r/prepping

Looking at Auguson Farms and Mountain House and others and their 3 day, 30 day, and 6 month packs are either oatmeal or beans and rice.

Aren’t we all stocking those already!

Are there any interesting freeze dried meal kits?

Chicken Alfredo and Beef Lasagna are still just pasta and sauce. Not exactly worth buying freeze dried.

Flaired as s**t post because it’s not really important enough to warrant serious discussion, but it IS still relevant IMHO.

Is anyone buying good kits?

I get that these are for an emergency, but if it’s an emergency situation then I really want something good. Not beans and rice again.

Just wondering how often everyone checks their gear, goes through it, specifically when it comes to like a black out kit. Stuff for power, lights, lanterns etc, I mean if you know a storm is heading your way with enough warning you can check to see if everything still has a charge. However, an earthquake hits, you don’t exactly have time to check and plug things to charge them. So just wondering if you go through your kits once a quarter, every six months, once a year? Food I think is a little easier, just checking the expiration dates and having a list made I can just checking the list.

In what scenario, except living in the woods, is a fire kit supposed to be used for? Why not just stay at home. Or do they plan on building a fire in their backyard??

Not AI - I'm a middle aged academic, my pride would never allow it!

tl;dr - It's a big post!

1. The goal is to build a strong foundation of health and ability supporting a specialized skill-set that makes one materially valuable to a subsistence community.
2. You want T-shaped distribution of skills. Many shallow skills and abilities with 1-2 really well developed economic skills
3. Skip to The Steps
4. Read The Shallow Part and The Deep Part as needed.

Introduction
I started writing this as a response to a recent "what skills are important?" post and it got rather out of hand. This type of question is perennially interesting to the prep/survival minded and every survival board I've been on gets questions about it often.

The following is a framework that I find useful for thinking about skills and personal accounting aimed at long-term SHTF/collapse-of-the-state/tech-regression type scenarios. It is not meant to be the be-all/end-all, just a structure in which you can slot your own life, environment, social context, and personal opinions. I have spent a lot of my adult life putting myself through a primitive version of this and it has been personally rewarding + should help insulate me against the journey yet to come.

The framework is more or less aimed at people who are new to the subject and/or are lacking in a deep and relevant skill. If you've been homesteading for five years or did a few tours as an army sniper or work as a paramedic, you probably know what you need to do already.

This is a long post that I have structured to hopefully make readable. Nowadays, this structure can look like AI. No AI was used in the writing of this post.

Basic Structure
Making a life anywhere, at any time (with a few exceptions that do not apply here), requires a T-shaped distribution of skills. What this means is that you've got a broad suite of skills that you know a little bit about (the shallow top of the T-) and one or two areas in which you have a deep knowledge that you have consistently trained over a years of active practice (the long part of the T-) to the extent and reliability that you can survive on the fruits of your labour in a society that supports some degree of specialization.

In modern western life this looks like understanding when you need a handshake/fist-bump/up-nod/down-nod, knowing how to do your shopping, how to catch a train, what buildings you're allowed to enter, how to pay a bill online, how to talk to a police officer, how to cross the street, and so on. To supplement this huge tapestry of small skills, you need a highly developed skill set that someone will pay you for - engineer, bus driver, teacher, nurse etc.

In planning for SHTF, you're doing more or less the same thing but for a world that you don't actually live in (yet).

You need to articulate a vision of the future scenario that you are actually preparing for before you can think cleanly about what the requisite skills are. The zombie apocalypse has different needs from climate change, as an example.

The Skills
I would encourage you to write down the scenario/s that you're preparing for and then write down all of the skills you can think of that are required for a community to live well within it. If you're worried about a collapse of international markets and food systems with some technological regression, this is going to include a lot of the economic basics. Break these skills down into two categories:

The Shallow Part
- foundational physical fitness - a baseline of health, endurance, strength, and mobility
- foundational emotional fitness - address mental health problems; cultivate your virtue - wisdom, courage, temperance/discipline and justice
- foundational social skills - how to follow a leader, how to cooperate across difference, how to resolve conflict, how to be part of a community
- foundational mental skills - reading/writing, basic math, basic science, basic history (high school level)
- foundational physical skills - bare-bones basics of running, biking, swimming, climbing, driving, striking, and grappling (firearms if it's legal.)
- foundational survival basics - first-aid, fire, shelter, knots, etc + experience with fasting, sleep deprivation, cold, and heat.
- a basic introduction to a context-dependent suite of skills from the Deep Part list

