped” – maybe a couple times a year you would haul in supplies that you couldn’t grow yourself. Imagine having to haul wood and water, cooking on a wood stove or over a campfire and make everything from scratch.

This knowledge should not be lost!

Back to basics with the simple life.

A suggestion that I learned the hard way on food storage many years ago….

When you bring home sacks of flour beans, rice and pasta, put them in the deep freezer for 48 hours to kill weevil eggs. Then store in buckets in a cool dry dark place. Its a real pain to open up a bucket later and find it full of weevils!

Excellent suggestion, TLM! Especially here in Florida, where if you leave the bag out for a few weeks, there’s not much left for me to eat….
You’ll find that, pound for pound, there is not much of a better deal than beans, rice and pasta, and you can add almost anything you want to the pot and still have a solid and nourishing meal.

Went on a camping trip, one time, the full length of the Suwanee river, back in the 60′s, and that’s all we took. Just by adding game, and whatever else may have been growing along the river, we got by real good! That was a little over three weeks, but it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. Oh, in all honesty, we also had the condiments, coffee, sugar, salt…..

I went on a 2-3 week pack trip that turned into 6 weeks. I had plenty of dried rations packed and added what we picked up along the way. We ate like kings.

The one thing people need to do with food storage is rotate it. We live a LONG ways from a store, so we get canned goods by the case or 1/2 case. The first thing we do is mark the cans with month/year and rotate the old to the front of the shelf.

Another important thing for dry goods is to use food grade buckets. I was able to get a bunch of square buckets from a food processing plant years ago, they stack better than round ones, but lack handles.

The most important thing for me in our pantry is my bucket wrench! I would never be able to open my buckets otherwise (and a rubber mallet helps to close them back up.)

You’ve got some good thinking there, TLM…i have the same story with keeping supplies for a hurricane disaster, power shortage. The last time, it was close to two weeks without power. When you’re dependent on the power grid, you’re going to suffer unless you’re equipped to handle a drastic change in what you’re used to. I rotate my supplies every other year, and check them every year, especially after one year when a can of pineapple ate it’s way open and spoiled the rest of the food in the crate…Needless to say, I don’t recommend any acidic canned foods after that one…they will eat through the can after a time.
Like you say, square containers will fit and store more than the round ones. So what’s a bucket wrench? And where do you shop for your food buckets?