Food prices and emergency planning

[Sub_Umbra]

I've been following the West's relentless drive towards using more and more ethanol as a portable fuel and it's inescapable ramifications on the world's food prices and availability for some time now. Without jumping into the politics behind it's now gotten to the point where more and more are becoming as alarmed as I am. (Yikes!)

I thought I'd start this thread as a heads up after receiving an email from one of the places I buy storable foods from a couple of days ago. They wrote that their suppliers had informed them that they would no longer be able to guarantee quoted prices for more than three weeks. My dealings with this outfit over the years leads me to believe that there is more behind this warning than just hype or a desire to boost sales.

Since I was planning on placing two orders of storable food anyway I decided to do it yesterday. I phoned in my order with the folks who sent me the email and had an interesting conversation with them. We talked about changing food prices and their email and the lady mentioned that they feared that some of their products may jump in price by as much as 50% in the next month -- and that they had toned down the email notice because they didn't want to come off as alarmist.

Long story short -- I think that between ethanol use trending upwards and the uncertainty in the North Atlantic financial markets the stage is set for potentially dramatic price swings in food as well as broader, more wide ranging effects. I'm moving a little quicker and heavier on food purchases than I normally do. We usually just buy a little extra here and there throughout the year but I placed two orders yesterday and we'll do another big one early next week. If I'm wrong it's no big deal. The worst thing that could happen is that we may still eat the food.

The point of this post is twofold:

1. If you tend to lay up food for yourself or extended family on an ongoing basis you may want to think about bunching up some of your purchases.
2. If you only buy once a year (like right before hurricane season or some other repeatable, regional threat) consider moving up your usual purchase timetable because you may well get more food for your buck right now.

If the increases don't come you can always eat it, right?

 

[9volt]

What exactly do you consider 'storable food' and where do you buy it?

 

[Barbarian]

What exactly do you consider 'storable food' and where do you buy it?

This is where I buy some freeze dried food


http://beprepared.com/

 

[Sub_Umbra]

What exactly do you consider 'storable food' and where do you buy it?

Like most, we buy most of our food from the grocery store but there are a few categories of exceptions:

• Food we have a hard time buying locally in Post-K New Orleans. We've always been 'bike people' and with so many store closings in 2005 there are many things that we either can't get or can't get in the quantities we'd like within bicycle range.
• Some staples don't store well in large quantities in the subtropics. A good example would be Nonfat Dried Milk. Since we can't get it in the size we want and the boxes don't work well for storage here we buy it in enameled #10 cans. Both problems solved.
• We are continually moving away from some food that stores poorly under even the best circumstances. Fresh eggs are a good example in this category. Poor shelf life requiring refridgeration -- great combonation. Whole Dried Eggs are a great alternative. Again, enameled #10 cans are the answer for us in the subtropics in uncertain times. With ~90 eggs to a can we buy them by the case (6) and never need to worry about what will happen to them when the power goes out. Also, the price of eggs has gone up ~36% in the last year. Carefully canned eggs will last 5-10 years in unopened enameled cans and as an experiment we slowly used 1 #10 can of whole dried eggs over a period of 14 months and they were great all the way to the bottom!

So, when I say storable what I mean is either larger quantities than available locally, or processed and/or packaged in a way that makes it easier or possible to store for extended periods under normal or primitive conditions.

My source for eggs

My source for NFD Milk and other foods.

There are so many sources. I ask around and try to find one that a friend has already had experience with whenever possible. EDIT: Shipping costs can also be a beast so it may really pay if you can find the exact same items that may be shipped from a location closer to your home. In some situations you can order and just drive up yourself and pick it up, saving a bundle. Many people, for example, order the brand Mountain House for their storable food. That would be a really good one to try to find a distributor for nearer to you or near enough to pick it up yourself since it will be an identical product no matter who you get it from. There are some things we get online, like grains, that cost less than the shipping. Ouch.

Disclaimer: I'm not connected to any food distributors -- I'm just an end user. I found one of my sources here on CPF.

 

[paulr]

One cause of the price increases is the insanity of burning food (corn-derived ethanol) to run cars, especially since the corn is grown from oil-based fertilizers. But the other part is that the prices of this stuff is set on world markets, and the US dollar is getting crushed due to runaway debt. It's lost something like half its value compared to the euro in the past few years, so prices of bulk commodities are heading towards doubling compared with a few years ago.