The Deep Part
- living off the land - hunting, fishing, gathering - collecting nutrition from the land without agriculture
- horticulture - growing fruits, vegetables, grains, and plants for craft and medicine
- animal husbandry - cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, poultry, etc
- food crafts - cooking, baking, brewing, distilling, preservation - focusing on low-tech approaches
- resource crafts - wood, metal, stone, ceramic, fiber, and leather - from collection to final product, low-tech
- infrastructure crafts - plumbing and electrical, power generation
- artifice crafts - machines and electronics
- medicine - injury, maternity, contagious disease, herbal and modern pharmacology
- violence - firearms, close-combat, small-units, security

Points of Consideration
Each of the above categories are broad categories not specific skills. Resource crafts is not a skill set, honestly, wood craft isn't even really a specific skill-set that a human could master. It's a material based composite of many skills: timber frame carpentry, stick-frame carpentry, furniture (in many different traditions), turning, carving, and so on. You need to develop a T-shaped proficiency within these skills as well.

Living off the land, resource crafts, and agriculture are all biome specific. These must be studied and practiced in the environmental context in which you expect to find yourself. A deep skill-set in hendre a hafod cattle pastoralism will be very useful in temperate uplands, fairly useful in flat ranching country, and not very useful in deserts or the far north. A deep skill set in oak timber-frame carpentry will be very useful in temperate woodlands, fairly useful in tropical hardwood and temperate softwood forests, and much less useful on the Arabian peninsula. Think carefully about your context and research how people lived there before modernity.

It is very difficult to make medicine or violence a deep focus unless they are part of your job. You can and should absolutely get the basics but be ruthlessly realistic about your ability and willingness to deeply focus on them as a hobby. The fundamental problem is that real expertise is a product of real experience. Gaining that real experience in medicine or violence requires interacting with other human beings in emergency situations... regularly... over years. Outside of careers in something like nursing or the military or police forces, this is really difficult to accomplish. You may have a particular situation that makes it possible but be very honest with yourself about it. Far better to be an expert blacksmith with a decent firearms foundation than someone with bare-bones metalworking and deluded sense of their expertise in a field that they've rarely (or never) practiced in anger.

What To Do
It is very common in prepper/survivalist spaces to armchair skills for years, read lots of theory, debate the skills online, and then not actually practice them with the frequency required for deep knowledge. I do not recommend doing this.

You need to make sure that you've got your Shallow Part basics covered and you need to pick 1-2 Deep Part skills and tackle them with such depth and rigor that you develop expertise. Each one of the Deep Part skills is a life's work, they are incredibly rich bodies of knowledge that must be learned by the eye, the mind, and the hand. There are no shortcuts, there is only dirt-time, doing them again and again and again until you know what not to do because you've made all of the mistakes already. You do not want to be making mistakes for the first time when it really counts. It is this kind of expertise that makes you materially valuable to other human beings and will ensure you have a way to make a life in the journey yet to come.

The Steps

1. Identify your anticipated environment (urban/rural, temperate-forest/hot-desert/wet-uplands, etc) with the risks, resources, and opportunities that environment affords.
2. Identify the scenario/s you're preparing for (temporary disruption, long term collapse, etc).
3. Make a list of the shallow skills that everyone needs to learn at a basic level.
4. Make a list of the deep skills that are materially valuable in the scenario and environment you're considering. (this matters more for long-term scenarios)
5. Do a rigorous and skeptical accounting of your skills, interests, and aptitudes. This is not a time to gratify your ego, be brutal about what you've really physically done, what you really enjoy, and can reliably demonstrably do under pressure. A glorified this is how I like to imagine myself approach will lead to failure. Resistance to confronting yourself in the scouring light of day is a sign of emotional weakness and a need to further cultivate your virtue.
6. Select 1-2 skills from the Deep Part list to focus on. Be realistic about your time and resources. For this part, it is better to have real proficiency in one thing than a basic understanding of two - basics are covered in the Shallow Part. Chose things you like doing, not things you just like the idea of being good at. Expect it to be hard, expect to fail a lot, expect to suck. You have to suck for a long time before you stop sucking. This is normal.
7. Select a handful of supplementary skills from the Deep Part list that are either particularly important for your scenario or particularly synergistic with your core skill foci. An example of "particularly important" would be building a foundation in violence if you're concerned about state collapse. An example of synergy would be supplementing an agricultural focus with the basics of wood and metal working to build and repair your buildings and equipment - as farmers have traditionally done.
8. Make a plan - focus on your big weaknesses from the Shallow Part and your main interest from the Deep Part. Do not "major in the minors." Really build these things into your life such that you're doing a little bit very regularly. Stack development where you can, for example, a boxing/judo/etc class 2/week can help you with fitness, basic physical skills, violence, and emotional toughness all at the same time. Forget about perfection, perfectionism is for the emotionally delicate who are terrified of making mistakes or being seen to be a real human being by the outside world - you have to discard all of that.
9. Revisit your personal accounting regularly to see where you are progressing and where you are falling behind. Account for new problems, celebrate victories. Adjust the plan accordingly.