I tried to find a price chart on finance.yahoo.com but don't see one (or am not looking in the right place). Wanted to see what corn or wheat futures have been doing over the past few years.

 

[LightInTheWallet]

Paulr, here is a link to the relevant data via pdf and excell documents . Prospects - Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet)

 

[NA8]

Anyone watch BookTV on CSPAN2 on weekends ?

They had a genetics guy on who claimed you can get a better fuel from algae grown in the deserts irrigated by saltwater. Sounds better than destroying your food production.

Doing a very quick search, came up with this. Different guy, same idea.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

 

[js]

Hey, Sub! How are you?

I was just telling people in two other threads that we can expect food prices to rise dramatically over the coming year(s), and in one thread, told them to BUY FOOD that will store well. If I'm (we're) wrong, it won't be money wasted. But I think you're (we're) right.

 

[paulr]

Thanks LightInTheWallet. According to the pdf, corn (maize) went from 98.7 $/mt in 2005, to 171.9 in 3q2007, an almost 75% increase. Wheat more than doubled, 152.4 to 341.9, over the same period. And of course we know what gasoline has done. Man, this is NUTS.

I wonder when we will transition from merely rising prices, to flat-out famines.

 

[paulr]

Hey, Sub! How are you?

I was just telling people in two other threads that we can expect food prices to rise dramatically over the coming year(s), and in one thread, told them to BUY FOOD that will store well. If I'm (we're) wrong, it won't be money wasted. But I think you're (we're) right.

I wonder what has happened to food prices as measured in "real" money (i.e. Euros) instead of the collapsing dollar. It may have been better to invest in overseas mutual funds.

 

[Sub_Umbra]

Hi paulr, js,

It's great to hear from you both and even better to be in some kind of agreement.

I'm no economist. I'm disturbed by what's going on with ethanol today but I'm more concerned with what I (perhaps myopically) perceive as the big picture. Aside from the pro-ethanol trend, we in the West are no longer the 'breadbasket of the world.' We have not only become food importers but worse yet, we are distracted food importers. We (as a block) don't care where the food we feed our children comes from. We have no laws requiring honest labeling of actual food origin. No statistically significant number of us in the West is interested in anything about the food we feed our loved ones except it's price -- our current food providers all have only one thing in common -- they are all the lowest bidders -- in short, we don't care where we get our food or what quality it is, as long as it's cheap.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the situation that the West is in now you don't have to be any kind of expert to see that signs from multiple disciplines are all somewhat foreboding at this time, without having to get too pointy on any of them. Pick yer poison: ethanolisation, the current financial crisis, our radically changing food supply, the price of oil and still others. A cursory look at any two of these subjects would indicate that it may be time to act to secure your loved ones future food supply.

The good news is that whatever the causes are, they are visible and we may do something about it for our loved ones. We don't have to be experts. That was really my point in starting this thread. CPFers are a demographic that is way more prepared for everything than the masses and this is just a heads up to the faithful.

I hadn't really thought about it when I wrote the OP but if you have a good online source for storable foods that you've actually used and could actually recommend, this would be a good place to post current links. CPF is a great place with a huge knowledge base and I know that many of you have good info that you have verified yourselves. Please share.

 

[fieldops]

I've had good luck with this outfit:

http://www.nitro-pak.com/


They have a good assortment of items ranging from food to general emergency preparedness items.

 

[TIP AND RING]

http://longlifefood.com/ Although MRE's are only a tiny part of my food storage plan. This dealer has excellent service and reasonable pricing.

 

[fieldops]

http://longlifefood.com/ Although MRE's are only a tiny part of my food storage plan. This dealer has excellent service and reasonable pricing.

Yes, I have had good luck with them as well

 

[LightInTheWallet]

Bumped for our friends who were busy last weekend.

 

[cat]

Aside from the pro-ethanol trend, we in the West are no longer the 'breadbasket of the world.' We have not only become food importers but worse yet, we are distracted food importers.