Good luck and let me know what you think.

Prepping caught momentum decades ago. Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers were used widely by regular consumers since the beginning of this millennium. I'm sure there is a big number of people who still have stored food that is 20+ years old.

For the folks who stored grains like rice, wheat...etc. Can you please tell us what your experience was in terms of taste, smell, texture...etc?

It would also be helpful if you can share storage conditions like whether you used sealed mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, and the rough room temperature in which the food is stored?

Please feel free to share other people's experiences if you heard or seen any.

I found this video on YT. She says the rice was stored for 15 years. They couldn't tell the difference between a 15 year old rice and a 2 year old one. But she didn't say anything about room temperature which is the single most important factor here for food degradation.

https://youtu.be/CMyxwkp\_erg?si=p\_VzzCshRGGd14HP

So far I know cooking scavenging some knots(still learning)leather working sewing blacksmithing blade smithing fire making wood working and more but those are some things I specialize in

Last Sunday I went looking for a spare USB-C cable in our emergency bin and ended up dumping the whole thing onto the dining table. Four charging bricks rolled out. Two had the same output, one had a label so faded I could barely read it, and the last one got noticeably warm when I tested it.

There were cables for devices we no longer own and a sealed accessory pouch from a bundle I bought during a sale last year. I had no idea what was inside without opening it. Meanwhile, I had tabs open for another charger and a small power station because apparently my response to not knowing what I owned was to buy more of it.

I plugged everything in and kept two chargers that worked properly. Redundancy is useful, so one went back in the bin and the other now lives upstairs. I marked their output on a piece of tape. The warm charger and two frayed cables went into the electronics recycling bag. Anything I could not match to a device went into a small box for a month rather than straight into the trash. If nobody goes looking for it, it can leave.

I was still standing beside the table when I looked at those shopping tabs again. The charger duplicated two that had just passed the test, and I could not name a job for the small power station that was not already covered. Both tabs got closed.

Our Jackery SolarVault 3 Pro was not part of the mystery pile. It is already part of the balcony energy setup, and I have watched the fridge and router loads in its history during normal evenings. I know where its paperwork and cables are. More importantly, my partner knows what it does without calling me. Buying another battery before I had even written down the gap I wanted it to cover suddenly seemed a bit ridiculous.

The bin is about half full now. I can see the flashlights without digging, and there is an index card under the lid showing which charger belongs to what. The only thing I bought that afternoon was a roll of masking tape.

Has anyone else thought about their choice of clothes, durability compared to utility or even blending in plus availability.

Blue Jeans are the everyday standard tough if you add starch and readability available everywhere with decent pockets.

While cargo pants and even tactical pants have much more utility but don't really last as long and tend to wear out a bit more quickly.

Does anyone else have any other style they like to add or or have an option on?

Ok so right out of the box this week from the company that shall not be named. Before everyone goes and jumps down the FCC bandwagon we have a family GMRS. Looking to set up one or two frequencies for SHTF (cough Helene looking at you) (anyone interested I’ll answer Helene crap separate) and I can’t get the two radios to communicate.
Again please no FCC rules bashing. What I get is red ptt light the infamous beep but I do break squelch on the receiving unit. Was never a RTO Comms guy and I’ve been doing my research videos and books. The Not Rubicon videos have helped but I need someone to explain it like I’m 5 and have crayons

I’m new to the solar game, with the panels becoming more easily available. I’ve always been a fan of generators and having portable energy in any scenario from “prepping for Tuesday” to a “SHTF” scenario.

This looks like the best of both worlds, as far as ease of transport, use, and stealth since you can run it inside. Not even touching on the prices that I’m seeing, but again, I’m new to the solar stuff.

I also noticed they sell some refurbished units and I’ve seen some complaints and reviews talking on the negatives, but I wanted to hear from some of you who may have seen it already.