Any product, be it grown, processed, or manufactured. Capitalist/corporates will move production to wherever the cost of labor is lower and where they can avoid regulation regarding pollution, etc.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the situation that the West is in now you don't have to be any kind of expert to see that signs from multiple disciplines are all somewhat foreboding at this time, without having to get too pointy on any of them. Pick yer poison: ethanolisation, the current financial crisis, our radically changing food supply, the price of oil and still others. A cursory look at any two of these subjects would indicate that it may be time to act to secure your loved ones future food supply.

The signs are there now. We seem to have reached a new stage in general awareness of the finite nature of petroleum and coal etc resources.

Maize/corn. Food and ethanol production. It suddenly became an "issue" here a couple weeks ago. Warnings about the country no longer being self-sufficient in maize production, a surplus producer. (As in, produced for food.) Some others in the government see it as being a good opportunity for small African farmers, being able to get higher prices for their maize.

So...we begin to see that...we can't go on consuming petroleum at the rate
we have been doing, so we move to using ethanol derived from maize...and then maize becomes too expensive to use for food.

 

[AndyTiedye]

Can't we make ethanol out of biomass that is unsuitable for eating?
An awful lot of garbage ends up in landfills where it is no good to anyone.

 

[sunspot]

Thanks to all for the links. I bookmarked them all for later reading. my main problem is that there is only my wife and I in the house. I need to find single or double serving sizes. The #10 can is a gallon size and way too big to eat after opening.
Now I'm off to find a water purifier for the house. I have bored wells on my property but no way will I drink straight from them.

 

[Sub_Umbra]

Can't we make ethanol out of biomass that is unsuitable for eating?...

Yes, it can. It may be done a number of ways that actually make sense, but that wouldn't be in the interest of the status quo. It's like oil companies donating money to hydrogen fuel cell research. It can't work for anything but submarines, satellites and a few other uses where cost is no object. It's a win-win for them. they not only get the great PR for looking like they're trying to get us off of oil -- they also decrease the signal to noise ratio on alternateive fuels in general, making it harder for anyone to actually hear about any new technology that may actually be appropriate for use by the masses.

Some friends and I developed working systems thirty years ago that utilized stocks to produced ethanol with a much smaller energy input cost and created the ethanol itself from those stocks using much less energy than is required today. These programs are designed to produce noise, good PR and then, ultimately, fail.

If you're a hands on type you can do it yourself -- but all of the big operations are designed to fail.

 

[Sub_Umbra]

Thanks to all for the links. I bookmarked them all for later reading. my main problem is that there is only my wife and I in the house. I need to find single or double serving sizes. The #10 can is a gallon size and way too big to eat after opening...

Not necessarily. As I noted in post #4 of this thread Mrs Umbra and I (just the two of us) buy Pasturized whole dried eggs in #10 cans and have had no problem with them -- even when slowly using a test can over 14 months.

Just the two of us also consume nonfat dried milk in #10 cans and they go even faster. A #10 can of NFD milk runs somewhere between 4 and 5 pounds of product and is comparable in size to a big, economy sized box of Carnation -- exept higher quality. That is also not a huge amount for two people to use up without even coming close to having it go bad. The cans come with plactic lids and we've had good results in the sub-tropics.

Also, consider this approach: Tomorrow I'm putting together an order from the same folks I gave the link for eggs for above. EDIT: Not eggs, MILK! /EDIT They have many dried veggies in #10 and #2.5 cans. A #2.5 can holds roughly a quart. I'll be ordering twelve #2.5 cans -- all different:

Dry foods:
Stew Blend
Potato Dices
Carrot Dices
Corn, Super Sweet
Garden Peas, Sweet
Green Beans
Mixed Peppers
Celery
Chopped Onions

DEHYDRATED DAIRY:
Sour Cream Powder
Cheddar Cheese

DEHYDRATED MISCELLANEOUS:
Garlic Granules

OK, they're smaller cans so they cost less and we may try each product to see which we like and get some kind of realistic idea of how much of each item we may expect to work into our diet. Then when we re-order, who knows, we may drop some items and re-order others in #2.5 cans and re-order still others in #10 cans because we'll have a better idea of how we may utilize them.

It really doesn't have to be as risky as it may seem, even if there's only two of you.